South to the Dominican Republic: Post #4 Continuation of the DR Saga: Day One

No casualties! The whole group has survived 12 hours now! It is SOOOOO humid. It is strange being able to go outside and not need to wear a jacket in the early morning, and not be cold. For breakfast we had baked yuca and fried onions, mango, avocado, and eggs, along with some freshly grown coffee. Yes, everything except the eggs and onions came from the mission, including the coffee. They have a lot of land that they are farming there at the mission. And yes, I drank coffee for the first time. Even kids in the DR drink coffee. I liked it heavily sugared I will say... :)

After breakfast we went swimming/bathing in the creek as seen in the pictures below. The water was a little cloudy, but cleaner than Oregon river water, or so we think. We jumped off rocks (my dad got an action shot), slid down a rock slide, and tried to communicate with the natives. The latter part did not work so well... The language barrier is huge. Then we went back to the compound, dried off, and prepared to go to a church service in Santo Domingo.

After lunch we headed to the church which was 1 1/2 hours away and that took up the rest of the day, but we had an interesting time so I will tell you about it. Our schedule looked about like this for the rest of the day.

2:45pm leave the compound-

4:15pm arrive at the church-

4:15 - 5:30pm explore the village-

5:30pm church service starts-

8:45pm leave church, yes that was how long the service was-

9:30pm eat dinner and head home-

11:00pm arrive at mission-

Yes, it felt like a VERY long day. Exploring the village was one highlight of the day though. We stopped at a REAL KOLA shop, to have get some soda, and my dad started playing catch with one of the Dominican kids and he made a friend, as shown below. Afterwards we went to the church and sang songs and listened to them speak in Spanish for three hours. Very interesting though. We went to dinner to finish off the day, and that was very good. We had BBQ pork, chicken, beef, sausage, fried plantains, and french fries. Oh, it was good. Headed back to the mission after that and had a good night's sleep to end the day.