The Things I Like

The holidays here have felt far from typical. In fact, there was almost a total lack of the consumer craziness that has come to define Christmas in the states and a complete absence of cookies and sweaters. Right now, the big difference in Pedro Santana from any other time of the year has been the amount of people and cars here to visit their hometown and families. I don’t know the population right now but I can tell you it is far above the usual thousand. It has been fun for me because there are loads of people my age who have left town after high school for school and jobs in the capital. They come bumping in SUVs or Toyota Corollas, a Dominican favorite, with capital goods like boxes of cereal and sunglasses.

Their presence is like a little piece of home and makes apparent the things I don’t even notice are missing. I saw a baby being pushed in a stroller and had a moment of confusion, a lot like when you wake up and, just for a second, you don’t know where you are. Strollers are not necessary here and would surely turn into potentially dangerous toys for older siblings and I, therefore, totally support their absence. Less mesmerizing but surprising all the same, dog leashes, braces, and swimsuits have been popping into sight. Although I am admittedly enjoying all the material crap that reminds me of home and my new lively social life, I have realized what I really do like here that we don’t have in the states.

I like the apparent quality of resources. I had never paid much attention to where housing utilities come from or questioned their presence. Here, we have power for about half the time. When it’s on, the refrigerator gets cold, you can charge your phone and music is blasted through loudspeakers throughout town. When it’s off, life is a little more peaceful especially at night when candles light the house and the vivid stars give you that camping feel. Water, oh water. Apparently we are on to better water days but for now, it is pumped every second or third day from the river and runs through the aqueduct to arrive in faucets, dirty or clean. I have resorted to bathing in the river with natural soap because it’s refreshing and saves water at the house. The only other utility that I can think of is the propane for our stoves. I have a ten gallon tank and there is no way of knowing when I have used up the gas until it’s gone. I have asked a few people because I should be nearing the end but one day, surely in some horrible culinary moment, it will just run out without warning. I will have to wait and pay to send it on a truck to be filled an hour away. Maybe I’m not shedding the best light on this aspect of life here but I do like it because it isn’t confusing and I am forced to appreciate things that I only pretended to appreciate at home.

I also like aspects of family life here. Specifically, I think I can learn from the generosity without question that is illustrated in so many houses. One indicator is the food being sent to and fro to poorer grandparents, nephews and friends. More common questions than ‘where to you live’ are ‘where do you sleep’ and ‘where do you eat’. ‘Oh, I sleep with my cousin at my grandma’s house and I eat at my house, the neighbor cooks because my mom works.’ Another is the many hijos de crianza meaning children of belief. Many children are raised by relatives, godparents, or even seemingly unrelated community members. Because of our position on the border, there are Dominican families with Haitian children who have been raised since infancy and therefore speak only Spanish and are quick to correct their nationality as Dominican. Hijos de crianza, in my mind, demonstrate how much simpler and nicer things can be here. The messy yet supportive families here make development look like a monster that brings the difficult and messier foster care systems, adoption processes and custody battles.

Another cultural difference that I respect but I don’t see myself ever fully embracing is the bluntness of lifestyle and speech. You go girl, you wear those rollers in public! Put on pants so tight the fly won’t zip and let your love handles shine as your shirt is really a bathing suit and your bra is sticking out the top. There seems to be little problem with weight issues as I haven’t heard about eating disorders nor is there much of an obesity problem. Plus, in case you haven’t noticed, a little flub is attractive! Other aspects of the lucidity here are health and aging. Everyone’s health problems are chatted about and shown openly. Things like cataracts and missing teeth are left as is for the world to see. I honestly didn’t know so many people have these conditions because they are fixed or covered up. We are exposed to people getting older honestly without the means to worry about vanity and hide the signs of aging. Vocabulary here is also a lot clearer than what I am used to. Many nicknames are allusions to their appearance, blacky, whitey, little, fatty. It makes for embarrassing introductions as calling someone blacky is far from my comfort zone. I can’t count the amount of times I have asked who we are talking about to get an answer like, ‘You know, the ugly’, or ‘The fatty teacher with the red motorcycle’, or ‘Wait, are you talking about my black brother or my chubby brother’. I have gotten all sorts of questions and comments about my own appearance and so I learned how to say ‘That hurts my feelings’. I rarely use it because I am usually more amused than offended and as long as I’m not referred to as just plain ugly, I feel pretty lucky.

There are other things I like here and many I don’t like, that’s life. Also, most of these positive cultural qualities could never be translated literally in the states. I promise when I go back home I won’t turn off my power box, try to raise other people’s kids or refer to someone as the little fatty. I do hope, however, to take the idea of resource consciousness, generosity, and honesty that comes so natural to the Dominican lifestyle. Plus, maybe I’ll wear tighter clothes and be a little crass just for fun.

Happy New Year!

December Heat

Just Changing My Glasses

Life is always full of mountains and valleys wherever you are. It also always seems like events or conditions that alter your situation come in little bundles. You achieve some accomplishment, you get a message from a long lost friend and the weather turns fabulous all at the same time. The same goes for the valleys. Your car needs work, some social drama makes your stomach churn and then a bird poops on your head. These things seem to come in groups partly by coincidence and partly because you are wearing sunglasses, either rose colored or crap brown. Right now, I have to admit, I am in a bit of a valley and I am trying hard to change my lenses.

I came home from Thanksgiving with a detour including a lot of sitting at deserted intersections, an overheated bus engine, and a jerky driver who took my money and then left me short of my destination at a military checkpoint with no cell signal. I thought my foul mood could be washed off with a cold bucket bath and some juice when I got some unfortunate news. Over Thanksgiving weekend, there has been a group of criminals attacking people who are walking and riding motorcycles in the rural areas. They beat a teacher who lives near me almost to death with rocks and tried to suffocate him with tape. There have been three other attacks in which two died and some sightings of masked people with rocks. Maybe it is because of the masks, the difficult roads or because we have no police force but not one criminal has been caught. Everyone is instructed to be on guard and not to travel alone, “That means you can’t walk like you do, no. You hear me Jazmín?”

As a Peace Corps volunteer, we theoretically have project partners or a supportive group that we are working within. In reality, every situation is different and I have no official project partner or amazingly helpful group. I work in a little rural school doing environmental and art activities that I will start doing in the bigger town school in January. I am working with the school director to propose and implement a literacy promotion project to get these kids reading. I am also working with youth to reduce waste and collect plastic bottles for a water project in Haiti. While some of this is in the pueblo, my favorite days are going up to the rural school, an hour and a half walk from town.

Hiking and running in the area also keeps me going, a must that I can’t imagine forgoing. Being told that I can’t walk alone is like telling someone who has a car that they are not allowed to use it. It is not a perfect analogy because at least you might have other transportation options. I often have little other than my feet to get me around and I don’t see how my life is going to function for the next year and a half if I really cannot travel solo. I realize that it is petty to complain about not being able to walk or hike alone while people have lost their family members and I don’t want to disrespect the weight of the crime here. It is truly tragic. Such brutal beatings for motorcycles and pocket money are a disgusting manifestation of poverty and greed that I will never understand.

I guess this negative entry should not continue for long so I will finish with my bundle of events that define my current slump. While I was gone, someone stole my bananas and plantains off of my trees in my fenced yard. I have an eye infection that I can’t seem to get rid of after purchasing two very expensive medicated drops. I am continually avoided by a water engineer who should be responsible for a broken aqueduct in a community I am trying to work with, vehicle troubles, my ass! It is also apparently ant season which means that ants march into my house through the windows like a parade and find their home under things like my shortwave radio. I am letting them control my life by my avoiding cooking or dishwashing inside and even having trouble in the bathroom with toothpaste and other toiletries. I planted some basil that sprouted and then was promptly eaten by chickens. I am afraid to ask my landlord if I can make a vegetable garden and compost and even more afraid of the quantity of chicken wire I will have to buy to protect them.

And now I take off my shitty sunglasses and say some nice things. I am swimming in the river and doing a lot of art in my free time with and without kids. Christmas lights are popping up in town, hoo hoo. Red Cross is working on our town aqueduct which means that maybe starting in January, water will come everyday or almost everyday, yeah baby! (There may be a period in December with no water as they are making the switch and I have a secret plan to flee to the capital.) See, my rose colored lenses are coming right on! I hope everyone is doing well and that December brings lots of cookies and family fun!

Oh the Holidays!

Sometimes I cannot even imagine being in the states. I think about myself driving around with a big cup of tea and a bran muffin listening to American music and it looks like someone else. Lately my thoughts about being home have gotten more frequent because many of my volunteer friends are going back for the holidays. They will be pulled out of this world to the Christmas madness, hot showers, carpets, and real bread that constitute the American dream. I am confident in my choice to stay here for the holidays especially because some of the family is coming to visit in February, woohoo! Thanksgiving was a breeze. There was a big Peace Corps party where we had a run, sports, dancing and food binging to the point of sickness, just like home!

I will spend Christmas in my site which may or many not give me a hint of what I am used to. From what I hear, the town fills with cars of family members who have moved away. There are very few people here with private vehicles and none that are not trucks so the presence of cars marks any big special time in town. Other than a large dinner on the night of the 24th involving goat meat, I think Christmas is just a chance to get together and drink and dance bachata and merengue. There is no custom of cutting down trees or gift giving, two traditions that I am sincerely not sorry to miss. Christmas cards, however, I am unwilling to forgo. I started chatting with people about this and realized immediately that card giving in general is a foreign concept. I decided to facilitate a Christmas card making session with poster board, old magazines, crayons and glitter.

I invited a bunch of high school kids and encouraged them to bring anything they had around the house. When they showed up empty handed, they told me that they didn’t understand what we were doing. Who were the cards for, what were they supposed to look like and why hadn’t I showed up with models for them to copy. We started with scrap paper and pencils and many sat waiting still looking over a friends shoulder. My little fifteen year old friend informed me that I needed to teach them how to draw first and we spent the entire allotted time talking about creativity, the thought that counts, and my usual babble about reusing material. No one completed a card nor wanted to work on it at home so I rescheduled for today. I am equipped with more recycled paper, and a few example cards (probably a mistake but well varied and difficult to copy) and more maybe more explanation about the thought that counts.

While I was a little worried about starting too early before Christmas or using materials that you have to buy for kids who could not buy them themselves, I think introduction of art outweighs these preoccupations. We will see how the session today fares but I am excited about being a creativity pusher. The lack of expression is also apparent with the little kids. I have eighteen pictures of houses from kids who come over to color, color a little house with two windows and a flag that apparently they learn in school, and then won’t take their pictures home. Like many things in this country, I don’t understand the fear of doing a little original art or of taking things home but I am not afraid to be that weird white girl pushing kids to color outside the lines. Plus, I could use a little glitter in my life!

But is it really helping?

If people are hungry, you want to give them food. Everyone should have the right to water so we should make an aqueduct, supply filters, make it happen. I could go on and on with sturdy houses, cement floors, seeds and latrines. But if you go to a community and throw up gifts, noble as they are, are you really helping the progression of the community? Are you contributing to development?

This is the situation in my region. I am on the border with Haiti in technically the poorest municipality of the poorest province of the Dominican Republic, a great place for organizations and government agencies (like Save the Children or USAID) to carry out projects. There are 17 large institutions with projects in my region, made obvious by stickers and signs around every gleaming latrine or bright pink wood house. I would be so presumptuous to argue that many of these projects that better the economic and health conditions of the people are detrimental to development. There is obviously something to be said for improving the quality of life of a community and I would never believe that people shouldn’t have the cement floors or clean water. These are changes that immensely decrease the parasitic infections of children and greatly improve the overall health of the inhabitants. Everyone should have a right to health.

My position is that the way the projects are carried out should be dramatically changed. The projects that I have witnessed come like a tornado of presents. They initiate the project with a meeting which lays out what they will be bringing. I have noticed that they bring juice and treats to these meetings, which results in amazing attendance and a first impression that this organization has such excess that they are willing to throw money to buy white bread and cheese. They organize who will be recipients and the details of the tasks to come. As the majority of the projects require labor such as construction of the homes, latrines or aqueduct, the project offers employment to the people of the community. This constitutes a month of high paid labor to a group of community members, a true gift. Maybe they even provide lunch food for the workers which often consists of rice, beans, oil and salami to be prepared by the wives.

The projects are beautiful. Huge trucks carry cement and wood on rough roads. Engineers come from the capital to monitor the project. Nice white people inevitably visit to take pictures and have cultural immersion experiences. Then, it’s over and the people have what they have gotten often with little instruction of maintenance. The lives of those people are improved in one aspect or another and they adjust to their new, more developed lifestyle and wait for the next project to come.

So why am I critical? It is because community organization is not only excluded from these projects, it is discouraged. Ideally, a women’s group or community association would discuss the problems that they face and the most effective and feasible solutions.
However, with the current manner of development institutions, it is unnecessary for a village to make an association, analyze their situations and necessities and solicit a project. In fact, everyone knows that if the community was to plan to build latrines and petition for the resources themselves, the members would have to organize the project and work without pay or free food. It is much more practical for them to go without latrines for however long it takes for someone to come and gift them. The campos around here not only don’t meet amongst themselves, they are resistant to meeting because it is just too much work for not enough compensation. The idea that they should think about progression or work to change their own situation is destroyed.

It is impossible to place the blame or maybe even to imagine a different, more effective approach to development. However, I think it is important to look at what is happening and discuss possible improvements. It could be as easy as more education involved in each project. Not only do you receive water filters but a course about water contamination and the health effects. Maybe they could assign someone in the community as the leader of the project to be of guidance for maintenance and replacement. An organization that installs cement floors could involve a committee in the whole process to show how future projects could be planned and implemented.

Thinking about the best management of development efforts is enough to make my head hurt but it is clear that blindly dropping bags of food or solar panels on people suffering true poverty cannot be the secret. If there is no structural or educational progression, decades will pass with filters and solar panels that no longer work, broken aqueducts, full latrines and people without the custom of changing their own situation. The gifts of these amazing agencies are like your pajamas at Christmas, just gifts to be replaced on another occasion. I hate the word sustainable but it’s like peace, worth a try!

Photos of Cercadillo

Cercadillo

Yesterday at about two in the afternoon, I looked at my tear streaked face and questioned my decision to commit two years doing this. The night before, I planned a day trip to one of the poorest communities in my municipality. I have been there a handful of times before and always been drawn to their situation. Unlike many of the rural communities in the area, Cercadillo is avoided by all of the development projects that arrive with gifts like home construction, cement floors, water filters, and trees or crops. This is because over half of the population is Haitian and living illegally on this side of the border. The majority of these projects, including those from the US, cannot benefit families without Dominican citizenship cards. This leaves the 150 residents with dirt houses and floors, little potable water, and little opportunity for wealth generation. Since the first time I visited, their aqueduct has been broken meaning they have to collect water in their closest river.

Because I have visited and I am white, there is one Cercadillo woman who finds me every time she comes to town to ask for help. She always tells me that they still don’t have water and she is going to get the president of their water association to talk to me. Last week, she and this president found me on my morning run and answered some of my questions. No, they have not told the municipal government. No, no one is having meetings to figure it out. No, an engineer hasn’t visited. They aren’t sure but they think three bags of cement could fix the problem. I decided to go there and see the situation but I told them they should also talk to the mayor and Red Cross (who are working on the aqueduct in town). Three bags of cement is about $18 US dollars, not exactly a fortune.

I planned the trip with a driven college student who lives here half the week with his family and studies half the week in the capital. He had asked me if I had interest in a fruit tree project in Cercadillo and I thought we could take the morning talking to the people there about their future plans of the water problem. We set off in a mode of transportation not recommended by Peace Corps on the road that gets progressively worse as it nears Cercadillo.

Our morning was filled with introductions, a hike to the source of the aqueduct, and some uncomfortable talk about the fruit tree project. It was only uncomfortable for me because my friend mentioned an extension to their aqueduct and food compensation for their labor, two expensive ideas that wouldn’t be possible in the scope of Peace Corps projects. It turns out their aqueduct needs a tube replacement to effectively pump water to the tank. The tank also needs to be cleaned out as it has been sitting with a foot of water in the bottom for a time period no one seems to know. I don’t know how much it is going to cost but I know an engineer should visit to confirm that this as the easiest and most effective solution.

What brought me to my tear-fest when I got home was not the situation of their aqueduct. I watched a seven-year-old girl carry a five gallon bucket on her head up a steep hike and then over a fence that was hard for me to climb with nothing in my hands. Getting water at the river is hard but not as hard as the other factors of poverty that challenge the people of Cercadillo. It was the naked kids with protruding stomachs due to parasites, the people who look so hungry and thank us for visiting while apologizing relentlessly for not having even a little coffee to give us. It was all the kids who are not going to school because their school is undergoing what looks like a dreadfully slow process of reconstruction and the thought of not being able to pay people with food. It was the feeling that I am never going to be in their situation nor will I be able to change it.

When I got home, I drank the two bottles of water I had in my backpack that I could never have taken out in Cercadillo. I then broke down in tears and consequently started gagging a little (don’t drink two bottles of water really fast and then have a fit). It is moments like these that make me realize I just may be too much of a baby to be doing this. Then I realized, like almost everything, it is so not about me. There are billions of people who live in conditions like this and those far worse. There are others who live in a porcelain world that never allows the thought of poverty to enter. In my opinion, the global distribution of wealth is ugly to the point of being grotesque. I have some unjustified hope that if enough people care, it will improve. If there are a few Greg Mortenson and Paul Farmer types to do the dirty work and enough rich people and governments to donate their dimes, maybe the world could have water, healthcare and education. Maybe people won’t be driven to cut down their forest causing a nearly irreversible feedback loop of erosion and soil degradation and further poverty. I know this hope is out there, but it’s what I choose to believe.

I shouldn’t look at my ridiculous crying face and question my decision to be here. That’s just silly because I already made the decision. Now, I just have to keep it together a little and take it one day at a time. I’m sure that’s what they do in Cercadillo.

Sin Vergüenza

In Spanish, to say "I'm embarrassed", you say "Tengo vergüenza" which translates literally to "I have embarrassment or shame". I like the use of the noun because you can do things with or without embarrassment, you can leave your embarrassment, claim that something gives you embarrassment or say "There’s no embarrassment here" as if it is something you can tangibly eliminate from the environment. It is obvious that there really is less of it here. You are bound to see people singing loudly or dancing in public, picking their nose in the open, or shouting obscenities at a family member sin vergüenza or without shame. I’d like to dedicate this entry to embarrassing things that I do in my Peace Corps service. Maybe this is more like a list of things I should be embarrassed about but in true Dominican spirit, I do sin vergüenza.

Eggs are a cheap and easy source of protein so I eat them almost every day. Instead of converting pesos into dollars to figure out if something is a good deal, I think in terms of eggs. For example, I like powdered milk but a tiny baggy is worth eight eggs so I can rarely bring myself to buy it. A cold drink is three or four eggs… robbery.

There is no solid chocolate here so I bought hot chocolate powder at the out-of-town supermarket and I eat it dry with a spoon.

The only entertainment I have on my computer is season 5 of The Office. With a true display of discipline, I waited four months in site to watch it. The first day I started it, I watched ten episodes and didn’t leave the house. It’s been about a month and I’ve seen the whole season twice.

I lie and say that I have stomach problems when I don’t to get out of eating gifted food.

When we run out of water, I wake up really early to pee in my yard when the neighbors can’t see me. I also visit the church to use their latrine and only eat things that don’t dirty any dishes like hard-boiled eggs.

I go on runs with my ipod shuffle and sometimes I stop to sing and dance to my American music. One time, I had a mutually fearful moment with a small herd of cows rounding a corner.

I think about the electricity so much that I try to plan my day and water consumption around the state of our refrigerator. I have a bunch of plastic bottles that I drink and refill like it’s my job when we have power. Lately, there hasn’t been power at night so to avoid using my headlamp too much I do a lot of walking and visiting friends who have generators.

Even when I am talking in a group of Dominicans, I blurt out words in English like “Really!?” or “Now way!” when something surprises me. I used to laugh at myself and explain what I said in English but this just perpetuates the situation. Now I just pretend it didn’t happen.

Sometimes after a long day and a look in the mirror, I realize that my sunscreen and sweat has made prominent white streaks on my face.

I have vivid dreams about food I can’t get here like ice cream and burritos. I used to be a pseudo-vegan but the things I crave from the states are not the things I used to eat. I think way more about chocolate chip muffins and cheesecake more than dried fruit and soymilk (although it all sounds wonderful).

I get my feelings hurt because people in the rest of the Dominican Republic think my town is the most horrible place in the country. In the capital, I get a lot of yikes facial expressions when I say where I live and instead of Pedro Santana, they call it Pedo Santana (pedo means fart). I have even cried about it, ha!

My mom sent me an Us Weekly magazine and I savored it, restricting myself to one article every morning with my tea until I had read every word. I will probably read it again.

When people shout, "Americana!" in the street, I respond with "Dominicano!" but depending on my mood, when they yell other more annoying names or phrases, I sometimes yell "Please, I have a name!" or "No, I’m not your love!". Occasionally I find myself shouting at really old men or children, whoops.

I gossip… a lot. So I hear, my town is getting a new bus to the capital complete with air conditioning and curtains, what now?!

I have such a guilty conscience that I am always thinking about how unfair it is that I will likely always have more than the people here. Other volunteers seem to do a lot more traveling, socializing and spending but I almost never leave my site. For example, because I have friends here who have never seen the beach, I don’t want to go to the beach for vacation and have to come back and tell people. Of all these embarrassing things, this is perhaps the most shameful with the greatest repercussions. I don’t want to live on this island for two years and not leave my hot dry border town because I want to live like the poor. Oh dear!

Now that you have surely judged me, I feel a little liberated. Peace Corps is certainly not restricted to perfect people living pure and noble lives. Living in a different country produces a lot of embarrassing experiences and habits but so does life in general, right? You can hide what you do without anyone knowing but it is so much better tell people about it, get a laugh, air it out! If you feel like sharing, I’m all ears!

Potties and Trash

Garbage Lady

There has been a staggering change from lying in my hammock studying Spanish and pondering development work to running around asking for money from the mayor with sawdust and paint all over me. This change was the result of someone asking me if I would paint garbage cans with a youth club. There is a huge religious festival in caves of a protected area in my town. Tens of thousands of people come to make a promise to God and meanwhile buy a bunch of crap and get plastered. The area inevitably gets trashed and, because neither volunteer work nor environmental appreciation is popular, there are hills of garbage that grow every year.

I was told that there were twenty garbage tanks donated from the capital and all of the paint will also be donated. I could use environmental themes to paint environmental images and messages on the tanks with kids. Easy enough. With about a month before the festival, I started working on the designs and messages. I went to meetings to listen to many creative ideas like putting religious figures within every image (advice I was not about to take). The tanks finally arrived and with two weeks to go and I started off with a drawing event with high schoolers (because we had no paint). I then went every day to work on the drawings and lettering hoping to eventually get the donated paint. About a week and a half before the parties it became clear that the paint wasn’t coming and a resident of the protected area yelled in my face about the fact that there are no latrines and everyone is going to do there business wherever.

I spent two days riding on the back of a motorcycle going to the town government buildings with a letter asking for money and supplies, visiting construction sites for extra materials and back and forth to the caves to tell the community they could start digging the hole (they are latrines after all). Although we, the protector of this area and I, were feeling pretty proud, I had no idea what I was doing. My partner for this project left for the capital and I was then the construction supervisor for the latrines with the trash can painting project still absolutely unfinished. I held a painting event that was a disaster with little kids painting wretchedly and the bottoms of the paint cup melting out.

It also became apparent that the latrine workers had no idea what they were doing as they needed more and more materials leaving me to beg the mayors and even the priest. I did some commanding, really yelling, in Spanish and mentioned loudly that I was a volunteer and it did not seem like anyone here was willing to organize nor work voluntarily. In the end, the latrines are up with one door made of trash and the trash cans are out with horrid paintings and environmental facts. I didn’t go to the festival because I didn’t want to work nor see thousands of people throwing trash on the ground next to the garbage cans. I will be organizing a trash clean-up soon but all I really want to do is sleep. Although I would hope that I have gained respect in the community, I am pretty sure everyone is just mad that I finished my English classes.

It has become scarily clear that no one wants to have any extra work to do. I get really excited thinking about literacy and garden projects until I realize that nobody is with me. In general, the people here don’t like to read or eat vegetables and there is no way I am going to change their minds. I am going to spend two years struggling to feel like I am doing something of value when all anyone wants is money. I am pretty sure I should just lie in my hammock, study Spanish and hang out with friends!

Hiking, Trujillo's Fort and Painting

Some Town Photos

All About Agua!

I have never thought about water as much as I do here. I tried to think about it, taking lots of baths and turning the water off as I brush my teeth, but we are so distant from any kind of water issue in Seattle, I didn’t understand what it meant to conserve water. Here, like many parts of the world, water is not only a problem, it is the problem. Rio Artibonito, the natural border between Haiti and Dominican Republic, is our water source in Pedro Santana. There is an aqueduct that pumps water from the river up to a tank which then distributes the water evenly between three towns. Water arrives usually every third day for three or four hours. At this time, the whole town is filling large and small buckets, washing clothes, mopping floors, and bathing.

A hose is useful for filling the large buckets but my style is carrying small buckets back and forth to fill the large ones. Some times the water arrives clear, which becomes the talk of the town, and others it is really brown (nicknamed “chocolate milk”). The dark water is the result of the erosion after it rains amplified by the complete deforestation in Haiti and in much of this side. Occasionally, the river is so muddy, water can’t go through the aqueduct and households dry up. People bathe and eat at friends houses that have these huge tanks for water storage. This past weekend, I washed my clothes at a neighbor’s house and brought some water home in buckets for the bare necessities.

My house is like most in town in that it has a bathroom with a toilet and a cement area with a drain to bathe, and a sink, as well as a sink in the kitchen. Water, however, only arrives to a faucet in the back yard. Because there is no running water in the houses, everything functions with the help of buckets. We have two large buckets that stay outside; one is for bathroom use and the other for kitchen use. We also use two five-gallon buckets, one for bathing with a bowl and the other to wash dishes, and one two gallon bucket for throwing water down the toilet (the alternative flush) and for mopping our cement floors.

Many people throw water and soap on the floor like a flood which I assume is supposed to get it good and clean and also to cool down the house. I exempt myself from this activity because my two roommates and I lack furniture and consequently practice floor piling organization. For drinking, we buy water for about 86 cents per carboy. It is better and cheaper to have a filter. A water filter project interests me as many people here drink the river water to save money making parasites one of the most common health problems in town.

Right now, we are in the midst of the rainy season, a time I know I will miss dearly. We all hope for afternoon the sky to change from 100 degrees clear blue to dark clouds with a cool wind. Everyone bustles around shutting windows, stashing things like clothes and chairs inside and strategically placing every bucket to catch the rainwater from their roofs. We empty all the buckets to take advantage of the clean rainwater. I change into shorts and a T-shirt and get ready to run. Then it pours with the intensity of a high pressure shower. I like to go out with a bunch of boys who run around in the neighborhoods, jumping in the rivers that run down the streets and hitting up the good gutter from the roof of the town government building. They think my presence is hilarious and I’m sure if I saw myself yelling in Spanish and splashing Dominican junior high boys, it would look like a joke. I’ll take a running club anywhere I can get it and I like to lie and say that I, like all American girls, never get tired.

When I get home, I strip down to my skivvies and take a wonderful shower in the rain. I hope I will never forget to appreciate water coming from above. I am well accustomed to the bucket bath but a constant flow down on my body still feels like a birthday present. After my long clean shower in the rain, I also get the gift of feeling a little cold. Then, I go with my umbrella to teach my English class and no one shows up. Nothing normal happens when it rains. The kids go home from school early, meetings are canceled (informally as no one is notified, everyone just knows), and even social lives are put on hold to sit in the house with family. I admit that it is kind of nice to sit in the house and read, either by electricity or flashlight if the power is out.

The days after hard rains are important planting times in the fields. In a community dependent on subsistence agriculture, a good rainy season means a good harvest and the possibility to make money by selling excess crops. Unlike higher technology agriculture, there is no insurance of an irrigation system. The farmers here are totally dependent on the completely undependable weather.

There are aqueducts serving many of the rural communities in this region built sometimes by the government but more frequently by foreign aid. Some communities don’t have an aqueduct but are able to collect water from a nearby river or stream. Still, there are many people without easy access to water and even more with no potable water. No access to potable water goes hand in hand with children’s protruding stomachs, impossible roads, and no easy access to healthcare. Here, water is everything.

In much of the developed world, it goes almost unnoticed. We drink it from the faucet, cook with it, take showers, use washing machines and complain when it rains. On the scale of global water issues, we are fortunate here. The worldwide water crisis is almost too immense to think about. I have no advice about how to take it in or an easy way to change your lifestyle. The more time I spend here as a community-based development volunteer, the more I think effective development work is not with small projects. What really facilitates development is infrastructural improvements. People need roads. When vehicles can access a community, they can build aqueducts and clinics. Without water, no one can produce anything to sell and without roads no one will come to buy the products. Infrastructural development is essential for economic progression.

I wrote a final paragraph that resembles a guilt trip so I will end here. It is my personal belief that we, as lucky ducks, have some sort of responsibility to at least acknowledge the problems of the world.

Get Ready!

These last few weeks cannot possibly be representative what my service will be like because if it is, I will never make it two years. In the end of July, I was in a fabulous place, busy finishing my community diagnostic, making some real friends and teaching a disgusting amount of English. On my morning run, I decided to take a little detour when I was viciously attacked by a guard dog in my armpit. It scared me so badly, I shrieked “Somebody help me!” in English, which quickly turned into the new town joke. Jokes aside, the incident really freaked me out. The following week I did the six hour trip to the capital twice for rabies shots, finished my diagnostic presentation, moved into my house, and said some quick goodbyes as I was off to a week-long training.

The beginning of the training was our presentations and time to plan our year with our project partners. Mine cancelled at the last minute so I was all alone presenting and planning. The rest of the training was great. On top of getting the information, it was kind of therapy to hang out with all of my wonderful friends from pre-service training, eat copious amounts of food, and use flush toilets. Upon returning to Pedro Santana, I did my rounds of visiting and was ready to start planning some projects. Apparently my body was not ready because I came down with something that knocked me to bed for two days before I was sent to the capital where I stayed in a hostel, then in the hospital for two nights, and finally back to my community.

So, here I am in Pedro Santana, hoping to free myself of medical crises. I got home last night to my comfortable new house with no furniture except beds and plastic chairs, classy. I was warmly welcomed by the neighbors and some friends who have been very worried about my health. After being constantly asked by nurses why I had no company in the hospital, my vulnerable little self esteem sopped up the affection.

My grand plan is to do some serious visiting, find an end to my English classes (involving certificates), and slowly start some projects with water and kids. My less grand plans are to return to studying Spanish and Creole, do some recycled art, and buy some earplugs (because, damn, they play that merengue loud). My fantasy plan is to go to Haiti and work with a large binational project based in my town, but as of now, I am forbidden to cross the bridge. On a more feasible note, I am psyched about cooking. I bought a bunch of stuff in a supermarket in the capital that I can’t get in Pedro Santana: whole wheat pasta, lentils, oatmeal, peanut butter, soy protein, cinnamon, thyme, pepper, and oregano. Today I bought carrots, onions, and egg plant at our weekly street market. Man, I must be hungry!
How self-involved! I hope to make this blog less about me and more about the situation of the people who live here. It’s about to get so educational, you won’t want to read it… get ready!

Oh Peace Corps.

I am just now starting to feel like I am a resident and not a visitor of this little town. I just finished visiting and interviewing one hundred houses of the pueblo for the Peace Corps community diagnostic. It has become apparent that what I have learned from the interviews, that water and lack of work are the largest problems here, I could have known after talking to a couple of friends. The real function of the surveys turned out to be introducing myself to the community as a Peace Corps volunteer living here for two years, not a missionary worker or a month long German visitor. I can tell people feel like they know me a little more because I get a lot of shout outs with my actual name (Yasmín) instead of “Blanca” and a lot of cheek kisses from old ladies on the street.

I have also decided to greet everyone I see if at all possible which means I am always shooting little waves around willy nilly, undiscriminating and a little oblivious. I am thinking that there is nothing better than being viewed as friendly and nice but it definitely results in my confusion when people come up and talk to me and then they say, “You remember me from the park on Saturday, you were running and I was with my friend!” If I have not said this before, I have been doing a lot of Peace Corps lying, “Oh yeah, I remember!”, “Yes, I love your food.”, “Peace Corps won’t let me do that.” I am pretty sure I have already lied more in this country than my whole life in the states. I have consciously let reputation and acceptance outweigh honesty for the time being, judge as you will.

I am getting accustomed to the cultural differences very little by little. One interesting one has been that it is not very popular to do anything alone. I tend to like some alone time but it is totally unacceptable to be in your bedroom if you aren’t sleeping. If you want to read or relax, you best be sitting with your people; if you are in your room, you best be sleeping. The river that separates my town with Haiti, Rio Artibonito goes through stages cleanliness and with the hundred degree heat, I have gotten really into dipping in the river (or as they say, bathing). I went the first few times with friends and then yesterday I wanted to swim but no one was going so I headed out alone. Before I could get out the door, my host mom had found someone to go with me, not for safety, just for company.

Walking alone is almost the most rare of them all. Every evening people enjoy the fresher temperature and walk around the town (literally around the whole pueblo). Sometimes I start my walking alone but I am always joined by someone who starts by saying, “Who are you walking with?”, a polite insinuation that it is not normal to be doing my round around town solo. Another walking rule that I am bound to break is that two people of opposite genders walking together are in a relationship. Because this is a flexible rule and virtually unavoidable, I figure if I walk with enough different guy friends, people will just except that I am a weird American and the rule doesn’t apply. I’ll let you know how this goes.

The difference that has been the hardest to get used to is the pace of life here and the professionalism. I am up at six running and planning my day only to later be at a meeting where no one shows up or to wait for an hour for something to open or someone to meet me. I have been teaching English classes and I have had to accept that the actual class can’t start until fifteen minutes after the starting time. My plans with the NGO I am working with are the most flexible of all. Meetings and promises of transportation are forgotten more often than they are remembered. Clearly, I need to just take some deep breaths and a chill pill and welcome myself to the Dominican Republic.

My favorite difference is also my least favorite and it is the compulsory sharing. This is by definition a give and take phenomenon that only works in your favor in one direction. I love seeing people sending food from house to house or calling a neighborhood kid on the street to come and eat the leftovers. People actually bite off pieces mints and offer the remainder to a friend. The negatives are when you really don’t want the fried salami or more frequently, when you don’t want to share. I’d like to eat my dinner sitting with you but I’m hungry and I don’t want to give you any. My survival strategy is to hang out in the front of the house but always eat in the back.

Despite my very slow understanding of the social norms of this country, I am getting more comfortable everyday. I am no longer in constant calculations of how much I’m not doing, how many mistakes I made or how many days I have left. Scratch the last one because I am totally still in the day counting business: I have less than twenty two months left, baby!

A Little Illustration

Kids are so cute.

This is a view of Rio Altibonito that supplies the water for this region and separates Haiti and the DR.

It´s mango season.

A little campo view. I will be posting some pueblo pictures soon!

My Life These Days

I have been living in the town of Pedro Santana with an astonishingly nice woman who gives me air kisses and defends my Spanish to any communication critics. My days have been rather full although not at all productive in the classical sense. My average day begins at six when I drink a tiny cup of strong coffee and eat breakfast which is usually a piece of bread with a hardboiled egg. Four days a week, I set out for the rural campos. On these days, I pack a notebook, pencil, water and sunscreen along with the awkwardly large umbrella and motorcycle helmet and head for the very long dirt road. Although I should be embarrassed about carrying the helmet, I can often catch free rides with motorcycles and watch some of the five miles wiz in either direction. I get a quite a few laughs because almost no one wears helmets here and carrying one without a bike is quite the walking joke.

I arrive sweaty to the campo at eight thirty in the morning (it takes me about an hour and a half to walk the five miles meaning I walk pretty damn slow). I always first visit a handful of my regular houses where I am expected to frequent. I find a spot in the shade and utilize my usual conversation starters: “How are things?”, “How are your kids (most people have grown children in the capital)?”, one question about the weather, either a recent strong rain or “It was really hot yesterday, huh?”. If these don’t get the ball rolling, I move on to their crops and animals which always seems to work.

Our conversations usually veer toward problems with health, money and always water. Unfortunately, I lack the social graces to be able to respond to comments about hardship. I would blame this on my language barrier but I am just as challenged with this in English. I try to ask relevant questions and always throw in my “How difficult.” with a sigh. These reactions become even more necessary when I do my interviews. I try to do four or five each day I do the walk and because I added to my interview questions, I interviewed fourteen houses twice, poor them! I introduce myself and explain that I am doing a diagnostic before asking a variety of mundane and invasive questions in imperfect Spanish. I thank them profusely and they tell me to come back and visit soon. I then head slowly back to town for lunch even more sweaty and disheveled after all the hot walking.

On days that I don’t go to the campos, I run to the next town over after breakfast, enjoy a cold bucket bath and use the fabulous generator in a communal office space where I type up my interview responses and, let’s face it, pretend like I am working. I am also always on the hunt for someone who is passionate about the inadequacy of the projects that come to this municipality. We talk about broken water filters and organizations that don’t implement their projects and I ask an excessive amount of questions.

Everyday, I eat a big lunch of rice and beans around noon and drink about two nalgenes of water. It is more difficult to fill the afternoon because everyone is sitting still inside or in the shade to avoid the raging heat. I have lucked into a few weekly meetings and was tricked into starting a small adult English class with people who work in the office. These have been good for filling my planner (feeling like I am doing something) and making friends, a work in progress. At six o’clock, I eat a small dinner before I go for a walk around town becuase it is cooler and there are always people in the streets. I am shouted at with “Americana!” or “Rubia!” usually accompanied by a laugh like it is just too hilarious that I live here. Although I appreciate the excitement to an extent, I prefer talking to yelling. I visit an old colmado (corner store) owner with nice eyes who has lived here his whole life. I sometimes go to the “park” where there is usually a little social crowd. The first time I went there, I was sitting on a bench trying to look busy and someone was repeatedly shouting something like “Virginia” but with Spanish pronunciation. I finally turned around to a group of people staring at me and I realized that I knew some of them from a youth club meeting. I joined them and asked them what they were saying. They answered, “Your name” and gave me my favorite “you stupid American” look. I have miscommunications like it’s my job and I am proud to say my embarrassment threshold has been drastically altered.

When I come home from my walk, I sit with my hostmom outside to watch passersbys before I set up my mosquito net and fall asleep to merengue. All day, everyday, I think (or rather, worry) about how I am going to be able to actually contribute to this community. I am daunted by the complexity of the needs here. The largest problems in the region seem to revolve around water. There are campos that don’t receive any from the aqueduct, don’t have functioning filters, and can’t save their crops or animals if it doesn’t rain. The communities could also benefit from more efficient cook stoves that use less wood and have chimneys to direct the smoke out of the kitchen huts. This list of potential projects could continue with cement floors, latrines, literacy, sex ed and nutrition classes. Right now, I am trying to take it one day at a time and prioritizing making friends and learning Spanish, two essentials to my two year stint here. I hope you are all doing well!

Swearing In: Who Says We Can´t Be Fancy?

The girls becoming real Peace Corps Volunteers. Take a good look, this may be the only time we have a chance to wear a dress in these two years.

The boys in ties.

Bekah, Jared, Malia and I, sweating.

Some Photos from the Campo

There are few stranger things than finding a crab in your bedroom when you don´t live close to a water source. It was larger than my hand and when I first saw it, it was pretty dark and I was sure it was another rat... but no.

The kitchen and dining area in my house in the campo. I spent more hours than I care to admit to cooking and washing dishes in that kitchen.

A view from a hike I do in my campo.

This is the man of the house in the backyard. He is eighty years old and he works on his land everyday.

This was a tarantula in my bed the first day of my site visit. It lived in my wall and I would see it every once in a while.

Rats, Sickness and Starvation, Oh My!

I will avoid going into detail about the last three weeks at my site. Most of what I would have said would highly resemble complaints and would reflect badly on my host family. The truth is that my living situation has been difficult and the lack of cell phone signal and transportation has not allowed me to work as an effective volunteer. I am happy to report that I will be moving into the town of Pedro Santana into a house with a kind woman. I owe a huge thanks to my stepdad who told me, “If you don’t like your situation and people aren’t treating you well, change it.”

The next day, I packed for a long day and headed out on foot to town. I talked to a development worker who I just barely knew and by the end of the day, I had a new situation where I will be healthier, happier, and more able to work productively. Although I am fighting off waves of guilt and insecurity about my toughness, I can live with being a pansy! I will be visiting the campo frequently to carry out a community diagnostic and keep the connections and friendships I have made.

Today, I am sitting in the air conditioned Peace Corps office in the capital, loving every minute of it. I will be off to a small Haitian community for a weeklong basic Creole training. When I go back, I will make the move. New house, new friends and nutrition here I come! Woohoo!

To the Border!

When I received my site assignment packet, I had no idea where Pedro Santana, Elias Pina was. I frantically flipped through to the map which barely helped to orient me as it was a detailed image of the region. I looked at it for a few seconds before I blurted out, “Is that gray side Haiti”. Pedro Santana is a border town and by first glance, looks to be in Haiti rather than the Dominican Republic. I read on to find that I will be living in a campo of 19 houses outside of Pedro Santana and working with a large development NGO on a binational reforestation project. I took a couple deep breaths and shined a smile to my program director. This should be an interesting two years.

The next day, we met our project partners and set out to visit our sites. After a six hour ride on progressively under maintained roads, we reached Pedro Santana, the poorest pueblo in the Dominican Republic. I was surprised by the quiet streets and clean sidewalks, this is where I will be working and eventually living. Our truck continued up a rough dirt road for fifteen minutes that seemed to last forever when my project partner dropped me off in a campo of nineteen houses, no cell phone service, and no public transportation. I was greeted by an elderly couple who told me they were very poor and kindly asked if I would like chocolate water. I smiled and told them in my still imperfect Spanish that I was happy to be there and thanked them for their hospitality. The Peace Corps recommends that we live with a family for the first three months of our service before moving onto our own but because of safety and logistics, I may move closer to Pedro Santana sooner than three months.

The five day visit was filled with views of the Haitian hills, questions about how to bathe, where I will fit in the NGO, Intstituto Dominicano de Desarrollo Inc., and sitting silently with interested neighbors. I admit that I cried on the phone to my mom, read half a book curled up in my tiny dark room, and questioned my judgment in joining the Peace Corps and my program director’s judgment in placing me here. The visit finished with a fiesta in the capital of our province and a short night in a vacated building before catching a 3:00AM bus to Santo Domingo. We swear in today and move to our site this Friday. I am excited to become accustomed to the very new life I been given. Frontera here I come!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

A Little Taste of La Cumbre

A Few Photos

Vengan conmigo a La Cumbre

I have spent the past month in La Cumbre, a mountain campo near Santiago for community based training. We got dirty learning erosion control, gardening techniques and building ceramic stoves. I embarrassed myself time and time again with Spanish miscommunications and a four hour Earth Day presentation to eighth graders. We all got a little better at dancing the bachata and merengue at the Plaza, a little outdoor colmado that could easily be mistaken for a storage unit during the daytime but transforms into a hotspot at night with blaring music and a row of parked motorcycles. I ran every day and ate more fried cheese than I would ever care to quantify.

I loved my family even though much of our time was spent in silence. My host sibblings taught me cool Dominican expressions and then laughed hysterically when I would slip them into conversation. I translated an Akon song into Spanish for my host sister to the best of my ability. Akon has to be the most famous American here because not a day goes by that I don´t hear a little kid singing "I want to make love right now now now" with a cute accent. We made a lot of friends through conversations or silence while sipping tiny cups of coffee. I also met some running and hiking buddies who I was really sad to leave. Our time in La Cumbre made me realize that it is possible to feel welcomed into a community, feel comfortable with no doors to the bedrooms or bathroom, and feel at home while blatantly standing out with all the wrong clothes and a really bad accent.

I am back in Santo Dominingo getting wet from sideways rain through an open window in an internet cafe. This coming Tuesday the Peace Corps will disclose our sites. I am of course psyched and nervous to hear where my new home will be and even more anxious to go visit on Wednesday. No matter where it is, I have already decided that I will like it. After all, it´s all about the attitude!

In Just Three Weeks

It feels like I have been in the DR for far longer than three weeks. I am used to my host mom patting my stomach to ask if I´m hungry and then proceeding to give me enough food for a family of four. I sleep through the blaring bachata music through the night and than the roosters who wake up to the bachata, not the sun. I don´t flinch when people address me as anything but my name, go ahead and just call me Gringa. The trainees in my group are my home away from home. We have learned to dance Dominican style, ride public transportation, and bargain for lower prices even though I am pretty sure I won´t feel comfortable using this until my Spanish improves and maybe not even then.

We have been living in barrios or Santo Domingo but we´re going into the wild for five weeks. The environmental trainees are going to a campo near Santiago where we will practice rural living and learn job skills for the next two years. We will build energy efficient ceramic stoves, community gardens. We will also be trained in environmental youth involvement and rural eco-tourism. Are Spanish teachers are joining the fun because... we need them. I know training will fly by and May 13 we will swear in fancy clothes and move to our site where we will probably not need fancy clothes.

I am still feeling lucky to be a Peace Corps volunteer and excited about what´s next. I think my Spanish has improved from a toddler to full on kindergarten student. Someday I hope to speak with the eloquence of an adult but I will probably always have a strong accent and all the wrong clothes.

Here I go!

27 months in the Peace Corps is such an exciting and daunting undertaking. I will spend my final days at home packing my last bottles of sunscreen and saying goodbye to all of the people I care about. I fly to Maimi March 3 to meet my fellow trainees and we will be off for the Dominican Republic March 5 for 11 weeks of pre-service training in Santo Domingo. After training, I will serve for two years in the Community Evironmental Development project (CEDE). Wish me luck!