Let them eat cake!

On March 4, I celebrated the two-year anniversary of living in the Dominican Republic. Two years! Can you believe it?! March itself has been a month of celebrations: March 1 was Peace Corps 50^th birthday, March 4 was, of course, my PC training groups’ two-year anniversary. March 4 was also Angel’s 5^th birthday and on March 8, it is International Women’s Day. I didn’t do much celebrating for anything Peace Corps related,  but tomorrow Silvia and the gang are going to roast a pig to rejoice in Angel’s 5^th year of life (yes, a five-year-old gets an entire pig in his honor, and trust me he’s bragging about it). And for International Women’s Day, my girls group and I are going to have a soirée if you will, at the town clubhouse. 

The affair is set to start at 6p.m. (hora Americana- or, on time) and my girls are going to give three different talks/presentations about 1)Women’s health issues, including how to do a self-breast exam 2)Self Esteem and 3)Domestic Violence. Each talk will hopefully be about 10 minutes in length and reinforce how lucky we are to 1)be women 2)live in a community where everyone is family and supports and loves each other and 3)not be men. After all this, we’re going to eat cake. 

Cake, as I have learned, is an intricate part of Dominican culture. If you want to make any occasion formal, you must have a cake. If you want to officially commemorate anything, a cake is the proper way to do it. Again, I guess the same rules, more or less, apply in the US; it’s just that Dominicans are so much better about making things formal and ritualistic. 

Long story short- I want La Caya’s International Women’s Day to be a formal, special occasion and so therefore I am buying a cake. A $3,200 pesos cake to be exact, which is roughly US $86- so it better be a dang good cake, because that’s about a third of my monthly PC paycheck (okay, okay, phew! I’m done with my money spending rant). Despite the cost, I figure with only two months left, now is the time to be spending my money on things like cake. Because the truth is, I don’t know if I’ll ever have this opportunity again.

Wish my girls luck! And celebrate Women’s Day at home- it is an international event after all. Pictures to follow, hopefully on Tuesday or Wednesday…