The First Week

Well, it is now Saturday morning, November 2. We just finished scrambled eggs and Tang for breakfast. A lot has happened since we arrived last Saturday night. It all kind of blurs together in my mind.

Monday morning we went to breakfast with the McIntyre's, the other missionary couple doing records preservation. Pancakes. Yum. Then they took us out shopping and to the bank and showed us around a little - mostly where the stores are. We bought some DR pesos, braced ourselves, and jumped in.

La Sirena could be compared to a Super Walmart. It has groceries and most of the things you'd expect to find at Walmart. The prices are a little higher than we're used to. 

PriceSmart is quite similar to Costco or Sam's Club, with a yearly membership for $35.00. The style and layout of the store is familiar enough that it had to be patterned after the US stores.

Monday night there was a family home evening at the CCM for all the senior missionary couples and a farewell for the outgoing temple presidency. By the time we got to bed Monday night it was late and we were pretty well worn out.

Tuesday we did more of the same except for the FHE. I don't remember Tuesday. Oh, wait. We went to lunch Tuesday at a restaurant by the ocean. It was a little on the expensive side for my tastes, but it was pretty good. The outdoor tables were under a sufficient cover that we didn't need to worry about getting sunburned. The shore around here is mostly rocky - no good swimming beaches. Still, it was pleasant to sit surrounded by palm trees and hear the waves and feel the salty air and have little birds flitting around us while we ate. A pelican flew low overhead, just for fun.

Enough vacation. Wednesday we went to work at the Junta Central Electoral. I still have no idea what that means. In this building people come to get a birth certificate or marriage license or something. It is always crowded. There are guards with guns. I presume they're guards. Among other things the building is a repository for records. At least some records. For instance, if you want to find the records of births from some town in some province of the DR in, say, 1940, you'd probably find it in a big book on the shelves in this building.

At the back of one official-looking room full of little Dominican ladies is a door that opens into another small room with a leaky air conditioner and a sink and some cockroaches. In this roughly 8x8 room are 6 chairs and two tables on opposite walls, each with a camera stand for the purpose of taking digital photos of all the many record books. 

For the time being, we have  a bit of a problem. There are only two cameras, but we have six people all crammed into that little room. It seems a third camera has been sent but is being held up in customs pending a proper fully detailed list of the contents of the boxes. Unfortunately, nobody really knows the contents. The boxes were sent by someone who just put stuff in and had no idea what he was packing up. Customs apparently won't let anyone open the boxes without a list. Nobody can make the list without opening the boxes. Sound familiar? Welcome to the Caribbean.

The McIntyre's and we are the two senior missionary couples, and there are also two young girl "interns" from BYU Idaho who are assigned here until December. There may be more coming to replace them after they leave. As it is, there is not really sufficient room and if we ever get a third camera I have no idea where we'll put it. There is a rumor that we may get a contract in the national archives building, which would allow us to put a camera there and alleviate our current overcrowding problem. We shall see. In the meantime, it's a bit frustrating to be sharing a camera. I'm thinking it's time for Sherrie and me to go on vacation until the third camera arrives.

Of course, we're still not completely settled in at our apartment. We've replaced all the broken, missing and dead light bulbs so things are a little brighter. We found shelf-liner at Ikea (Ikea, in the DR?) and after we get that installed we should be able to start putting things away. First though, we had to deal with the bugs. But that's another story.

Last night after we got home from work we had hot dogs for dinner, checked our email, and then thought about watching some sort of Halloweeny kind of movie. We watched the first part of "Blackbeard's Ghost" and then, as we were both falling asleep, decided to call it a night. 

Today maybe we'll do shelf-liners.