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Semana Santa has come and gone, so now we’re in the long stretch leading up to the start of the Dominican Summer League in June and beyond. Some of the players have left for Tampa and more will be leaving next week, and new players will be arriving around April 1st. Not that many have left, so my class sizes are still fairly large. Most of the guys that are here now will stay here throughout the summer.
Opening Day of the 2008 baseball season is just a few days away and the excitement is picking up. In recent days, some of the players have been watching the final Yankee exhibition games on TV in the afternoon, and I’ve had to play the bad guy, asking them to turn the set off and leave the rec room because English class was beginning.
I’m curious to see whether or not the high school players will be here this Saturday. They didn’t play last week because of the holiday, but there are still some Gatorade signs pinned to the center field fence of one of the fields, signs that were put up when they first started playing a few weekends ago. I’ll try to get some more photos of the games if the teams are here.
There’s really not too much going on right now, but I’ll have more later.
The last couple of Saturdays the camp has hosted a high-school age baseball tournament, consisting of 8 teams, which means all four fields have been in use. Each team plays two games, beginning about 11 a.m. and finishing around five, I’m told. (Because I’m usually in Boca Chica on Saturday afternoons, I’m not around for the finish of the games.) There are quite a large number of supporters, family and friends, I assume, who have been turning out for the games, and, with the 20 or so members of each team, the complex has been quite crowded. One of the best parts of the tournament has been the enthusiasm of the players. Cheering, chanting and hand clapping punctuate the play, and with the green, yellow, red and blue uniforms dotting the fields, the complexion of the campus is drastically changed. Very interesting and exciting. I don’t know if the tournament will be played this Saturday, since this is one of the big holiday seasons in Latin America, Semana Santa–Holy Week.
Speaking of which, we get a few days off, beginning today. The Dominican players are going home after practice today, but the rest of us, from other countries, are staying at the campus. Last year the Yanks put us up in one of the Juan Dolio resorts, just down the road about 30 kilometers, for a few days, but not this time, for various reasons. There’s quite a large contingent of foreign players here right now, probably in the neighborhood of 15 or so. Last year, too, the holiday coincided with the player turnover which takes place near the beginning of April. We’ll get a lot of new players in then and lose some, who will be moving on to Tampa. In the meantime, though, I’ll enjoy the days off, probably spending a lot of time in Boca Chica.
My jogging times are back up to over an hour, so I’m 100% recovered from my recent illness. With all the physical fitness attempts, I figure I should at least be allowed to take a few batting practice sessions to keep up with recent Yankee signee, Billy Crystal. I ain’t askin’ for a contract–just a chance to strike out against one of our young guns. 
There haven’t been too many nice sunsets or sunrises lately that I’ve been able to photograph. There was a gorgeous sunrise the other morning, but I was out jogging. The one below is about the only one I’ve been able to “bag” recently. More later.
P.S. For anyone who is wondering how Nai is doing, well . . . he was doing pretty good, but now the doctor tells him that he has malaria! Go figure. He’s also been complaining about one of his eyes hurting him. This is one of the results of the motorbike accident that is still lingering and it’s something I’m worried about. He says he can barely see out of it, and I can’t figure out whether it’s bruised, or a scratched cornea or a detached retina, which is serious. I warned him to see a doctor right away, which he did. The doc seemed to feel that it might be ok. Nai said he would send me an email, written by his friend, explaining what the doc told him. He’s pretty despondent right now and weak, but I hope he’ll get through it all ok.
I mentioned in a previous post about the fires that are set in order to burn off the dead undergrowth this time of year. Here’s a couple of photos of the smoke from a few fires that were started just outside the camp. The first image was taken through my bathroom window, and, with the large cloud of smoke, it’s a good thing the wind was blowing away from us.
The second photo is from my balcony. Though the smoke is not as bad, the wind is blowing toward us, so the field was beginning to get a bit hazy.
You can see how dense the smoke can get, but in reality, the size and the intensity of the flames are quite small. I walked outside the fence and took a look at the area of one of the burns the day after, and most of the larger, living stalks (1-2 feet tall) of whatever kind of plant they are, were barely singed.
There’s sometimes so much smoke coming off these burns that you’d think the blazes must be huge. They’re not. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire–but not much.
Apparently, there was a small oil spill near Boca Chica last week, causing the closure of the beach for a short period. It wasn’t too serious, and the Weekend Office beach was open this past weekend. I read today that the shipper was fined 7 million pesos (about $210,000) for the cost of cleaning up the spill.
Also last week, the Dominican Republic was host to a summit of Latin American nations. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, as well as his counterparts from Ecuador and Colombia were present, and they shook hands and made up over the recent spat about Colombia’s incursion into Ecuador. A couple of the Venezuelan players told me that Chavez and some of the other leaders were staying at Hamaca Resort in Boca Chica. I looked around for some sign of them on Saturday to try to get some photos, but I saw nothing, so I assume they had already returned to their home countries.
Nai seems to be doing better, but he’s still weak. When I called him this morning (early evening in Laos), he was out walking around, albeit with the aid of Pui, his brother. I, however, am just now getting over a bug of some kind that I picked up last Monday or so. I even cancelled last Wednesday’s classes because I felt so badly, and I’m still not 100%. Thus, my running program has sure gone to heck, though I did manage to survive a 45-minute jog this morning. More later.
I was sitting in the Weekend Office yesterday when a large, heavy-set, florid man, about my age, plodded over to me. He sported a shaved head, wore a couple of gold chains around his thick neck, barely clearing his jowly chin, and had a rather large beer-belly that flopped over his swimming trunks. He stood about two feet away from me and started to practically yell in my face that Toronto was the team to beat this year. I asked him why he thought so, but his response was he’d bet me $1000 right now that the Blue Jays would beat the Yanks by at least 5 games this coming season. (I was wearing my Yankee hat at the time.) I declined. Then he proceeded to rant about how A-Rod came crawling back to the team, about how the pitching would be non-existent, and about what a chicken s**t organization the Yanks are.
I really, really wanted to jump on this guy, but I just smiled and nodded my head. It seemed the best thing to do, then. While I’m not technically a member of the Yanks nor an employee of the State Department, I suppose I do, in a way, represent them. So, in a situation like that, it’s best to keep my cool. The guy bloviated some more, but finally gave up, probably sensing that I wasn’t going to rise to his bait. As he walked away, I wished him good luck this season. I forgot to ask him where he was from (not that I could really get a word in edge-wise), but I’ve never met a Canadian who was such a blow-hard, red-neck type of person, so I assume he was from the U.S., but I could be wrong.
Working with such a class organization as the Yankees, perhaps some of that class has rubbed off on me. Their class is evident, so no response from me was really necessary. I should have taken up the bet, though. This guy was way over the top, coming up to a total stranger and sounding off like that. Why, I could have had a black belt in taek-wan-do (blue belt is fairly close)–I could know a little bit about Muay Thai boxing (ok, I’ve watched it before)–I could have been a psychotically obsessive Yankee fan. I guess it was his lucky day.
I finally talked to Nai today and he’s back home, a little worse for the wear and tear. He was feeling very tired and couldn’t talk for long since the medication he’s taking (probably pain killers) was starting to kick in and he wanted to sleep. He did say that he hurt his back, head and leg in the accident, and he has to return to the hospital frequently for checkups. I asked if someone hit him, but I think he tried to tell me that no one else was involved. He must have crashed on his own, and I’ll find out more as he recovers. I’m just thankful he wasn’t terribly injured, and I hope he recovers soon.
Looking over my lists of new arrivals at the camp and the players who are holdovers, I see that a few of my classes are going to be quite large, with 20 or more students in a couple of them. Of course, that size class wasn’t unusual in South Korea and would certainly seem small compared to the 50- to 60-student classes I had in Benin. Still, I think I might have to see about moving the classes out of the comfy rec. room and into the cafeteria, which has more seating and few distractions. The kids aren’t gonna like it because there is only bench seating, so there won’t be any sofas and armchairs that they like to slouch on in the other room. Some won’t mind, though, since the rec. room won’t be off limits during class hours. More later.
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