Day 4 Juan De La Cruz

On Tuesday we drove up into the mountains to a place called Juan De La Cruz.  Now don’t go thinking that because we went up into the mountains that it was cool.  It was still hot and humid.  Today we were going to a school and our patients would be mostly Dominican.
We stopped at a school that Solid Rock sponsors for a little bathroom break

When we drove into town we found out that the school was up a decently steep hill with a dirt road.  So we got out and hiked and the busses drove up.  I swear those things go everywhere!  It was a really beautiful place.
This guy pointed out the way for us









There’s a banana tree in the school yard.


Today we had multiple rooms to use!  And the rooms were definitely cooler since the roofs weren’t tin.  We felt like it was luxurious compared to yesterday!  The people were still very poor, but after yesterday poor is pretty darn subjective.  They were definitely better off than the people in the village yesterday.



The bathroom was definitely better too!  Wow.  There were actually stalls and stuff.  By the way, in the Dominican you can’t flush your toilet paper, it messes up their system.  Just think about that one for a minute.
The kids in this village were about the exact opposite of the kids yesterday.  We had to win them over to get them to play with us.  They were much more reserved and shy at first.  But at lunch we played games with them and gave them stickers and blew bubbles.  In a way it was nice because we could get a few more games and things out because we weren’t stampeded every time we got something new out.




When we got back into San Juan it rained HARD!  Crazy Hard and started to flood.  Lots of the students went out to venture in the rain.  They said it was up to their thighs in the street outside the wall of the guest house.


It was crazy and super loud thunder.  The kitchen started to flood but everything is basically made of cinder block so it’s not a big deal.  Within a few hours the water was all gone.  Flooding is apparently not that big of a deal here. It just goes away.

We helped put some walkers together that night and sat in the cabana and had a good chat with a bunch of my nursing students.  They’re seriously the best.  I just love them. 

They have soda in bottles to drink.  When you get done you put the soda in a case thing to send it back to get sterilized (hopefully!) and then they fill them back up and send them out.  Some of the bottles were clearly much older than others.  The soda was so good. I had to limit myself to one of each flavor (I wanted to try them all!) but the cream soda like stuff (pictured below) was so good that I didn’t drink a coke and had two of these instead while I was down there.  I could’ve drank one of each flavor every day and been happy but I was already gaining a pound a day (true story) See the cankles??  So bad!  I hope the pound a day is mostly the water I’m retaining in my freaking feet!