Visitors from afar

We are looking forward to a team coming in Wednesday from Baltimore. They will be visiting a local deaf church, a school in Santiago, doing some cultural studies, and best of all, spending three days with us at the schools in Sabana Perdida and Ozama, in Santo Domingo! The children are excited, of course.

School restarts tomorrow, after the long holiday. Dominican children get their gifts on Three Kings Day, January 6th, so they always get those extra few days off. Usually when school restarts after any vacation, especially an extended one such as at Christmas, the children trickle in over a week's time. By the second week, most everyone will have returned. Many of the children go to their parents' home towns, or out in the country for the holidays.

During the break the teachers came to my house for one-on-one computer instruction. We also purchased a much-needed supplies cabinet for the classes in Sabana Perdida with a donation that came in. I was able to get quite a lot of errands done, that are hard to take care of during school days. Our older emac is at the mac store for possible repairs. They said they would look at it, but tentatively pronounced it dead--as in not worth fixing, suspecting the power supply was bad. We are still waiting on confirmation, but very blessed because we were given a new imac the same week the emac broke down.

The weather has been very strange lately. It's been cooler than it has been for years. At night, the lows were actually down to 66, which is quite rare. We still have hot days, but when the temperature here gets down to 70, we all put on jackets!

We've also had an unusual amount of rain in the last few months. Rain always affects school attendance. Even the teachers have a hard time getting to school during torrential rains, because none of us drive to school. Many roads flood. Public cars (shared taxis on a regular route) often have broken or leaky windows and doors, and get off the road when it begins to rain, leaving passengers with insufficient transportation. The plus is that the temperature is much more pleasant during these bouts of rainy and cloudy days.