Esa vaina amarilla

The following is written September 12.

I went to help my neighbor pick his first crop of peppers this past Saturday morning. As we were picking the other workers informed me that the ones that were already red couldn’t be sold since these peppers are for export. Of course I immediately said that I wanted them. No, no, they replied, the red ones are spicy. Well of course then I really wanted them as it’s always so difficult to find enough seasonings for our food here. Dominicans, at least the farmers, really prefer the blandness of plain white rice and boiled green bananas. And so it was that I had a bag full of spicy peppers to skip home with at lunch time.

Anna also succeeded in pickling some cucumbers, onions, and garlic. We of course just devoured them. But in a noble attempt to honor Peace Corps’ second goal we also sacrificially offered some to two schoolboys. They barely managed to swallow their bite of the pickle and we had to bribe them with some fresh banana bread (thanks Suzie Q. for the fabulous recipe) to get them to smile again.

This past week I gave the first English class for adults. Almost 20 people, the majority with no experience in English beyond random movie lines, showed up. How do you successfully teach any English to adults with no textbooks—we have no textbooks partly because I know practically no one will bother to study outside of class—for only one hour each week? Well they might not learn much by the end of two years, but they should at least be able to have more patience with my occasionally mangled Spanish. And I get to laugh at them instead of them always laughing at me. I also started helping out once a week in the 6th and 7th grade English class at school.

The educational system in this country is sometimes dismaying. The English teacher teaches from three pages of notes he took when he was in college. That notebook and a cheap 50-page English-conversation booklet form his English-teaching arsenal. He writes things on the board and the students copy it down. He also teaches French. I haven’t seen his books, but I’m hoping the fact that French is also a Romance languages helps at least a tiny bit. I’m not belittling the teacher for the textbooks or language knowledge he doesn’t have; I’m questioning the sanity of a ministry of education who prescribes two foreign language courses (without educating the teachers) to middle school students who are only in school four hours each day. What’s more important by the age of 16, being able to (barely) introduce yourself in French and English even though you can barely read in your native language not to mention doing the multiplication table, or being able to read and recite the multiplication table as if it were second nature although you don’t know a word of English or French. (Although if you are a true Dominican tiguere you will have learned “I love you baby!” without the help of any formal English classes.) Yes it looks good on nationwide curriculum requirements, but in the real world of the classroom (at least in my rural community) it just makes me sad.

Novels must be very lonely here. I can count on three fingers the number of Dominicans I have seen reading for what appeared to be pleasure. And one of those was a teenager reading a middle-school reading booklet. When the people in my community see me reading they say, “Oh you’re studying again.” And sometimes they’ll add, “My, but you work a lot.” I have given up trying to explain that I’m reading for fun. No, it’s not hard work to read. It’s relaxing. At least they think they have one hard-working volunteer. I’m assuming this dearth-of-reading, this death-of-the-novel type lifestyle is not so common in bigger towns and cities. For the sake of the Dominican cultural I can only hope so.

Schnickelfritz, our spoiled little kitty for which Anna sometimes makes a tiny salami-and-egg omelet, is growing like a fat yellow vegetable in a Dominican garden. For any of you that know Dominican slang, you will laugh to know that when our 7-year-old neighbor boy comes looking to pet Fritz he always asks, “Y dónde está esa vaina amarilla?”

Until next time.