Here’s a little list of what life looked like for me and my team during our time in the Dominican Republic. Enjoy! 🙂
- Plantains. Plantains. And some more plantains.
- Shrek feet. Definition: Feet and ankles that have blown up to about 5 times the size of normal human feet. Used in a sentence: “Remember that time I had shrek feet in the Dominican?”
- Bucket showers. No joke.
- Dominoes. Intense games of dominoes.
- Crazy loud motor bikes that zoom by at all hours of the day and night.
- Dominican driving in one word: INSANE. No joke. Beware of the streets.
- Squawking geese, roosters and turkeys. Barking dogs. Cats in heat. All with a life goal to keep you up all night.
- Generosity. Freely given without expecting anything in return.
- Mama’s singing. Mama was our host’s mother who cooked us three meals a day, every day we lived in Los Cerritos. Some of my favorite memories from the Race thus far were spent on her porch.
- Mama’s cooking. Seriously, there’s nothing better! What I wouldn’t do for some of her sweet, fried plantains.
- Weekend-long block parties. Music blaring from car stereos. Dancing in the street. Dominoes tournaments.
- Marc Anthony’s “Vivir Mi Vida”. Confession: It may be my favorite song now.
- Gelato. Not what you would normally expect in the Dominican Republic but we found a spot. Guess where most of my personal budget for the month got spent…Woops.
- The people. I can’t even explain the people that I did life with this month in words that would do them justice. So much love was given, so many laughs had, so many games of Phase 10 played, so many gelato runs, so many late night talks, so much life breathed, so much of the Lord shared. These people will hold pieces of my heart forever.
- The songs. “Love, love, love one another and be kind, kind, kind to each other.” Oh my gosh, we sang these two songs to our kids at English Camp about 10 times every single day for 2 weeks. I do have to admit, it was one of my favorite things to hear our students walking by on the street singing those songs to themselves.
- The kids. This month wasn’t about the kids learning English or performing their skits right at Teen Camp. It was about love. God’s love for them pouring out through us and His love for us being shown through them. What a beautiful exchange.
- Worshiping the Lord in two different languages. There is almost nothing better than this. To be in a room full of people that you barely know, who speak in a language that you don’t understand but singing the same worship song as you to the same God. Ahhhh!
