Art and nature

I'm here at the base in the little media office corner of Troyers' house. There's lots of hammering, drilling, banging, clanging, thudding, and talking going on over my head, and every so often a sprinkling of dust and dirt showers down on my head. Hence the plastic over my workstation. I even put it over my head once or twice, but it got too hot under there to work, so I'll just brave the dust.


The team from Middlebury already has half of the roof completely done and they are making a lot of progress on the other half. The only reason I have time to write right now is because there's not much to video; they are working on a lot of little details up there so the roof looks pretty much the same right now as it did an hour ago. (Ah, here comes more dust!!)

Anyway, it's been a fun weekend! I've been filming a lot, and this morning I actually got up early enough to get to the base to film the team's morning devotions and worship time.


Some highlights from the weekend:


Saturday night was an art exhibition in Jarabacoa. Francisco, one of the teachers at SI's art site, and Amy Babb both had some of their work on display. The theme this year was Dominican birds. The had the exhibition in an open-air building in a park by a river with decorative nests here in there and bird sounds playing on some large speakers just outside. Pretty cool!


Here's Fran with one of his paintings:

Here's a picture of some of the displays. The whole Middlebury team went to the exhibition.



Sunday morning Nate and Lowell took the team to Jimenoa (him-an-oh-a) falls. I got great video for the team dvd with the video camera, but I forgot to get some pictures of the falls with my own camera. :-(
Some of the guys and myself hiked/climbed/crawled up to way above the falls. It was quite a hike! Extremely steep in parts; we had to grab vines and trees to pull ourselves up. We sweated like crazy, but the view was worth it! There were huge, huge boulders carved out by the rushing river. Lowell said some of them moved after the hurricane rains. You can imagine how much water was pumping through there then!


Here's a picture of one of the falls above Jimenoa itself. All that water funnels into probably an eight-foot-wide gap between rock walls:



Tremendous water power; as Nate and Lowell said, if you fall into there, you die--end of story.


Here's a picture of some of the smaller boulders (and even they are huge). I wish there was a person in this photo so you could see the scale:

I will definitely get a picture of the main waterfall posted sometime. It might be awhile, though.


It's lunch time, so I'm heading down to the cafeteria.