Day 7: Monday January 10, 2011: Laundry and Rummykub

Monday is laundry day! Finally clean clothes! I happened to forget a ziplock bag of work shirts, but it worked out nicely because we washed clothes the day I ran out of shirts. :) Today we did all the 'single peoples' laundry. Meaning everyone who didn't have a spouse along, and the youth. 
It was a little different than doing laundry in the states, but thankfully we had 3 washing machines and thus didn't have to do it all by hand! 
   We piled all the laundry into piles of cleanest to dirtiest in the backyard at Jewel's house. The cleanest got washed first since the water was fresh. We filled the washers with water and put the clothes in and let them agitate, then we would wring them out and put them in the other compartment in the washer, which was the 'spin cycle. We then took them out and rinsed them in the rinse bucket and put them back in the spinner to wring out most of the water, then Lara organized them and put them on the clothesline to dry.  The water in the washers would get changed every two washes, or when it got too dirty. The rinse water: every two loads. Like I said, it was a little different than doing laundry in the states, but it was actually a lot of fun....probably because there was a group of us doing it. I wouldn't wanna do it by myself!

The three washing machines

piles and piles of dirty laundry

wringing water out to put clothes in the spinner

"The rinse cycle"

At lunch, we found out we were going on a walking tour of Los Toros to see "all the important places".  I felt like such a tourist. Our tour guides were Henry Reyes and Mildred's husband, Umberto.  Henry had on purple aviator sunglasses with a rhinestone heart in the corner. Hannah and I couldn't help but giggle every time we saw them too! 
Los Toros is much bigger than I thought! We are just on one side of the town! But at the same time, it's not very big if there are 20,000 people living there. We started our tour by the baseball field, which coming from a baseball family, intrigued me. The boys train four hours every morning on this field. Moises is one of them. For many of the boys, baseball is their only ticket out of the Dominican. But I also learned that you have to be tall enough as well. This ballfield is used as a right of way to the fields as well. We walked right through it Sunday when we took our hike. It's not fenced in or separate from the town. It's just a multi purpose field with a backstop and pitchers mound at one end. 

I enjoyed walking around the town, even though it was really hot! We got to see the Town Hall, Schools, Hospital, Library, internet cafe as well as MLB player Pedro Feliz's house. 

The Béisbol field

A veiw from the outskirts of Los Toros

Town Hall.

The Clinic

Ambulance recently donated to the town by MLB player Pedro Feliz

The Dentist chair!

High School classroom

Chevy showing us where we are on a hand painted map on the school wall

By the time we got back, the work day was finished, and successful! Juancito and Dominga's house was plastered! 

The outside of Juancito and Dominga's when we were finished plastering!

After supper, we packed up all the church's sound equipment and loaded ourselves onto a bus and headed to a neighboring town for an outdoor church service. Again, the youth girls graced everyone with our singing and guitar abilities. This time singing Amazing Love.

Now, it was really interesting being in a service where there wasn't a translator!! It was good, even though I didn't understand a word spoken. Some of the songs, we could figure out what they were talking about because they had the words on PowerPoint! :)

  At the end of the service, this little girl was brought up for prayer(we found out later she had a hernia..I think..). Anyway, I thought that was pretty cool and it got me thinking about how here, they don't have all the medication that we do. They just deal with stuff, like ADHD and ADD. Or even other special needs, I don't know, it was just interesting to see how people like that just seemed to be accepted into society. 

Hannah and I were in no way ready to go to bed at 9pm! We were hungry however, so we went to the Cafe de Tres Hermanos to get cheese sandwiches! Then we waited anxiously for the second bus to come back so we could ask Mariela if we could play games! Of course we could!! And we headed over to her house, first with 5 people, then slowly more and more kids showed up ready to play Connect Four against Chevy, or Chess against David! Jamie walked in carrying the game RummyKub, which...to be honest...I automatically associate with old Mennonites! HAH! He asked Hannah, Stephanie and me if we wanted to play. And since Steph already knew how to play she explained to us in English what we were doing!! *sigh*...

...and now...I can not associate RummyKub with old people anymore, because it is a lot of fun! And Hannah and I, being the newbies, had the help of Samuel and Jose Daniel...hehe..much the Jamie's dismay! We played 4 games and everyone got to win except Stephanie! :( 
I said midnight was late enough for game nights, cause we all do have to get up and work in the morning. I don't know how the Domincans do it! They stay up late pretty much everynight and are always up and working before us...??