Christmas Day in the afternoon, we made some beautiful music (if we ourselves do say so)—including a really great merengue carol in addition to old favorites.

After two and a half months of waiting, and many false promises of immediate installation, we finally got telephone and internet service on December 17. Yea! (You can find our new home telephone number on the “Contact” page.) The following day our daughter Hannah arrived to spend Christmas with us. The next day we held the seminary’s annual Christmas dinner, a big celebration that includes not only the students and faculty, but also their families and many graduates. A couple of days later came the pre-school Christmas party and the long end-of-semester faculty meeting. Next evening the National Choir gave a wonderful concert at Epiphany. Around the same time Michi the seminary dog, who had never quite recovered from giving birth to her last litter of pups (see the November Chronicle), took a turn for the worse. Since everyone else was leaving for the holidays, it fell to us to care for her. A trip to the vet revealed that she had a huge malignant tumor.

These events brought with them a whirlwind of activity. Because we had put off dealing with a lot of email until we got our own internet service, there was lots of email correspondence to catch up on. And there were friends and relatives, with whom we had thus far only had written contact, that we wanted to call on our new phone. Hannah’s visit made us want to see some of the local sights with her. April had promised to make fudge, cookies, and carrot cake for the more than 100 guests expected at the Christmas dinner. And all the while we were taking Michi back and forth to the vet, and getting up in the middle of the night to coax her to eat and drink. The days surrounding Christmas were a dizzying mixture of corresponding, calling, partying, preparing for preaching, cooking, carol singing, sight seeing, and nursing the sick dog. We celebrated the holiday itself with services on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as well as Lessons and Carols that afternoon. The LaMarches kindly invited us to their family Christmas Eve dinner, and on Christmas Day we joined several members of the English speaking congregation for a midday potluck.

On December 28 Michi sadly but mercifully died. Three of her four pups survived, and two were adopted. We decided to keep the last pup as the seminary watchdog. We named her Milly, after a Dominican merengue singer named Milly Quezada. We and José Abreu, the new sacristan, will have joint custody, so that he can look after her when we are away, and vice versa.

With Hannah’s visit over the holidays, we finally had both the motivation and the time to explore some of the country. In Santo Domingo itself we visited Tres Ojos, three partially underground lakes, and Faro a Colón, a hulking monument built to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. (Does it hold the remains of Columbus? For more on the mystery of where he is interred, see El Bohio Dominicano.)

Stalactites in Tres Ojos	Hannah by one of the lakes in Tres Ojos

We had a relaxing day at Playa Domenicanus, a small and relatively quiet beach to the east near Bayahibe.

Over the New Year holiday we went to Jarabacoa, in the mountains toward the center of the island. There we attended services at Iglesia Monte de la Transfiguración, where the Rev. Miguelina Espinal is the pastor. We took in the waterfalls for which the place is famous, struck up an interesting relationship with our guide, and went white-water rafting—April was thrown in but pulled out within seconds!

A stop at Altos de Chavón got us thinking about the mixed blessings of an economy based on tourism. It’s the strangest thing—a quaint replica of a “European village” built on bluffs above the Río Chavón. You’d think you were somewhere along the Rhine or the Loire. It was built in the 1970s as part of a huge resort called Casa de Campo, originally owned by an international corporation but now in private hands. It holds nothing but exclusive shops and restaurants, and tourists flock there by the busload. Why on earth is there a place like this in the Caribbean? It made us wonder about the extent to which our foreign visits are a pretense.