APPE International Rotation, Dominica; A Final Reflection

As we drove away from the Albany International Airport on Monday afternoon, the tires of the black Suzuki treading once more familiar paths, and the colorful autumn leaves dancing playfully in the crisp November breeze, it was with a heavy heart that I stared out of the window. Had it only been two weeks? It seemed like more. Dominica is like a peaceful home in the early morning, before the din of alarms and the creeping warmth of dawn conjures the rush of a new day; beautiful in its quiet, humble simplicity. I can see why some travelers never leave. In Dominica, time seems absent. This is written upon the eternally young faces of its people, and their amusingly vacant concept of punctuality. The vicissitudes of your life at home slowly fade out of thought, like the last drops of rain chasing a midday storm. Just as our airplane had, moments before, hurtled out of the bright blue sky and landed forcefully along the slick black runway of Albany International, I too had just crashed back down to reality. It had only been a day and already I missed the lush green jungle, the precipitous, rolling peaks, the warm, moist air, thick with exotic scents and the smiling eyes of the Dominican friends I had left behind. Fortunately, as much as my tempestuous memory will allow, I will hold my experiences in Dominica close to my heart where they will stand boldly against the slow pursuit of time; one gift of many from the island.

I could regale you with an encyclopedic recounting of my experiences on the island, but my peers have just done so, admirably at that, in recent posts, and I would be remiss to bore our readers with redundancy. Instead, I’ll choose several little moments from the trip that still linger freshly in my mind as a snapshot of my experiences on the island. I still keenly remember our first morning. The previous day had been a trying one, complete with international connecting flights that boasted an impressively tight schedule and a seemingly endless stream of security checkpoints. The night had concluded, in a marvelous Dominican welcome, with a harrowing ninety minute drive from the airport to Jungle Bay. We soon realized that our cottages were no mere stone’s throw from the resort proper, and the hike to our beds was both exciting and foreboding. I presume we all slept well that night. But soon the morning dawn spread silently across the horizon, pouring across the Atlantic Ocean and beaming through our wide open windows in a beautiful wash of gold and orange. Untangling myself awkwardly from my mosquito net and stumbling over hastily removed sandals, I found myself standing on the balcony, staring awe struck into a morning view that I cannot do justice to with words. The cool morning breeze wafted a slight scent of ocean air mingled with the damp jungle floor to my nose. I wasn’t alone. A small gecko, several inches by my untrained eye, perched gently upon the balcony rail, staring intently at the dawn. “I agree”, I said to my new friend. And we sat for awhile, taking in the morning together.

Another moment I keenly recall was during one of our visits to a school in Petite Savanne. This was the second school we visited as a group, but there were numerous differences between this school and the one at Delices. Our plan was the same; break into small groups to effectively tackle all of the classrooms, engage the students in discussions, activities and games regarding pharmacy and medication safety, and then dive headlong into physical fitness activities to exhaust the sugar-rush we were soon to induce. The morning went reasonably well. Our resources were stretched thinner than predicted from our time in Delices, but we all worked with what we had and the demonstrations went off without a hitch. As a whole, the school seemed somewhat better organized than Delices, and the children better contained. But the classroom that Nicole and I had chosen proved to be a memorable exception to this trend. The Smarties candies we had finely crushed, in exorbitant amounts no less, for the purposes of a pharmacy demonstration, were rapidly consumed - sometimes trapped within our arro root base, and sometimes just as the straight powder itself. It didn’t take long for the sugar-rush to take hold.

The multistory concrete structure trembled under the pounding feet of a dozen sugar-crazed children as they exploded out of their chairs, through the classroom, and gushed like soda from a shaken can, through the doorway. They jumped, skipped, hopped, bounced, slid and ran through the second story balcony like little blue blurs; screaming, laughing and playing. We never did regain control. Fortunately, lunch time arrived, followed by our physical fitness activities and the pent-up energy had a suitable method of release. Exhausted after a rousing game of futball in the blazing Dominican sun, I collapsed onto the ground floor walkway, taking advantage of the shade. As I rummaged through my pockets, trying in vain to identify and organize the artifacts accumulated throughout the day, I withdrew several long, white sleeves covered, on one side, by a myriad of Hannah Montana stickers. It took only a fraction of a second for my mind to register the immense treasure in my hands, and it was a fraction of a second too long. Suddenly, as if she had teleported instantaneously at the sound of Hannah Montana stickers being removed from a damp cargo-short pocket, a cute little girl, her hair awash in blue ribbons, bows and beads, planted herself firmly on the walkway besides me, her eyes locked hungrily onto my stickers. “Could I have one?” she asked, her eyes boring into the sleeve. I knew the danger, but couldn’t resist. I twisted the sleeve awkwardly, contorting my entire arm around the scene to protect from any wayward eyes and slowly showed the stickers to the girl. “Which do you want?”, I asked. “That one!” she said, pointing to a large, full body depiction of Hannah. I began slowly peeling the sticker from the back. I didn’t even get to Hannah’s shoulders before the air grew quiet and the prickling of a hundred tiny eyes raised the hair on my neck. 

The sun disappeared.

I was suddenly plunged into a sea of bodies. Arms, too many to count, thrust themselves plaintively before my face. “Please sir!”, “I want one!”, “No me!”. It was a tornado of hands. The only thing between me and suffocation at the hands of immense American popstar adoration was several dozen stickers. Innumerable index fingers pointed desperately, and I peeled stickers off as fast as I was able. One sticker off the page, placed delicately onto an outstretched finger which instantly disappeared. The small hole where the previous arm had been was rapidly filled with another arm, another hand, and another frenzied “That one sir! That one!”. As piranha can strip a carcass in moments, my sleeve of stickers was gone in a flash. Dozens of children whirled around the area, stickers on faces, arms, hands and notebooks. Giant smiles spread from ear to ear. I inhaled a deep breath of fresh air, my first in over a minute. I looked over at Kristen Felthousen, who sat several feet away. “You brought that upon yourself”, she smiled. And I’m glad I did.

I have dozens, if not more, of these moments from the two weeks I spent on Dominica. In the interest of brevity, if brevity hasn’t already been grossly surpassed, I will leave it to those two. The intention was demonstrated, nonetheless – that the powerful experiences during this rotation were both internal and external. In my two weeks on the island I did as much inward learning as outward learning. The implications of this experience will resound through my near and likely distance future. It was truly an unforgettable experience.