April in the Dominican Republic



 







 

Catching a ride



Another truck headed for the market. If you look close you can see eggs and green bananas ( these are not the regular bananas),green peppers and then some sort of roots. 

Power distribution in the Dominican Republic

According to our understanding, the government provides all the power and sells it to power wholesalers who then distribute it. The distrubtion system belongs to these distributors. Over time people have tied into it without permission and without paying that they estimate up to 60% of the power is delivered without paying for it. The distributors go broke and new one comes on line and runs new lines to try and see that he is paid for his power, but eventually he looses so much power to non payers that he also goes broke The next one runs more new lines. As you can see it is a royal mess. Usually everyday power will go out for a time. All nice apartments and office buildings have backup power generation systems.



Another view of power poles in the Dominican Republic

 Moon Lake wastes a lot of pole space. They could put a lot more wires on those poles, don't you think?

Dinner with the Fords & the Roberts at our apartment

The Fords are serving in the Santo Domingo West Mission Office, the Roberts are Perpetual Education Fund Missionaries, and those folks on the far right look a little lost, don't you think?

Groceries for this week

Here are the things we purchased today. We show this only to ask you to guess "how many plastic bags do you think they used to bag this up?" They use a lot, but I doubt you would guess 20, but that is how many bags they used. One bag had 2 cubes (not pounds) of butter, another had a small can of Nestles Quick. It is no wonder that you see so many blowing in the wind and everywhere.

When you don't have a truck a bike will do.

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Bikes just make their way through traffic