¡Saludos from El Seibo in La Republica Dominicana!

El Seibo is a smallish town of about 30,000 I think, 2 1/2 hours northeast from the capital. It’s about 2 hours from either coast in the “flat” lands--lots of sugar cane fields and ranch land. Everything is green, rolling hills with the mountains in the distance to the north, and it is hard to believe they are in the middle of a pretty bad drought. So far it has been cooler than Santo Domingo, though they say the summer here is much much hotter. It’s been raining off and on and so cools down regularly. I say cool, but the Seibanos complain about the cold when the mercury dips to a low 81º F. El Seibo is also the “cow town” of the east, which means you can find men in cowboy hats riding horses down the streets, motorcycles and cars weaving around them at breakneck speed, trucks blasting their horns as they bear down on everyone with out slowing.
The Dominican Republic is a land of bizarre juxtapositions, and El Seibo a prime example. You see the man on the horse riding past a bank, all glass and modern angles, then he stops at the little wooden shack next to it to buy some food that is being cooked over an open fire by a hunched little doña with bare feet. But behind the fire could be the cinder block wall, neatly whitewashed, that surrounds the clean, bright blockhouse where the doña lives with her daughter who is a lawyer in another town. A small cloud of street boys gather around the horseman, begging to shine his boots, show him around El Seibo, carry his bags, do anything, anything please for a single peso.
We are working at the high school, the liceo, which is the nicest school I’ve seen so far. We each have internships, and mine is in the high school computer lab. Each class has about 35 students. The lucky thing about El Seibo is that there are 24 hours of electricity, which is definitely rare here. We are learning a lot for sure, with most of the new stuff Spanish and culture, not a lot of technical skill is required.
Overall I enjoy El Seibo much more than Santo Domingo, just for the simple fact it is smaller. I can walk around safely, even at night in most places, and the stars aren´t obscured by the smog and light pollution. We have already completed 2 of 5 weeks here and have been in country for over 5 weeks. I can´t tell if it´s going fast or slow...but it is going well.