Piropos, platanos, and a Presidente

Some thoughts on things Dominican. First, ”piropos.” We were given a handout explaining that “piropo” is translated as “compliment” in English. When a pretty woman is walking down the street past a macho dominicano, he pauses the domino game and, lifting his plastic Dixie cup, takes a long sip of cold Presidente (the preferred cerveza here). He proceeds to look the lady over, and after carefully choosing from his vast arsenal, selects and fires the appropriate piropo. If he’s feeling clever, he’ll invent something like the following “¡Cuántas curvas y yo sin frenas! (All those curves and I don’t have any brakes). Or, “¡Como avanza la tecnología que hasta las flores caminan!” (What technological advances, even flowers walk). But if our hero is just having a normal boring day in the barrio he’s more likely to just shout out obvious things like “!Hola linda!” (Hey pretty). Or in the wondrous case that the charming lady is a foreigner, you’ll hear “!Ojos azules!” (Blue eyes). Or, “!Hola rubia!” (Hey blonde). Or, “!Americana, Americana!”

These piropos are ubiquitous. It doesn’t matter if you are walking the street, riding public transportation, or relaxing in the park. If you are a good-looking female, especially una americana, you will receive piropos machine-gun style from an endless stream of admirers. From the phone-card vendors sweating in their bright orange suits, from motorcycle taxi drives leaning intently over their handlebars, from the over-enthusiastic man who charges fare on the bus, and even from a bright-eyed boy in his blue school uniform. Dominican men see piropos as part of expressing (and I think trying to prove) their manhood. Dominican woman seem to mostly ignore them, or just haughtily accept them as their rightful due from a lesser gender. So are piropos really compliments or are they actually just a form of harassment in the guise of clever language? Take your pick. But (ladies) don’t hit the Dominican streets unless you’re ready for some piropos.

And on food.

The DR has an overabundance of viveres. Most of these are starchy tubers that must surely be in the potato family: cassava, yucca, batata (kind of a sweet potato), yams, etc. The vivere family also includes plantains and green bananas. All of this is not a problem. But serving a host of viveres with every meal is. All of these viveres are most commonly boiled in water and then served with either pasta and rice or meat. Honestly, when boiled, they don’t taste that great (not to mention that when eaten in great enough quantities they make visits to the bathroom practically unnecessary). But thanks to my lovely doña, I have discovered a way to eat, and enjoy, viveres. Fry them! Fried plantains or batatas are so unlike their pasty, boiled, hard-to-swallow cousins that you’d swear it’s a different food altogether. Never mind all the fatty oils, I say yes! to viveres that suddenly got sweeter and a whole lot tastier, and suddenly I can smile my way through that entire heaping plate of viveres (even if a bathroom visit afterwards is still out of the question).

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And here is an April 2 update from Anna on what we’ve been doing the last two weeks:
There were a lot of blackouts (as is so very common in the DR) in Santo Domingo and the internet cafes were closed the last week before we left. Now we’re in the countryside for our technical training. It’s so much better- we’re in the mountains with fresh air and cool nights and wonderful food and friendly people. We left Santo Domingo on the 26th and had a 5 hour drive to a Brigada Verde conference at Montecristi. Here are some photos of the conference. Just find the "Monte Cristi" album.

Brigada Verde is a Peace Corps initiative, started by volunteers some years ago. Basically it’s a club for teaching youth about environmental issues. Every volunteer is encouraged to start on at their site, with the idea that in teaching the youth the awareness of taking care of the environment will affect future generations. As part of the club, youth are expected to participate in the weekly meetings and activities. For example, when I was on my volunteer visit, I went to a meeting where they learned about the importance of clean water. Trash is a big problem around here; it’s probably the first thing you notice in the country. There’s not really an organized trash pick up system; communities have to get together and figure out a plan if they want to get rid of their trash. So unfortunately there’s a lot of trash by the sides of the roads and some communities use the rivers as their waste disposal, contaminating the water. So one of the activities of Brigada Verde can be a trash pickup, where all the youth get together and clean part of a beach or roadside. They also learned about pesticide runoff, and how deforestation and erosion affects the water supply.

I was pretty impressed by how well they paid attention and answered questions. Anyway, so the conference at Montecristi was a marine conference, organized by volunteers to give the youth information about coastal environmental problems. The volunteers each brought 2 youth from their clubs, for a total of about 40 youth attendees. Montecristi is beautiful; it’s the first time I’ve been at the beach in this country. It’s way up on the northwest side; close to the Haitian border. The water is aquamarine and very calm and shallow and warm. Friday evening was the official start of the conference; we had our first experience organizing activities and entertaining the youth for an hour and a half. My Spanish group has 5 people in it; between the 5 of us we came up with various things to do and play. Of course the biggest challenge is being able to explain the game with our limited Spanish; imagine trying to lead 18 youth in activites when you can only half understand their chattering. But they were really gracious with us, and although I felt pretty frustrated by the end, I got a good score and reviews on leading the group, so I guess it went okay.

The next morning we took a boat over to a beautiful island, where the volunteers gave talks on different marine ecosystems. There was a coral reef where the kids could go snorkeling, seagrasses, mangroves (which are these cool trees that grow in the water), and a presentation on erosion. I thought it was all really well done, and when it was over we got to lounge around and swim for a while. The next day was more of the same, but on the beach, not an island. And that was the conference. The youth were all really well behaved and fun and interactive, and the location was beautiful. The only thing not good was the food. Nobody knows why, but the cooking there was terrible. Leon got sick Sunday night, and I blame the food. There were hardly any fruits or vegetables, just lots of viveres, which are a whole host of starchy plants. The only vivere we’re really familiar with are potatoes, but down here they have a whole host of them: plantains, cassava, yucca, batata (kind of a sweet potato), yams…. Most of them are ok, but if you have them plain and boiled meal after meal, they just sit in your stomach like a big lump of dough. So they fed us lots of viveres and mystery meat. For example, one morning for breakfast there was boiled batata, scrambled eggs with ham, and hot dogs. Everyone was complaining by the end of the week, especially on Sunday when we were running out of food.

But now we’re here in the mountains, and we have wonderful food. Our doña (the lady of the house, pronounced don-ya), is so sweet. She’s about 72 and lives alone, although of course lots of her children and grandchildren live around here and the whole community knows her. Her house is really nice, a block house with a zinc roof that’s airy and spacious. She runs a nursery with tons of plants and flowers growing everywhere, and an empanada stand as well. She makes her empanadas from yucca flour, rather than bread flour, which makes them nice and yellow and healthy. Basically she makes the dough, cuts them out in half moon shapes, and fills them with chicken or cheese. As people order them, she drops them in the deep fryer and out they come, nice and crispy and sooooo delicious. She charges 15 pesos an empanada, which is about 50 cents. On good days she sells about 70 empanadas.

Anyway, she’s really friendly always asks what we want to eat. Her name is Maria, but everyone calls her Maria Dulce (sweet Maria). She’s the first doña I’ve heard of that actually gives me fruit and coffee for breakfast, because that’s what I asked for. Even though I told my doña in the city that, she insisted on giving us cheese sandwiches with salami on white rolls for breakfast (apparently she doesn’t view salami as meat). Doña Maria gives us lots of vegetables, the lack of which is probably the chief complaint of other trainees. And she gives good hugs. So we really got lucky with a good place to stay at for these 5 weeks.

Right now we’re in the community-based training part of our pre-service work. We stay here for 5 weeks and learn how to do practical things, like identify trees and plants, learn about gardening and how to build stoves (wood-stoves that are much more efficient than conventional Dominican ones), and get the feel of a rural community. Yesterday we learned how to make good compost piles (in the pouring rain), and I think we’re going to build one for our doña tomorrow, for her nursery plants. Our classes are on this huge coffee plantation, with a mansion that was used by the former dictator Trujillo. Trujillo ruled this country from the 30’s to the 60’s, and like most dictators, he did good things like build roads and organize schools and modernize the country, but also terrible things like torture and feed to sharks anyone who disagreed with him or got in his way. The mansion is beautiful though, and on a clear day you can see all the way to the ocean. Two days ago we walked around the coffee farm and learned about various trees and coffee plants, and then we went down to a community person’s farm and learned about plants there, how to identify them and where and when they grow. We’re definitely getting a lot of information in a really short time, but it makes the days go by fast. I feel really comfortable here, and hope we’ll get a site placement similar to this area.

Basically the days go by in a sort of scheduled way- breakfast at 7:45, Spanish class from 8 to 12, lunch from 12 to 1, and training at the mansion in the afternoon, which can last till 5 or 7, depending on the day. In the evening we often talk with the doña and people around here, do homework, and go to bed by 9:30 or 10. We have a long weekend this weekend (April 2-4) because of Easter, people take it very seriously here. Children have off of school all week, and the work week stops at 12 noon on Thursday. Lots of people go to the beach or visit their family in other parts of the country. Today Leon and I are just relaxing and catching up on some stuff. This morning some other trainees came over and we played cards and then went to the colmado to play dominoes and buy some snacks. Colmados are a big part of the culture here; they’re like little community stores where you can buy random things that vary from store to store. You can always buy beer there, and a lot of social life happens around them. You pull out plastic chairs and sit in front of the colmado and talk or play dominos (they always have a dominos game) and eat or drink. They have soda too, and a variety of baked goods that cost 5 pesos each (about 20 cents). In addition, you can usually get snickers bars, peanuts, crackers, coffee, batteries, dish soap, sometimes fruits and vegetables and various miscellaneous items. There’s definitely no equivalent to it in the states. Maybe the closest thing is a convenience store, with people hanging out there.

Tomorrow in the evening we’re going dancing with some of the other trainees. We’ve learned the basic bachata and meringue step, so hopefully we’ll eventually be good meringue dancers.

Until next time.