1. Didn't accept Sovan Datta Joshi's repeated invitations to move in with his family. I lived in a solitary hut and would have benefitted from the integration with a family that loved me a lot. Why didn't I move? Number one reason is I was paralyzed by the caste system. The Joshi family was Brahmin and I knew that after moving I would automatically have to adhere more strictly to the caste rules or their house would be religiously polluted. I had some low caste ("untouchable") friends with whom I was not willing to stop seeing for the sake of living with Brahmins. Number two reason is that the food at their house was terrible. I knew if I moved I would starting losing a lot more weight, probably get sick more, and dread every meal of the same rock-filled rice and watery lentils. I loved Nepali food in general, but Sovan Datta Joshi and his brother were the only people of high enough religious standing to cook at his house, and they weren't very good at it. Nevertheless, many years later, I'm sorry I didn't leave my hut and move in with them. I was very lonely. It would have been worth losing some contact with the untouchable families and eating poorly in order to integrate 100% with the Joshis and to participate in their subsistence family farming.

2. Never got comfortable with corporal punishment. My classrooms were the most unruly because I didn't carry a stick or whack student's backsides like my colleagues did. Perhaps I would have been a better teacher if I had abandoned some of my American notions about what's right and wrong for a teacher to do in the classroom. OK, so I am from a Western society that frowns on spanking. But I was living in a village where the stick was absolutely the only punishment a child understood. My standing kids in the corner failed to accomplish anything; it was so strange to them they weren't ashamed by it in any way, they thought it was some kind of game I was playing.

3. Stopped studying the Baitadi tongue. After I had studied Nepali three months by myself in the States and three more months with a language teacher during training in Nepal, Peace Corps sent me to a village where 80% of the people spoke no Nepali at all. They had their own local language which some foreigners called "Baitadelli" but which in Baitadi was called "local language", "village language", "our language", or just "language". The school kids studied Nepali, which was the official language of their nation and of the educational system, so I could communicate with most children. I had no idea what their parents said to me unless one of them translated. I didn't need to learn Baitadelli for my job, because all the teachers were at least supposed to teach in Nepali, although some of them didn't. Anyway, I was so fatigued from my relentless study of Nepali vocabulary and grammar, that starting all over again with Baitadelli seemed overwhelming. So I didn't. I learned how to say simple pleasant things to peasant farmers, like, "Is your cow giving milk?" but I never put in the hundreds of hours necessary to master a new language. Because of this, my deeper social relationships were limited to people who spoke Nepali, mainly the teachers at school. I had some good friends among them, but I remember trying to talk to Bhan Singh Karki's wife at his house, and how she had no idea what I was saying.

1. Planted a vegetable garden. There were a lot of agricultural volunteers in my group who were big on organic gardening. Talking to them, I decided that I couldn't be a real volunteer without a vegetable garden in my backyard. I had never had any kind of garden before. It turned out to be tons of work. I spent half of my first year in the Dominican Republic hoeing, weeding, and transplanting seedlings. The garden was a total failure. The soil was too hard, like clay, and a fungus destroyed my tomato crop. Out of my hundreds of hours of work, I managed to produce a few edible tomatoes and green peppers, and a little bit of eggplant and lettuce. I could have bought more food and of higher quality for a few pesos at the supermarket. My garden made zero economic sense, but more sadly, it consumed a lot of my time. I should have been spending that time with Dominicans, instead of weeding by myself. It made sense for the agricultural volunteers to plant gardens because they were good at that and could teach people about gardening in the process. But my garden was more of a lesson on how not to raise vegetables. I can always experiment with gardening in the United States. While I was in the Dominican Republic, I should have been out socializing with people instead of weeding.

2. Didn't seize the opportunity to teach the afternoon high school students the first time Carmen Prats asked. The afternoon shift was new and didn't yet have a computer teacher. When the school director asked me to teach, I hesitated because Peace Corps had lectured us about not taking jobs away from Dominicans and said that we were not supposed to be classroom teachers. The guy they hired was very erratic in showing up to teach, and eventually he took off for Puerto Rico, at which point I replaced him. Teaching the high school students helped me integrate better with the teachers in town and gave them more confidence in me. I shouldn't have been so chicken before. When you're a PCV, anytime someone gives you the opportunity to do more work, take it.

3. Closed myself in the computer lab. In my first year I was so eager to work, I scheduled extracurricular youth classes in every free hour available. I taught almost every day for four hours straight, during which time I couldn't even leave the computer lab. The other teachers who were at the high school during this time had lighter schedules and thought I was a freak. I should have left time to get out of the lab and be social with them. Instead I was already in the lab when the other teachers came to school and still in it when they left at the end of their shift. I felt badly about this. I hadn't anticipated the enormous interest in my free computer classes, and since I didn't want to turn any students away, I overcommitted myself. I taught hundreds of people, which was good, but in the meantime I was missing out on everything else that went on at the school. When I finally emerged from the computer lab at the end of the first year, and when I took over for the guy who went to Puerto Rico, I ended up making some good friends among the teachers which I wish I had made earlier. I feel like my life in the Dominican Republic didn't really begin until the second year when I gave up the vegetable garden, taught less, and socialized more.

**The careful reader will notice that I have contradicted myself. Should I have taught less? Should I have taught more? I don't have the answer. You just have to do the best job you can every day, and live with yourself whatever happens.