Back in '96

Late in coming, but faithful readers I must own it for all to know. I went to the Maná concert in the capital on June 12th. (Hey, don't roll your eyes about how I was on another gettaway from Pinar Quemado - I had a Campamento Estrellas de Hoy meeting to go to, too).

So, yes, we were in a flashback to 1996 with the guitar heroes of ole Mexico, remembering what it was like when rock en español was new, singing “mariposa, mariposa.” The days of my long, black Chicana hair were eminently missed, as were my fake Timberlands and plaid grunge flannel button-downs.

All these upper class Dominicans were there. That was sweet, seeing the other side of Dominican tastes a little, where there's more than just bachata and salami to meet the eye. Sorry, sarcasm again. The thing is, I'm here working with the poor and the rural, this means that what they have access to is very limited. This means that my average interaction will involve one of two dozen common topics of which we will speak in very rote form. To this end, it often feels like my Spanish is better than it is because I am so often having an identical conversation. These include:

• piropos (casual flirtatious comments which often go too far)
• gripe (the flu)
• bachata (type of music)
• platanos or guineos (platanos or bananas)
• cuarto (money, who's got it, who needs it, can I share some today)
• daños (hurts - different kinds ranging from the kind you get if you take a bath while sweaty to the kind you get if your wife leaves you to live in Santiago)
• traigos (drinking)
• Nueva Yol (New York, where everyone knows someone)
• beísbol or pelota (baseball, last night's game)
• lluvia (rain, when its coming)
• Americanos (yes, we are)
• 2009 (how long we'll he here)
• café (coffee, do we want one)

and the #1 thing:

• casada (as in, am I married? or when will he be home?)

which always leads to, with emphasis:

• niños (where are your kids????!?!! usually a pitying or puzzled looks comes with free)

Photos From the Hatian Market

At the time, I was stunned silent by the poverty of the whole thing. But, looking back, I'm glad I went. And yes, its a great place to buy what you're looking for. And mangos.

Work Update I

Talking about work, I feel I should go over that a bit. Wouldn't want word getting around that I am downright temperamental about the DR life or that I'm only happy at the beach.

Because there is the first thing I do, work. So let's go over the layout of my prestigious position, for which I am paid the big bucks - literally, the most of anyone living in my neighborhood (if you don't count the guy with the Jeepeta or the rich cabaña people).

The job can be divided into 3 pieces:

1. Primary Project. My project is to help Junta Yaque, a private citizens' NGO, to improve the administration of their organization and projects, install an accounting system, and build them a website.

2. Secondary Projects. These are many and include: teaching: English, knitting, reproductive and sexual health, math, computer literacy, Internet skills, business classes, pre-literacy with niños; designing the packaging for ASCAJA's coffee; random tutoring; gardening; hanging out with the neighbors. Yes, hanging with the neighbors is actually 66% of my job and what I do the least, go figure. But its not my fault, my primary project has been very demanding.

Also under #2, helping random people do random things, like: helping someone figure out if a volunteer could help them and helping them with the form. Yesterday, I was at a The Nature Conservancy meeting, and I met a woman who needs help changing the use code of a piece of land in her campo to 'protected' from nothing. So, that's an example of the kind of thing that comes up often that takes up tons of time and causes much andar-ing to places.

3. Peace Corps stuff. This includes different committees like the girls' leadership camp Estrellas de Hoy, working on PC reporting stuff, otra vaina.

4. Okay, yes, there are 4 topics in my job. Last but not least, remaining healthy. Takes up much time when you are a person from so-called developed countries transported to the so-called developing countries. For example, yesterday night I did not take a bath because I had no water. Stinky! I spent all day today doing half my laundry and enlisted the help of a neighbor to do the other half. For these reasons and more, when it thunders and rains hard, I go outside and wash my hair in the rain. Also, I may start dancing or tearing up at any moment.

Extra! Extra! Update!

Yes, that's a picture of my luggage strapped to the front of a guagua, in preparation for take-off.

I think I have about 10 posts on here now! I'm pretty proud of myself, seeing as I never thought I would live down having a blog at all!

The past month or so has been fast and slippery, as Caribe Tours and otras guagua take me all around the country in fast little loops. For that reason, I shall try to describe the last few weeks without getting (too) listy.

First off, I have had meeting upon meeting with the wonderful people at US AID lately. No sarcasm! Every time my project partners and I have a meeting with them in the capital, I'm always impressed with the gentle yet raise-the-bar attitude they have to keep people working hard to get projects done well. The staff, especially Josefina and Carmen, are intelligent and warm. Plus they know how to get my back when comes to talking to the Rómulo. Due to these meetings, Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World or Campamento Estrellas de Hoy), and having my wisdom teeth out, I think I have been to the capital once a week for the past two months. Ouch. The good news is that I made a friend in the capital! I had so much fun getting to know another American working abroad who doesn't work for my company (ha! I just referred the US gov't as 'my company').

On account of all that andar-ing and Ben actually making progress on this project, Ben and I canceled our in-service language training or (fingers waive in quotation style) “we postponed it.” Heh, I just feel like I will be out of my site enough with Seth (our first visitor) arriving the 30th, Estrellas de Hoy, and then the Berry's coming in the 19th.

Not that this doesn't mean I didn't have a little more time for, as they say, Beach Corps. Don't tell anyone I ever said this, but the beaches here are pretty nice and I'm exactly paid to overwork, am I? No really, I have a good reason for having canceled ISLT to head to the most beautiful beach ever (ok, third to Bahía de las Águilas and Sámana). I mean, I'm a California girl and all - and all things considered our beaches are pretty awesome, but dang! Bayahibe is gorgeous.

My reason was that two very wonderful grad advisers were going to be in La Romana visiting their midwifery student. The decision's not 100% yet, but I'm very interested in going into something like that, so I thought a trip to meet Terry and Angie was in order. We had a great time, and I learned lots about their profession and research on the little island, my interest is sky-rocketing, and so forth. But the magic was in spending time with Benny on the beach, seeing Tara's site in Bayahibe and Dilana's site in Padre Nuestro.

They both live reasonably close to La Romana, a town of good size where such magical items as plastic drawers and brown sugar can be purchased. (Actually, you can even buy vegetables in the colmado in Bayahibe - in Pinar Quemado where we live you might find a moldy potato in our colmado. When we ask for vegetables at the colmado, they usually give us half of their personal bell pepper or something). Our close-town, Jarabacoa, is more like a sleepy mountain village, except is crowded and polluted, and there are no cool stores were you can pick up incense. In La Romana, you can dine at a Mexican restaurant, a French bakery, or an Arab place. Can you tell I'm envious?

Tara lives in this cute little efficiency she pays an arm and a leg for with her puppy Abby May and you can practically see the water. Tara is so loving, she even has toys and little chairs for the muchachos. She has a really cool story about the time a muchacha tried to steal from her; I'll try and get her to let me reveal it on my blog. Ben laid it down in the cocina and grilled up some fresh barracuda (first fresh fish on the island and I been here 9 months!) with potatoes, breaded eggplant, and tomato. Tara got some beers and she made a mango crisp on the stove-top oven. Dilana came over, and it was the best, most relaxing party I been to. Granted, I was still semi-relaxed from the Bahia beach trip a week or two back.

Dilana, on the other hand, is just as great a PC host. In case you didn't know, the hospitality of the Dominicans is huge, but the hospitality of a PCV is legendary. But, she lives in a 'hood. As in, muy caliente. Not that you're nervous when you're in her place, but people are definitely noticing everything you do as the houses are so close set. And being so close set, nerves will get rubbed. Also, the area supplies the drugs and prostitutes some inevitable tourists come to developing world seeking. The story of Padre Nuestro is actually of a squatter town of workers for Bayahibe's all-inclusive hotels growing up in a national park. The park being 'rescued' from this development and US AID building all these people homes and calling the development Padre Nuestro.

I'm happy that the people were given a better standard of living in terms of housing, but there are so many challenges when working with a group of people who became a community in this manner, this recently. Dilana should really have a blog. Still, her place is really cute, and we watched the guys weld bars onto her windows and doors in the morning. For dinner she fixed us pasta with a fresh, spicy sauce, and for breakfast, it was thick Aunt Jemima pancakes. Of course, we ate mangos someone brought over.

Pre-Vacation Thoughts

Sorry, I should mention that sometimes I write these things and forget to post them. Other times, I write about something another volunteer or Dominican National told me. I will always write it as if it happened to me, unless I get express direction from the orator to make it about them. This is old and I forgot to post it earlier, so I guess you can't count on them being in temporal order, either.

Breakfast was ready in an instant: sugary corn-flay with powdered milk, coffee, but the effort it takes to wake up, and walk into this sad little kitchen, with its 10 inches of counter space and table-top stove. The charm in the pale blue tiles is all gone, now that I've seen cockroaches on all my dishes and have to vague hope even, of not smelling sewage near the sink and toilet.

Ben took out the washing machine this morning, grey and foggy as it was and filled the buckets with brown water. He washed too loads before it began to rain, the fountain sounds of the gotas exaggerated by the corrugated tin roof. Jarabacoa is lovely in the rain, and thankfully the electricity went soon thereafter, leaving Claudette free to enjoy the sounds, smells, and sights, of cloudy June heavy drizzling, free from the booming sound of Dominican sound systems.

I'm tired today. I should be packing for our trip to Bahia de las Aguilas. One of the most beautiful places on the island, I imagine it a pale yellow and dark gold beach, stern and frightening in its clear, glaring shadeless sun on a remote patch of Caribbean Sea.

The booming music is back, (¡llego la luz!) this bachata which is so simple and quaint, it hurts to think its the only music here. I realize I can't imagine a world with only one music, even though I live in one. With each flicker of the electricity, the base comes and goes, the fridge motor as well, and each wave reminds me that I'm tired, but that I should anyway, get up and wash my hair and pack for the camping trip.

I feel like its been ages since I've been comforted by my apartment flat, Burbank home, or the flush digs of a proper hotel. Coming home is comforting because I can be out of the sun, and in this country, any amount of privacy is a luxury. I wonder if Dominican people value privacy and how. So many questions yet to ask.

Portrait of the Current Days

I'm in my house, feeling happy that the windows and doors are closed from the bright, hot sunlight outside. Its midday, we've eaten, and poor sick Ben is taking a nap.

This morning he went to Bonao to look at some drying tunnels he's collecting bids for. It became clear to him that CoDoCafe has certain opinions on who should get the job.

I spent my morning at Agua Viva, alternately helping an 18 year old girl look up English translations to a story written in Spanish, it being her final exam to translate it. She was hilarious when she arrived - all her thin wet hair twisted into ponytail and lain over her head, end towards the forehead. The effect being a plump girl with a tail-looking thing on wet otter-like head.

Of course, she entered the room with disarrayed eyes and panicked, bursting out with no “excuse me's” or “may I interrupts” into: “I need an American and a computer.”

Miriam, the person I was there to visit, pointed at me. I was there to teach Miriam computer literacy stuff, but what kind of Community Economic Advisor would I be if I didn't drop everything to help a 18 year old mother complete an exam (she had a week to do) in an hour after she slams into me on accident?

To her chagrin, I gave her a dictionary and a pen (because no, it had not occurred to her to bring one), and told her to 'get to work!'

“But this is a final! I need to get a good grade to go to university!” (Read: shouldn't you be holding the pen, Claudette?)

“All the more reason for you to complete your own assignment. I won't be helping you do well in university if I don't show you how to translate something yourself.” (Read: No, I insist you hold the pen).

Turns out, she had only a few questions, and I was able to manipulate her into doing her own exam! Go me and cultural integration. I consider it a Win because she did what I wanted, over and above the fact that I did not offend her. Of course, I lavished much praise on her prowess with the dictionary, I'm no hater.

Miriam and I do some computer literacy stuff, and she's quickly becoming one of my favorite people, despite the long walk in the heat and cancer-causing rays to see be at the school and despite the school being in Palo Blanco, a community I believe finds me to be too me for their tastes. Or maybe its me. Palo Blanco is an urban ghetto, and being that I'm from one of those in the States, I'm not too keen on joining the Peace Corps to move to another. I was hoping for rural wonderland.

So, I leave happy. Joyful that Spanish held up for several hours uninterrupted, relieved that no one said anything dirty to me on the way, and even had minus a few minutes in the sun because my neighbor brought me home en bola. My first mistake was looking at these successes and thinking, “I must be getting the hang of this Dominican Republic.”

I am still struggling to like this whole experience, to find the silver lining in it that's not the fuerza of my volition, and after 8 long months, of which I have counted every day, I thought it had come: redemption from living perdition.

Oh no. My first mistake was unbridled hope. In this I realize I am still a child, able to take things at face value, and to my chagrin, believe the truth and the facts to have something in common.

Because, here I am in my house with the doors and windows closed, maybe checking out my warts or my fungal thing on my shoulders (or was looking at my swollen eye?), when Karina knocks on my door.

Well, I thought this was a happy visit from Palo Blanco, K is my host sister. She's invited to Camp GLOW and I thought she was excited to go. Until I see she's with a little entourage of preteens, including a skinny one who reminds me of Baby D in Next Friday. Basically Baby D is your ugly fat cousin who kicks people's ass for you. K's cousin is anything but ugly or fat, but you get the picture: she never says anything to me, preferring to scowl at me from behind her faux gold hoops.

Karina tells me some stupid lie about why she can't come to GLOW. Baby D repeats it, and they leave. They didn't even sit down! What a blow to my self-esteem. And of course, now I'm crying, and I'm not even sure why. A kid her age is like to change her mind. I have plenty of time to invite someone else. It makes me realize: these Palo Blanco people really hate me! They didn't even sit down, three 12 year-olds came all the way here on their moto to bring me bad news and their couldn't even sit down and even ask me how I am. This is worse than when people come visit me just to ask for money, or the other time K came to over, just to ask for my camera. In my Newsweek a while back, some guy wrote a book called Poor People, in his interview he talked about meeting people who were starved of body, but also of mind, referring to ineloquence everywhere in his travels.

Well, la ti da. This is why I think so many things happen. I know they standard culture thing is to say they are trying to 'save face.' But what kind of face can be saved when you say something nonsensical? It suits me better to think that this is a problem of poor communication. Just to be clear, I'm not mad she changed her mind, but she thinks I would be. Better communication skills would make it easier to say the truth and all the feelings around it and convey the meaning without resorting to sending out Baby D. After all, I'm the girl who can't fight back, I'm the one who has to take whatver they dish out, I'm the one with no one to turn to around here. I'm the one with no friends, so really why worry about what I think? It seems to me that with Baby D scowling at me, it can't be that she wants me to see her as kindly. Or why let the dogs out?

Well, at least now I know. If I want to have a big let down, close the doors and windows for a couple of hours, midday.

Check My Head in Amiama Gomez

On the way back from Bahia, I stopped over at Cheryl's for the night. She lives in a tobacco growing community in Azua. In The Incredible Brief Life of Oscar Wao, Azua is described as poor beyond poor. Cheryl mentioned that her town seems better off than it is. And I can see that, now. In the moment, the lively green rolling hills, (yes the same you see on the road to Pedernales), and the tobacco pods drying roadside in the sweating sun had me enamored with Amiama Gomez. A bunch of little kids find their way into 'Cheri's' to give us mangos; hours of our conversation were kept company by a little boy, 6 or 7, laying on the floor quietly, his eyes intent on our English. He would jump up to fetch or toss buckets of water or run little errands.

Cheri cooked us sopita a chicken broth soup with fideo, which is like a noodle, and salad for dinner. I bathed in her latrine and fell asleep to blaring bachata. I think some of her past guests have been less prepared for the bachata and Cheri's latrine is surely unique, but I can handle it all! I go almost nowhere without earplugs and I went away thinking of the latrine as roomy :)

We hiked to a favorite view of Cheri's, we visited her doña (separate post on the doña), and toured around the calle principal. Her site is the perfect size! Just enough people to know everyone, far enough from neighboring communities to be a place of its own to the extent that there's a rural clinic with a doctor and, Cheri's project, a computer lab/community center in the works.

Under the shamelessly sunny sky in the South, so different my walled in mountain valley and cloudy rainy afternoons in Jarabacoa, its hard not to be in love with Amiama Gomez.

Is that why I had the most clear conversation about my project ever? Cheri and I got to talking, and all of a sudden the answers to my challenges with Junta Yaque, its secretary, my project partner, Palo Blanco, Pinar Quemado, and the rest started to form a clear picture. A map where I could see my location and that of all the players and where the trails to travel would go. No, it wasn't Bahia or Amiama Gomez, it was the magic of hanging with Cheryl!

Bahía de Las Águilas

Learning to love the Peace Corps... I think its in the vacations. Ben and I just got back from a few days camping with (American) friends at Bahia de las Aguilas and I took an additional day to visit Cheryl in Amiama Gomez.

How did I forget this, most basic of all work premises? All work and no play... we all know the rest. And yet. I forgot! Since my arrival 9 months ago (feel free to send me cyber pats on the back or a real cookie), Ben and I had yet to take an R&R day or vacation day to anywhere besides Santiago or the cap for resuscitation from the hardest job you'll ever love.

And what a difference a couple days makes. We set out on a Wednesday, on the last guagua to the capital. (I love it that the days are longer now and I can bajar the mountain after 5 PM and it still be light out). Our ultimate destination was Pedernales, where the cruise director PCV Carlos/Charlie awaited us with tents and coolers. However, in the DR all roads lead to la capitai, and we spend one night there before catching another guagua out to Pedernales, a boarder town in the South.

My buns hurt after all that sitting, but for he who may visit, the South is gorgeous beyond compare. On one side you have the turquoise sea/white sand deal and on the other low rolling hills we like to call loma.

The road is curvy in places, and nonexistent in others: just past Enriquillo, the road is a patch of sand beside the construction of a bridge over the sand; near Barahuco, the forestry on both side is so dense, small, pale butterflies flitter around the guaguas and only patches of sea can be caught through the vines hanging between over-burdened mango trees.

Pedernales reminds me of the movie City of God. All the houses, save a few, are concrete copies of one another. In their beige facades, I see the handiwork of an US Aid perhaps? Or something like it, because it reminds me of a project. Its nice that way, houses could have more trees, but they are safe and sound little places to call home. Charlie shows us to the shack of a dark Dominicano making empanadas. His are best I've ever had.

A real pastry chef, with no more than a vat of bubbling soy bean oil and his hands, he made me an empanada with a perfectly flakey, thin and golden outside and fluffly egg inside. The yolk was intact and had the consistency of an egg boiled, not fried.

Don't start laughing at me having a culinary delight over fritura until you've lived in a developing country.

Ah, Bahia... we started out with 2 flat tires on the way out to La Cueva where poor fisherman live in houses constructed out of caves in the petrified coral. From La Cueva you take a motor boat around the boulders through shoals just under the turquoise waters to Bahia, a beach so secluded we were the only ones on it that night. Sadly, many previous campers had left there mark in the form of trash in all the shrubs. Benji did the Eagle Scout thing to do and collected a rice sack full of trash to take off the beach with us.

Still, the bay was nothing but pristine water of supernatural blue-green. Through the afternoon we chatted, swam, listened to music and made merry. I ate mango after firm mango and chased it with beer and dental flossing.

At night, we were quiet, so as not to frighten any sea turtle that may want to come ashore and lay an egg!

The whole place is a national park. Its care is underfunded, but par for the Dominican course, what employees there are are friendly and kind.

I went snorkling and saw sea fans, more shoals of little fish, thick starfish, sea urchins, and those long spotted bottleneck fish, got mosquito bugs on my bootie, and sand in my backpack. With that rosy glow that can only come of spending the night on the beach, we left the next day, late.

On a cloudless day like that, the ocean and the sky looked like two bands of thorough blue meeting in the background as we rumbled away on the rocky road. I saw a hitch-hiking iguana, silvery in the sun like a giant leather coin.

Cost breakdown:
Guagua from capital to Pedernales: 630
Nights in Pedernales: free in Casa de Carlos
Food in Pedernales: 350
Rented Stuff (tent, snorkling gear, coolers): 300
Food for camping (water, salami, beer, surprise gourmet conch in La Cueva): 500
Travel from Ped to La Cueva: 300
Total: $2110 RD or $63 US

My budget ain't exact. And yes, it was a total deal of a trip!

Stormy May

It's an expected vacation afternoon, with the mountains all cloaked in heavy white, blue, and grey clouds, the mercury thunderheads, sporadic but piercing lightning; it's not likely Ben and I will leave the house again today.

Aside guilty feelings over passing rainy afternoons in my house instead of with the neighbors, I love them. Thunderstorms make my little mountaintop country house feel like Noah's arc, blowing back in forth over a sea of greening pasture.

Once an hour or so, I see the top of an umbrella bumping down or up the road past, and the pinwheel colors: blue and white, red and white, the metal tips of the arms, they stand out on the green wavy landscape like rubber ducks in a bath.

I'm rolled up in my white fleece, navy blue jammies, wool socks, and crocs. Earlier, we got soaked bringing in buckets of water to wash the dishes. The buckets are out there now, overflowing with the water for dinner, showers, and whatever else we need it for until the water and power come back on.

The lightning's still going, and all the laundry is hung up in the living room, hitting me in the ears while I type. Ben's reading The Pillars of the Earth in bed. I loved that book! I'm sitting out watching the storm, watching the fog reach up from the green cover to the descending clouds, thinking about how to make the most out of my service.

Its been six months since I arrived in Jarabacoa, and I'm not making noteworthy progress with Junta Yaque and the infamous accounting system. And still, the past months feel weighty in my hands, I've learned much, struggled hard, and the measurable accomplishments are there, the packaging for ASCAJA's coffee, the computer classes and business classes, the reading to niños, the man-hours on the drowning accounting system.

What I would like, is to be giving more training sessions on budgeting, more talks on sexual health, more crafting classes, more reading classes. As volunteers, there's some competition among us to have a flagship project, like a the holy grail of service is to close with a master's thesis that has come to life and will live on in our stead. I think I want one, too. It's easier to justify this period in my career, if I can say 'I built a lab,' or 'I brought community gardening in.'

Is that a good reason to have a flagship project? It seems like using the ends to justify the means or valuing the destination over the journey - and all so that I can explain myself to old bosses and future bosses on why this spot of experience proves I can produce!

I can't say I blame the bosses of the world, showing we public servant types aren't slackers is hard. Who can read people who aren't motivated by money? It almost makes you an alien to all, even yourself, to pursue a career where the aim is not 'get rich or dye trying' (thanks 50).