In accordance with my craving for Spanish immersion and language experience I looked into a program offered by my Civil Engineering Department called "Latin America Study Abroad in Water Resources." It is a semester long class worth four credits that also counts as my senior design project that is required for graduation. I love killing two or more birds with one stone! So the scope of the class was to corroborate with Hydrologic Engineers from the Dominican Republic government entity call INDRHI, visit the desired site for construction and then spend the rest of the semester designing a dam with the desired characteristics to be built at the desired location.
Much of the infrastructure of the Dominican Republic is about fifty years behind that of the United States, and thus our limited skills were still very suitable for the task. Our class was split up into four groups each with different dam sites scattered throughout the country. My team was assigned El Rio Guayabal, located on the south eastern border of the country and near the border of Haiti.
The desired characteristics of our dam included producing 3 MW of electricity, and using the flows for irrigation and drinking. While we were in the DR we were able to collect precipitation data, and river flow data, and then begin to normalize the data. Each day while we were there in the DR we went to the office of INDRHI and collected our data and began compiling it and then creating preliminary assessments. Below is a picture of the desired site location of the dam. with an existing, "sudo" dam already in place for irrigation.
Working and touring in the DR was an awesome experience! The Spanish was much easier for me to understand due to its more Latino base, though many of the people born and raised out of the cities tended to slur and jumble most of their conversation and that took a lot of getting used to. The traffic in the cities was unbelievable! No one uses lanes! Cars cris cross and drive within inches of each other and follow the path of least resistance basically! Many of the cars and trucks had twice as many people as seat belts!
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| At the Airport |
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| Me, Chelsea Kimble |
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| My Dam Professor, Dr. Nelson |
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| This guy was out side our building. Look close becasue he is holding a shotgun! Many hotels and banks had many people like this outside. |
During the evening times I ended up playing a lot of card games with classmates and walking around to see the city. The LDS temple there in Santiago was very beautiful. The members of the church were very friendly and curious of our visit. There seemed to be some very beautiful parks and the beach was all along the city. It was mostly rocky but still very pretty. I went for a few runs throughout the city with classmates for early morning exercise. Let me tell you that if running wasn't great before I ran along the beach it sure became incredible afterwards! Seeing the sun rise thousands of miles away on the edge of the ocean was amazing! I wish that I had taken my camera on all of my runs.
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| LDS Temple in the DR |
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| City life |
While in the city we met with the director of all water resources for the country, which may not sound important in the United States, but in the DR this guy had butler like servants, wore a very expensive suit and walked elegantly kind of like royalty. It was a pretty interesting experience. On top of that, it was so strange to me how grateful every one we talked to was for our service to them. I kept feeling like what we were doing was simple and insignificant, but it was a huge deal to these people.
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| My Class and The INDRHI Engineers |
Everyday we got to eat authentic and incredible Dominican food for lunch. In the middle of the week we each traveled to our actual dam sites and took pictures and assessed the area to get a feel for the area which we were studying. It was funny to me, but the Dominicans thought that it was a good opportunity to show off there country and stopped many times to buy us fresh fruit, or chilled coconuts, or show us landmarks. we ended up going out on El Lago Enriquillo, a salt water lake that is a left over of an ocean pass that had since been cut off by the raising mountains. There we saw native iguanas, herrings, crab, cactus, and lots of other unique wildlife for the island. We took a boat ride across the lake to the island in the middle of the lake where there was a weather station.
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Fresh chilled Coconut! (Chelsea, David)
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Native Iguanas with Three horns like a triceratops!
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At the end of our stay in Santiago we presented all of our findings to the board of water resources for the country in a really big conference room. I was the only one that spoke Spanish in my immediate group and had to translate and basically give all of the presentation in Spanish. It is intimidating to give a semi-technical presentation in a second language in front of a large group of native, older professionals. But practice makes perfect right!? I love Spanish and cherish the time I had in the DR to continue to immerse myself in yet another Spanish speaking culture.
After giving our presentations, the same night we went to an authentic and loved restaurant by the native with music and dancers. It was very cool to see the native dances and music. We were at dinnner with the director again and supposedly it was a really big deal again. They gave each of us a gift for our services and it was a nice get together. At one point they got all of us "Americans" to go and dance with the dancers. The link to that video is below.
The next day we headed out on a bus to tour a bit of the country. We stopped at a place called 27 Charcos, which is an indigenous word for waterfalls. We put on helmets and life vests and hiked up to the first water fall and began by jumping off a rock into a water fall and the pool beneath it! We proceeded to jump and slide down many more water falls along the river until we had done all 27! An incredibly invigorating experience! One of my class mates Jaren had a Go Flex camera going the whole time and edited it down to a pretty cool video. The link for the video is below.
We stayed in a really nice resort right on the beach in Puerto Plata. Lots of incredible food, fruit smoothies all day, warm beautiful beaches. It was great! One morning I ran on the beach with my professor and classmate to catch the sunrise. We did and it was incredible! My background photo on facebook is one of the many amazing photos I took of the sunrise across the water and island.
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| The resort |
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| Leading to the beach |
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| Sunrise |
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| Reflection in The Morning |
Overall it was incredible and life changing experience for me, and I can't wait to visit more Spanish speaking places to further my understanding and abilities.
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