{"id":2836,"date":"2012-04-19T18:16:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T18:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/?p=2836"},"modified":"2015-11-16T21:20:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T21:20:01","slug":"the-punta-cana-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/the-punta-cana-community\/","title":{"rendered":"The Punta Cana Community"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By: Anna Groesser<\/em>
Graduate and Gap Year 32-week Program, 2012<\/em>
You can read about Anna’s internship with Grupo <\/em>PUNTACANA<\/i> on the InteRDom website here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u2019m now at the halfway point of my eight-month internship here in Punta Cana and there\u2019s so much to talk about! For starters, I\u2019d like to remark on the friendliness of most every employee I come in contact with on the hotel property. When I leave my casita in the morning and walk to the employee cafeteria, I probably pass on average about ten different employees, and it is extremely odd if even one does not look me in the eye and say hello or good morning. I am wearing my employee badge, so they know I am not a guest, and there is no need to try and impress me, yet they still give a hearty greeting. I am struck by this, even after living here for four months.<\/p>\n

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Right now, there\u2019s a tranquil, humid rain coming down outside and as I listen to the sound, it reminds me of the current changing seasons. When I arrived, I felt it was quite warm and humid, but it has actually gotten more humid as the months have moved past the winter season. Being from Northern Michigan, I am dreading the hottest months of the year- July and August- but luckily I have AC in my casita as well as the office, so I know it could definitely be worse!<\/p>\n

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I was thinking I\u2019d mention some things I do for fun, since I haven\u2019t really talked about that. I\u2019ve been here for a few months already and have made a small group of friends who are scattered throughout the Punta Cana region. I have a Dominican friend who works the reservation phone for Tortuga Bay (the luxury boutique hotel here) who I met on the bus going to Santo Domingo one weekend. I also am friends with the two local Peace Corps members who live right in the heart of the nearby Ver\u00f3n community. I\u2019ve got random friends I see at the office during the day, and ones I eat lunch with Monday through Friday, plus the front desk hotel staff who I talk to quite often (as I spend a lot of free time in the lobby, using the wireless Internet). Anyway, for fun, I find myself visiting a nearby theater to catch a recent flick, or spending a weekend afternoon on the beach with a Peace Corps member or two, or organizing a group dinner at a friend\u2019s casita or simply spending time alone, studying Spanish and watching movies on my computer. Sometimes I visit one of the jungle lagoons here for a quick swim, or I meet up with one of the Peace Corps volunteers in Ver\u00f3n (and I can really see how good I have it living at the hotel, since Peace Corps members live at the same income and lifestyle quality level as the locals!) There are a variety of hobbies I can take up here too- I can learn to dive at the dive shop and help them hunt the invasive species Lionfish in the coastal area, I can help at the PUNTACANA Ecology in one of their sustainable resources projects or I can spend a day volunteering at a local orphanage.<\/p>\n

As for my work activities, these are just as varied as my free time activities. Specifically, one recent activity was extremely fulfilling- I spent a week with a large group of doctors and medical students and we set up makeshift clinics in the local community, and simply treated people as they came. I did a lot of patient flow management because we had to keep the huge crowd (plus the numerous kids underfoot) from milling about too much, wandering into different sectioned-off areas to curiously watching the examinations! I\u2019ve also been working on the creation of a few different webpages for the PUNTACANA Foundation, and I am learning the public relations-related steps we need to take before these websites can be made official, since it represents the hotel corporation\u2019s image. And just recently, I co-managed a group of VIP tourists from the U.S. for a couple hours. They were interested in seeing the free local clinic and one of the local schools that the PUNTACANA Group created. This was a lot of fun, since it involved my direct supervisor Margarita and I acting as a close-working team during the tour, and we both received a hearty applause at the end as the group thanked us for our leadership that day!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Anna GroesserGraduate and Gap Year 32-week Program, 2012You can read about Anna’s internship with Grupo PUNTACANA on the InteRDom website here. I\u2019m now at the halfway point of my eight-month internship here in Punta Cana and there\u2019s so much to talk about! For starters, I\u2019d like to remark on the friendliness of most every employee I… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[182,10,191,181,117],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2929,"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2836\/revisions\/2929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.interdominternships.org\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}