What A Day!

My supervisor being unanticipatedly out sick and the mail server crashing in the same day... well, it's all good but I'm exhausted, and I've worked two and half hours overtime... whew!

With the President of the Dominican Republic coming tomorrow, we're busy! I tried to track down and contact Dominican media to try and get press coverage, and I worked endlessly digging up info about a certain Jerry Dupuy, who taught English in the D.R. from '62 to '64. One of his students was a certain Hipolito Mejia, a well-off young Dominican (actually, that part might be apocryophal). He married a Dominican girl from a wealthy family who was also a longtime friend of Hipolito's, and remained on the island to become a well-known agro-industrialist. When his longtime friend Hipolito became President a few years ago, "he offered to Jerry any position in government he wanted. Jerry declined saying that he preferred the freedom of being an unpaid advisor. Jerry recommended that the country create a Ministry of Environment, and it was done under Hipolito. Jerry recently retired from his agricultural businesses [tomatoes, other vegetables; he helped pioneer growing vegetables under modern practices on large farms] and from the Barcelo Rum company." That's according to the head of the returned Peace Corps volunteers' organization "Friends of the Dominican Republic." It's an interesting story, but it was an adventure to track down media documentation (largely in Spanish) without our email server.