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Hello family and friends!!
I feel like so many things have happened since I last wrote, but every day is so unique and so many things happen that I cant really sum it all up ... so I will just talk about the most recent happenings :)

Friday was awesome! There were about 30 volunteers (mostly sports medicine students and a few peace corp volunteers) who used the Mother's Wish clinic to set up shop and have appointments with a bunch of different people from the community. A lot of the med students did not know Spanish so they asked me to translate. It was really interesting and rewarding to translate the med. students advice and the patient's aliments, and it went a lot smoother than I thought. It was also an interesting realization for me... I remember my professors reiterating to me that only 3% of the world has a college education but I never really understood it firsthand until being here. It was really awesome to see that my undergrad degree and my nowhere-near-fluent knowledge of Spanish was able to make an impact that day.. but it also got me thinking about the complete lack of access to education there is here. Kids only go to school for 3 hours a day here, and a lot of them are too hungry to concentrate. In the girls clubs I've been leading and in the preschool there are definite children that stand out as incredibly intelligent, and a lot of them are just nice, good people and the fact that a lot of them wont be able to use their natural talents to lead a decent life or to be able to further their education is really devastating...

Afterwards I went on a little run and was feeling unmotivated but then I ran into a few girls from the girls club i lead and a few little boys and ended up running with them to a commmunity nearby. One of the girls is so funny, she is one of those people who is always smiling and just a little crazy, confident, and basically willing to do anything. We chatted about the marathons she runs (running is really big here) and how she runs twice a day everyday to train for it. Shes only 13 but she was taking on the role of my running coach, laughing and shouting at me to run faster with her, we raced a few times and of course she beat me haha . It was really fun.

This weekend my roommate and I went to a place with n atural waterslides and waterfalls, it was beautiful but considering my track record with hating cliff jumping Im not really sure why I agreed to it and did not think twice. We also still went along with our plan despite the MASSIVE storm that made it a bit had to climb up all the rocks. Ha ha, but the sliding down the waterfalls was the funnest part and im really happy i went.

I realized that one my favorite aspects of latin american culture is peoples lighthearted humor. People poke fun at everything and everyone, and are always laughing. I feel like coming here I was reminded of how amazing of a mechanism of it is to just laugh off the small, but frightening/irritating/problematic things that happen in your life.
My roommate and I have def. taken this on, we've developed a trend of just instanteously cracking up whenever something goes a bti awry. For example..getting dropped off on the side of a freeway by a bus (we just had to walk a little ways off teh road to get right the waterfalls we were going to, so it ended up fine), or spending an hour trying to kill a 5 inch spider above our bed, we just laughed and laughed and laughed. Today the taxi we were in was having issues and we thought it broke down for a bit, and we just immediately started laughing instead of fretting about it. I honestly feel like as long as the situation is not life threatening or hurtful to someone, theres really no reason not to laugh. Its so much more of a healty way of coping... and I feel like that is exactly why its a trait of dominican culture. a lot of people deal with really harsh realities but the fact that humor never fades is really meaningful.

Anyways, thats all for today, miss and love you all!!