Apartment Happenings...besides laundry

by Sherrie

I haven't written in a looong time.  It has taken me a loooong time to get used to this place and lifestyle.  I think the worst is over and things are looking up.  Hallelujah!

Here is a random smattering of a few of our doings.  Besides laundry.

We had a cleaning lady come and clean the apartment.  What a glorious event that was!  Brad wanted to slide around the floors in his socks after she left.  Everything was clean!  Cleaner than when we moved in! It was glorious.

 Millie cleaning our floors

Some apartment repairs were started in February.  Aye, caramba!  Many appointments were set for many workers to come and do many things.  Many workers didn't show up.  Many appointments were rescheduled.  And rescheduled.  Finally, things were fixed as good as it gets.  Except that now we're waiting for a guy named Rudolfo to come fix the air conditioners.

Working in the kitchen

Adding an electrical outlet in the bathroom

Replacing all the kitchen drawers and inspecting the gas oven

Our landlady directing a worker

Installing a smoke alarm in our bedroom

Our landlady decided it was time for new ceilings and light fixtures in the bathrooms.  Nice decision!

The old ceiling--the ceiling in the other bathroom was much creepier!  The panels were very dirty and there were big gaps between them so you could see-- look at the next photo... 

What you see when the ceiling panels are removed

Cutting the new panels

The square where the recessed light fixture will go

Waiting for the light fixture...

The light fixtures did get installed, and now we're used to them.

And just so you know, we do laundry.  Thankfully we don't have to go to a laundromat!

Through the locked and bolted door on the right is our laundry room and maid's room. (We don't have a maid.) On the left is the kitchen pantry door.

Through that locked and bolted door on the right is the garbage chute and the scary back stairs. Going out there is Brad's job, not mine.

 

Hurray for full-size US appliances!

Looking into the maid's room

 

 

Maid's room tiny bathroom

Looking up in the laundry room

Looking out the maid's room door. The door on the right goes into the kitchen.

Our hot water heater.  We always have hot water.  Yippy!

So there... an account of some things that have happened in our apartment.  Not very exciting, but hey--it's a blogpost!

Taking Pictures

Every work-day morning we get up at 6:30 and get ready to go take pictures. How cool! Photo journalists in the jungles of the Dominican Republic. It sounds so . . . National Geographic-ish. But no, it's not that kind of pictures. 

Instead, we prayerfully drive through some truly remarkable traffic (the subject of another post, someday) to the office of the Junta Central Electoral, struggle to find a parking spot, and wend our way to a little room where two missionary couples share a small space just large enough to set up two cameras.

The Junta Central - where we work

An easy parking day - still smiling!

This is our camera arrangement, about ready to go.

The McIntyre's - the missionary couple we work with.

This was the first book we photographed.

After we arrive, we flip on the lights to get them warmed up and turn on the camera and the computer for another day of picture taking. 

You can see that Sherrie is very happy sitting at the computer, making sure I don't goof up. As we take pictures, they show up on the computer screen where we can check to make sure they are in focus, are lined up properly, have the right amount of black border around them, and don't have any fingers or other extraneous items in the way. 

If you are curious and technically minded, you might wonder about the camera. It is an Illunis 50 megapixel gray scale camera with a 52 mm lens. The lens looks pretty much like any camera lens, but the camera doesn't look like any kind of camera you are familiar with. It is the silver rectangular thing sitting above the lens with black wires sticking out the top. The wires run down to the computer. We generally don't touch the camera except to twist the lens as needed to adjust the focus.

We lay a book down on the copy table and after we get it all lined up and focused, we started turning pages and clicking the little button that tells the camera to take a picture. It all appears rather simple, and sometimes it is.

 This particular book came from "reconstruction". It has been repaired and rebound. There is much tape around the edges and across torn or missing spots. The resulting pages tend to be a little curly and often hard to hold down. It is not easy to hold the pages down and keep everything in focus. As you can see, one side of the book may want to be higher than the other side. We have all manner of little jigs for holding the sides up to try and keep them even.

 The reconstruction books are particularly difficult and we sort of dread having to do them. But they are not the hardest. Apparently the paper and ink do not always get along well together. After 60 years or so the ink sort of eats through the paper, leaving large holes. From a scientific standpoint it's kind of interesting to see, but it's not so much fun to work with. In addition to the little problem with the ink, these books have not been well cared for and the humidity, bugs, and rough handling have all contributed to the current state where the books are quite brittle and literally crumble

 into pieces as we try to turn pages. Often we spend a fair amount of time trying to fit pieces back in where they belong. It is not very useful  to have a picture of a record that is missing a person's name or date of birth or the parents' names or things like that. We don't worry much about what's on the bottom where the seal and clerk's signature belong.

 Particularly difficult is figuring out how to hold a page down flat when it is in this sort of condition. The pages will open to about 90 degrees without too much trouble, but they really don't like to be laid out flat. Trying to clamp a page like this is not always wise. Sometimes just a little pulling will rip a page. We really don't want the books to be worse off for our having touched them. Not good practice.

 Now, this book is in quite good shape. It's a little faded and orange spotted, and has been taped a little in spots, but the binding is not broken, the cover is attached, and it can be made to lie fairly flat. A foam wedge under each side of the book can raise and lower the sides as needed to keep them as near level as we can get. We actually use a level often to verify the position.

 This one, while the binding isn't broken, has a bit of the dissolving paper problem. In particular you may notice the mess in the bottom center of the page where the signatures go. For some reason those spots seem to get the most ink and therefore the most damage. Thankfully, that is the least important information as far as genealogy is concerned.

 In the bottom left corner of the book you can see a clip that we use to hold the page down flat. It requires a little pulling, which is not good for the rest of a torn page, so sometimes we have to use a little bit of tape to keep things in place. Perhaps you see in the middle of the book little pieces of pages that have broken off and just been shoved back in. Those are always fun. It's sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It takes a lot of time and careful effort.

 On this page (over to the right, unless your computer is formatting this differently) you can see just to the right of the center of the page one of those interesting holes that goes through 20 or so pages. We have to keep reminding ourselves that each page is somebody's record and contains information that may be important to their family. So, we do the best we can.

Pages like these are fairly common. I'd hate to be the one doing the indexing on these books. I imagine indexing the Dominican Republic is going to be a really tough problem. Hopefully our picture quality will not add to the difficulty.

 There are a lot of books. Right now we're doing birth records (nacimientos). 

In addition to the birth records, there are also deaths, marriages, divorces, and whatever else, but they are in other rooms.

The books are stored on the shelves by city, in more or less alphabetical order, and sorted by date within each city. The earliest books go back into the late 1800s and there are not very many of those. Right now we are photographing the books only up to 1949

because those are the worst ones and the ones that are in the greatest need of being digitally preserved before they completely disintegrate. So we go alphabetically from city to city, doing all the available books up to 1949.
 
At present we have just started Santo Domingo. That's going to be a lengthy project. 

 Recently I was talking to the "librarian", the person in charge of checking out and returning the books, and she told me there are about 129,000 books held in this building and listed in the computer. Some of the books are not recorded in the computer yet. And of couse, each year they get another set from all over the country. 

 On a good day, if we have books in good condition, between the two missionary couples, we can do as many as 10 books in a day. By my calculation, it would take about 50 years to do all those books.

 If you click on the pictures you can zoom in and see more detail. If you look closely at the white bar code labels on the books on the far right of this picture, you can see they are labeled "defuncion oportuna" from the city of San Rafael del Yuma. Defunciones are death records (being dead is pretty much disfunctional?) and oportuna means it was reported in a reasonable time. Sometimes a death is not reported for several months or years and that would be reported in a different book, labeled defuncion tarde or something like that. 

 Interestingly, with the birth records there is another category besides "timely" and "late", called "reconocimientos". These are where (usually) the father comes along perhaps 20 years later to acknowledge that he is the father of someone. These are going to be especially interesting and hard to deal with because without indexing there is no way to find them.

Most of the books we do, after the main section where the clerk fills in the form, have a blank section where the clerk writes in the "reconocimientos'. It is a little surprising to me to see how many of those there are. I suppose it could be that back in the first half of the 1900s there were a lot of births out in the sugar cane fields that were simply not reported until many years later. 

As you can imagine, we need to get new books fairly often. We understand that in most archives where FamilySearch has cameras, a local custodian brings out new books and returns the old ones for us. But, this is the Dominican Republic. We just go back into the appropriate rooms, climb up on the shelves, and get whatever books we need. Then we load them on a cart and take them to the "librarian" who checks them out to us. It is an interesting procedure, made much more interesting when the librarian is not available.

 But if it works properly, we come back with a cart full of 10 to 20 books that will keep us going for another day or so. Actually, we seldom are able to do 5 books in a day, so this batch may last us several days.

After a day of picture taking we hobble our weary bones back out of the building, try to get our car out of the parking lot, and then begin the adventure of driving home. Always an adventure.

I'm not sure what happened to the "going to the beach" every afternoon, that they talked about in Salt Lake. Maybe that's a different mission.

Guest Post: Tom's Adventure in the DR

As Mom recalls it, I tricked her into eating fish guts when she came to Korea. I don't recall it that way, but we'll agree to disagree.

Mom and Dad came to visit me on my mission, in Korea. It's only fair that I should come visit them on theirs, right?

But I win, hands down. We went to Pizza Hut in Santo Domingo. Better in every way than fish guts.

Top Ten list of things about my trip to Santo Domingo:

1. Mom and Dad's Water Pump (and Super Bodega Raymond)

"Don't drink the water!"

I know it irritates Mom. But the water situation might have been my favorite thing about the entire trip. Check out their water pump!

It felt so rustic and fun! You want a drink? Grab a glass and go pump yourself some fresh water.

Not as fun as pumping it from a well, but it had its own charm. It's delivered by Super Bodega Raymond!

Of course we all know about Super Bodega Raymond. But I actually got to go into the Super Bodega Raymond store! I bought some tortilla chips. And I actually saw Super Bodega Raymond (or one of his helpers, they work like Santa Claus) deliver bottles of water to Mom and Dad's house.

2. The Colonial Zone and Christobal Colon

One morning we ventured into the old town area. The Tourist Zone. Not that there were many tourists, at least that morning. But there were certainly the type of people who prey on tourists. (That's how you know it's a real Tourist Zone.)

We picked up a 'helpful' tour guide almost immediately. He warned us about all the places we wanted to go, that the police were warning people away from those places because of all the murders.

But, hey? Why don't you go check out this store? It's got great prices.

What a helpful tour guide!

So, we also saw statues of Christopher Columbus. We saw the house where his son, Christopher Columbus Junior, lived. We stopped at some neat shops with Haitian art. And the paintings! So many crazy paintings! (I'm putting those pictures later, in the "shopping" section.)

And a little amber museum with a Jurassic Park display.

3. Restaurants

I already mentioned the fabulous Pizza Hut we ate at. Meat lovers! I don't want to over-hype the restaurants. They were admittedly expensive, maybe fifty percent more than US prices. But man, an IHOP is an IHOP. And they had an IHOP!

I also saw a Johnny Rockets hamburger place, and Taco Bell, BK, McDonalds and Cinnabon and all the food court regulars at a couple of the fancy malls.

So I'm not sure what was up with the very sad Denny's that Mom and Dad patronized on Thanksgiving. I hope next year they go have pancakes at IHOP instead.

4. Ocean

Santo Domingo is in the Caribbean, but it is not of the Caribbean. There's beautiful ocean all around, but they somehow missed out on the beautiful beaches thing!

One afternoon we went for a little walk out by one section of "beach," where there was some parking and a bright orange pier. The cool ocean breeze carried the smell of salt and palm trees. 

I wasn't going to be swimming, so I can't really argue that I missed out on anything.

Also, check out their sweet Missionary Car! In Korea, I wasn't even allowed to have a bike. Let alone a Honda

5. Hanging Out

 My favorite thing to do with family is nothing. Just sitting around, talking or watching a movie or cooking. Watching Mom and Dad do the dishes, while I eat molasses crinkles. That's especially my favorite.

And I got to do a ton of that!

Senior missions are definitely the way to go. Winding down after a long day with "Support Your Local Sheriff?" Yessir. That'll just about do.

Mom and Dad's movie theater setup is great! They've got comfy chairs pointed at the wall-sized screen and they can watch Netflix or any of the hundreds of movies they brought on their computer.

It was really fun to just sit and watch a movie. It felt very 'homey'. That was a fun family tradition that we had growing up. 

6. Church and Spanish

Selfies with Mom, outside the Iglesia. Aw yeah.

I understood the gist of the first speaker. She was American, speaking in Spanish, so I could follow her accent and grammar and train of thought.

The second speaker was more of a struggle. He seemed to be African? I got the feeling Spanish was not his native language, but neither was English. I only managed to grab a few sentences here and there from his talk.

Concluding speaker: native Dominican. Words per minute: too many. Accent: indecipherable. Gift of tongues: not operating for me.

My favorite part of the meetings was when I snuck downstairs for a minute and saw the Primary with its horde of wiggly children. (Also, Firefox spelling checker does not think "snuck" is a word. Silly Firefox!)

7. Smuggling

Look at Mom's clever way to get more closet space!

She needed to make all that closet space to store all the contraband I smuggled into the country. I am a Star Alliance Gold member, so I always get to check two, fifty pound bags for free. So I loaded up my bags with the contents of Mom's wish list. Chex, for making Chex Mix. Dream Whip. Double Stuff Oreos. Fritos. Chow Mein noodles. Stuff that they don't import and sell at grocery stores in Santo Domingo.

It was kind of thrilling, hauling all that stuff through customs. I suppose if the local authorities had wanted to press the issue, they could have tried to charge me an import fee and taxes. You're exempt for anything you bring for personal consumption. It would have been a tough sell, addressing the one thousand Aspirin pills.

8. Shopping

One of my favorite things to do in any country I visit is check out local grocery stores. It's a quick way to get a sense of how the locals really live -- no tourist orientation, no price gouging, just the normal day-to-day life. So we went to La Sirena, the store where Mom and Dad do most of their shopping.

I loved it. They had Goya brand beans and Maggi brand spice mixes (which April and I know and love from our Kuwait days) and fresh fruit juice. I got a pitcher of cherry juice, which was thick and pulpy and hearty. I haven't normally wanted "hearty" when I'm going for a fruit juice, but it was good.

9. Home Cooking

Somehow I had expected Mom and Dad to be eating rice and beans at every meal, with the occasional side of onions and pineapple.

Do you know what Mom was able to cook?

Beef-a-roni. Fudge. Molasses crinkles. Tang. Delicious pears and avocados. Scrambled eggs and tomatoes with ham.

We did have rice and chicken at one meal, and I cut up more avocado and stirred it in. Man, I love good avocado, and this was great. And cheap! Cheap, fresh avocado. I could live here.

Also, I have no pictures of any of the home cooking. You'll just have to imagine it. But be sure to imagine it *awesome*. I can't believe how well they eat, on an island in the middle of nowhere crazyland!

10. The Botanical Gardens

 This was by far my favorite of the attractions in Santo Domingo. While the rest of the town feels almost like any other developing-world big city, with traffic jammed roads and inconsistent trash collection and concrete skyscrapers of dubious construction integrity... The botanical gardens were a Caribbean island in the middle of it all.

We went on a cool morning. From inside, the city disappeared. Palm trees literally blocked the view. Exotic songbirds masked any sound from outside. Flowering trees and bushes filled the air with a sweet, tropical smell.  It was clean, well-designed, and everything I would imagine a perfect Caribbean garden to be.

We got a personal tour of their little museum. They had dioramas of each geographical region represented within the Dominican Republic. The guide spoke great English and was clearly proud of his country. 

The highlight was the Japanese Garden. Even in Japan, this Japanese Garden would have been impressive. Perfectly manicured and serene, with a giant Torii gate and traditional red bridge over the calm pond.

And how did we get around this park?
  
On a train! An early-morning, fresh air train ride through the nature preserve. 

That's a great picture to end my Guest Blog Post with. We had a lot of fun. Thanks for letting me come visit, Mom and Dad! I love you guys!