Cameron In The Corps: Foto Time

Hey how about that, two blog posts in one month, pretty good huh? This one'll be short on words and long on pictures which I'm sure you all will prefer anyway.

I finally got a camera, thanks to Alicia's mom Lorri. Thanks Lorri! In my now more than 18 months here I've taken maybe a half dozen pictures. My dad and Jen gave me their old camera to bring down, but it used AA batteries at an unbelievable rate; brand new duracells would literally last 5 minutes tops, so I just never took pictures because it was prohibitively expensive to use.

I'm also just not a very good picture taker. I feel like having a camera out takes me out of the moment sometimes. I'd prefer to just enjoy it, but then I always regret not having any pictures once time passes and my memory starts to fade so I'm determined now to chronicle my last 8 months as best I can to preserve the memories.

Also, Dominicans love taking and posing for pictures—I think my friends in my community are even more excited about my new camera than I am. Most of it is for reasons of vanity, but they have also pointed out that we can now take pictures of all the work we are doing. Nelson “el Chiquito” was out yesterday taking pictures of the girls soccer practice. Printed pictures also make great gifts I've learned.

Also, the newest group of volunteers arrived a couple weeks ago and I was asked to go to their training to share pictures of my house and community with them during the PCV Living Conditions presentation. I was one of 4 current volunteers to present. I represented a batey, and the others represented a campo, pueblo, and city. A batey is a rural mixed haitian-dominican community, a campo is a rural dominican community, a pueblo is a fairly large town, and a city is well, a city.

So for those of you who were wondering what it looked like, here are pictures of my house:

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