Island Life

If you want to support our latrine projects now is the time to do so. Since we only have a few months left (it’s hard to believe I know) on this noisy little island we need to start working with the money that has been donated so far. You will be able to donate until approximately December 15. On that date, or shortly after, you will no longer be able to donate via the Peace Corps website, so please fill our Christmas stockings now.

You probably wonder what I´ve been doing the last few months. Here are some photos. In September I was Peace Corps busy with a stove project. The long and complicated story made short is that Peace Corps DR is trying to find a wood-burning cook stove model that works in this country. A new model has been developed. I’m involved in building some test stoves to see how the stoves perform so that we can improve the model for when it eventually becomes mass-produced.

In October I made the long-awaited trip to Nueva York. Pennsylvania in autumn is beautiful. I was busy drinking cider, eating cheese, and snapping pictures of fall foliage, combines, and rolling cornfields for my neighbors here to see. Chicago (all paid for because I am a twin celebrity, or because some genius doctor thought it would be fun to study the genetics of aggression) was, besides the cold, superb. Unfortunately I got sick in the middle of my trip and didn’t get to spend as much time with friends as I would have liked. I tested negative for dengue, so who knows what hit me. But now I’m back and feeling well. It was cloudy and rainy almost every day this past week, which is Dominican for I didn’t really leave my house very much. I sat and read and waited for the sun to shine.

I spend a lot of time waiting for things. I wait for buses, I wait for grant money, I wait for a work partner to do what they promised, I wait for people from the ministry of environment to return my emails and calls, I wait in my house for the rain to stop, I wait in my house until the sun goes down and it’s cool enough to go visit someone, I wait because sometimes all you need is more time, I wait for my cat Clunkers to come visit me. (Clunkers, the poor hungry kitty we found in the coffee field, has grown up, fallen in love with the neighbor´s charming calico cat, and only stops by once a day for ten minutes to fill his belly. I wonder, is this how parents feel when their testosterone-laden sons are out chasing girls and only come home to sleep and eat?) I wait for projects to get off the ground, I wait for my community to get organized, and I wait for seeds to sprout in my garden. While I wait I do things like read and play with our kitten Buster. (We gave Nymeria, Buster´s sister, away to another volunteer to save her from Clunkers’ machismo advances). I walk, visit neighbors, play with the neighbor kids, dig around in my garden, chop weeds with my machete, walk some more, and go to the colmado to see what I can buy with 10 pesos. It’s pretty difficult to make all that waiting seem interesting to you.

So I decided it would be informative to write about specific incidents that typify common Dominican habits or cultural aspects.

I may have said this before but Dominican culture, although obsessed with the US and lacking any indigenous influence, is one-of-a-kind. At first glance it’s bland Latin America, dusty concrete, tin roofs, lots of trash, loud music, too many horns blaring, tight blue jeans and imported t-shirts sporting names like American Eagle, Hollister, and Old Navy. But since the DR is a tiny island the country doesn’t interact as much with other cultures, and as a consequence some very interesting customs have evolved.

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I had large plans that I would influence my neighbors to plant lovely vegetable gardens. They watched me spend a day sweating as I dug up my garden. They watched me make rows and carefully plant the tiny seeds at the proper spacing. They hung over my chicken-proof garden fence, which is actually my mosquito net cut into three-foot strips (thanks Peace Corps!), as I meticulously weeded around the tiny seedlings. Then they watched as the daily rains rotted my zucchini and infected my tomatoes with a brown rot. My sweet corn tasseled at two feet high (it looked like Munchkin corn) and my broccoli shot up into flowers, looking more like a wildflower than a vegetable. In case you think I am just one of those farmers unable to grow a garden I have had good crops of kale, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers, and green beans. One day I noticed some miniature tomatoes sprouting in my yard. I asked my neighbor if they were safe to eat. She said, “Oh, they’re great! I have some growing outside my kitchen. Here let me show you.” Where her dishwater escapes the kitchen were about five of these tomato plants. She said, “These just sprout up here and I eat them when I want some. This is what I do when I want more tomatoes”. She grabbed a cherry-sized tomato and popped it between her thumb and forefinger. The tomato seeds shot across the bare ground. She said, “Now more tomatoes will grow here,” and she turned and walked back to her kitchen to finish washing dishes. Although I could barely restrain myself from grabbing a hoe and scratching some dirt across the seeds, I now understood Dominican gardening.

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I sat on the concrete porch of a colmado soaking up the early morning sun as I waited on a bus. All the motorcycle taxi drivers had just arrived to wait for the day’s first passengers. They did normal motorcycle taxi things like bother a cat in the bushes, try to make the dog on the porch across the street bark, and talk about how chilly it was the night before. Then one tall old man, tanned and lean in his faded white pants and blue windbreaker whipped a razor (one of those disposable Gillett style things; in fact Dominicans only know this type of razor as a “Jeelet”) out of his jacket pocket and started, as he walked around chatting up the other taxi drivers, slowly shaving his grizzled jaw. After about ten minutes of this he sat down on the chipped concrete bench beside a teenage, who I remember was wearing bright yellow Crocs (of course they were knock-offs), and, from what I could see of his gestures, asked the kid to show him the missed spots. Mr. Yellow-Crocs then points to a spot on his cheek and Mr. Gillette shaves it. This continues for about five minutes. One man pointing and the other man, fully trusting his interactive mirror, shaving until Yellow-Crocs is satisfied that all is smooth. Mr. Gillette pockets the razor then stands up and stretches.

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I met a Dominican lady in my community one day who told me that I look very much like a certain John that lives in her town. I immediately suspected that it was some Swiss coffee farmer but after extensive questioning I found out she lives in a town where some Mennonites (specifically Beachy Amish, for those of you in the know) have a clinic and school. Being an ex-Mennonite myself I got very interested and asked her what she thought about the work they were doing. She said, among other things, “They are strange people. They dress funny and they have funny ideas about music. They are very friendly and I must say that the clinic and the school are both marvelous contributions to the community. But you know what’s wrong with those Mennonites?” and she shook her heard disbelievingly, “ It’s that they don’t watch TV!”

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I knew that interest rates are quite high here so I was surprised when a carpenter friend of mine said that he was only paying 3.8 percent on his truck loan. I was shocked. He said that it’s because he has good credit. Apparently if you have bad credit or don’t have proper documentation (as in the case of people like the Haitians mentioned below) you pay around 20 percent interest. Only after more specific questioning did it become clear that my friend was quoting monthly interest rates. He’s paying over 45 percent annual interest on a truck loan. If you have bad credit or don’t have a legal documentation (many people here don’t) you pay, if you can afford it, over 200 percent annual interest for a loan. And we Americans think we have it bad.

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Last month Hurricane Irene washed out a bridge in my community. It had been in precarious shape for a while. Last fall after Tropical Storm Tomas damaged it farmers propped up parts of the bridge with the trunks of pine trees. Then Hurricane Irene knocked it flat. So the farmers made a bridge out of just pine trunks. They bridged the stream with first one layer of trunks and then above that layer they put another layer; one trunk nestled between the curves of the two trunks below it. The top part was covered with dirt. It looked and worked great during week one. During week two some of the lower trunks broke and so the upper ones sagged and the dirt fell through in places leaving unnerving holes. Daring people drove over; the cowards or the wise, who can tell?, didn’t cross with their vehicles. One morning I watched the driver of the public transport jeep get out and inspect the bridge. He studied it for five minutes and then, looking grim, got back behind the wheel and steered cautiously up to the pine-log bridge. To avoid failure he would have to align his driver’s side wheels directly across a 12 inch diameter log. He got his front wheels onto the piney contraption, and certain he was a macho bridge-crosser headed too rapidly towards the narrow log. Half of the community was out watching and just as his wheel was about to drop into empty space everyone shouted excitedly. The driver backed up, swearing, and tried again. This time his front wheels entered the bridge very slowly, and as all the joyful watchers shouted contrasting opinions as to which way the driver should be turning the steering wheel he shook his head in fearful frustration, ground the gears into reverse, and refused to cross. A few days later the log contraption collapsed completely. As far as I know no one was crossing it at the time.

Four weeks ago preparation for construction started on a new bridge. They (meaning self-important government officials) even put up a detailed and colorful sign about the wonderful new bridge across the river. Except of course it’s not actually a river; in fact it’s not even really a stream except in post-rain flashfloods, but the sign does look good. The river that’s mentioned on the sign has no bridge at all and probably never will. It’s the river where the road ends, the one I once crossed (sheepishly) in my underwear using a big stick to poke along the bottom and keep my balance. Back to the (missing) bridge. This week, as construction got underway, the engineer in charge suddenly announced that the budgeted funds would not actually suffice and so they would have to settle for a culvert . The community said, “We want a bridge or nothing.” So now all work is stopped until some agreement can be reached. The community suspects that this is all a ploy by someone who wants to pocket the bridge money saved by building a cheap culvert. They are probably right. But even if the funds are sufficient and a bridge gets built, who knows how long it will last. I think the last one lasted ten years. In the meantime it’s coffee harvest and the farmers are having a hard time getting their coffee out to market.

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All along the road between my house and the province’s capital city huge orange billboards have been erected. Hurricane Irene’s rains smashed the road to smithereens and these billboards say things like, “Construction of a bridge approved by Leonel” (the current president), or “Construction of a culvert approved by Leonel,” except there is no construction in site, although it’s badly needed. I know by now that the DR’s government is clearly way better at building signs than, well, basically anything useful, but there are so many big orange signs that even I thought something might happen. I asked a friend. He said, “Oh, no worries, they will take down the orange signs after May’s presidential elections.” When I asked, “But what about the all bridges and the culverts?” he just laughed at me.

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Anna was sitting in our house reading one day when a neighbor boy who lives up the hill stopped by to say hello. As usual he hung around trying to find the DR on the world map on our wall and then trying to find his community on the DR map. He bothered the cat and played with our hand crank-powered flashlight. When he was about to leave Anna asked him what he was up to. He said, “I couldn’t find any paper at my house so I’m on my way down to Guela’s (a neighbor farther downhill) to try to find a piece of paper.”

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In many towns the green street signs that hang above stoplight intersections are about 12 inches high. On the top part, about 9 inches, the sign says things like, Chicho sigue trabajando. “Chicho (obviously the chummy nickname for the mayor) keeps on working”. Or they include other needless references to that particular town’s mayor. They tend to reflect the name of the mayor who put them up, although I wouldn’t be surprised if some mayors put up new signs with their own names. The bottom 3 inches has the street name. The result is that I know the names of quite a few mayors but I can’t give you good directions in their towns because when I was there I couldn’t make out the street names.

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The other week, the DR’s leading newspaper proudly reported, the seventh-billionth person in the world was born in the Dominican Republic. This child was born to a single teenager who had to drop out of high school in order to care for the baby. What’s sad is that the government offers free birth control for women but understandably teenage girls are reluctant to go on regular birth control, and to make matters worse Dominican men, for some macho reason of their own, tend to be very reluctant to use condoms. Hopefully with so many Peace Corps volunteers giving sex-ed workshops human number 8 billion won’t be born to a single teenage high school dropout in the DR.

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I was walking back to my house one hot summer sun’s day and yelled at a neighbor boy (he’s 21) carrying food to some cows, “Hey, how’s it going?” He shouted back, “Too much work and too little money.” After a moment’s hesitation he yelled over his shoulder, “Hey Leo, can’t you get me a visa so I can get to go over there? “Over there” is a common Dominican euphemism for the States. I just sweated on home.

The DR as a nation is obsessed with the United Sates. Most think it’s paradise, something dangerously close to the garden of Eden. I’m not exaggerating. There is a popular song from last year where a silly rapper raps, “I want an American, I want an American” over and over. Then another silly rapper replies, “Why? Why? Why?” over and over. The rappers’ answer, edited for your sake, essentially translates as, “To get me a visa! To get me a visa!” Of course this too is rapped over and over. Eight-year-old children used to walk by our house singing this song. Sometimes I or Anna (especially Anna because in the spirit of machismo the song is directed specifically at girls and mostly sung at girls) will get on a bus and someone will break out singing the song.

In one of the DR’s daily papers, stuck down in the left-hand corner on about page five, is a regular column where desperate Dominicans ask advice on things like how they can improve their chances of getting a visa to the US.

I have yet to meet a Dominican that doesn’t have friends or family or doesn’t know someone who has friends or family living in the US. Someone told me, quite reliably, that the DR has more attempted visa frauds than any other country. That basically means they want to make it to the States worse than anyone else. Despite this love of emigration, they mostly hate their own immigrants, specifically the crowds of Haitians that keep pouring into the country. My neighbor once told me that Haitians are good people. As I was mentally congratulating her for breaking through her culture’s stereotypes, she caught another breath and added, “But they are bad on the inside.”

In 2007 the Dominican Republic passed a resolution that basically revokes the validity of the documents of any Dominican of recent Haitian descent. I heard about an eighteen-year-old boy whose parents emigrated from Haiti forty years ago. The entire family has always had their legal documents but recently the government denied the teenager a copy of his birth certificate. Because he is a Dominican of Haitian descent he now has no legally recognized identification of any kind. Unless things change he will never be able to hold a formal job or attend university. And unlike Dominicans he can harbor zero hopes of making it the US, at least not legally, because he has no recognized papers.

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I was with my neighbor on his motorcycle the other day when he stopped at a garage to replace a seal where the bike was leaking oil. The mechanic in charge was a pot-bellied man in a dirty white shirt. He was sitting along the shop’s side wall. He told my friend to park the bike in front of him. He did. The fat mechanic man then extended his arm straight out from the shoulder, screwdriver in hand. The screwdriver was about three inches short of the screw that need removing. So the mechanic hissed at my neighbor and, scowling, told him to park the bike closer. He did. The fat mechanic, with help from my neighbor, then managed to change the seal and accept payment all without leaving his seat. As we drove away he remained like a bored Buddha, leaning motionless against the greasy shop wall while a mechanic’s calendar flapped above his head, the bikini-clad motorcycle-hugging lady in the photo undulating with the breeze.

In the course of the day we stopped at five different mechanic shops. Each shop’s toolbox consisted of a plastic or metal box about a foot square. All wrenches and sockets and screwdrivers were thrown indiscriminately into that one box so that each time a different tool was needed the mechanic or his child helper had to dig, usually for a long time, through the clutter to find the correct tool.

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My neighbors took in a little two-year-old boy some years ago. His mom didn’t want him and he arrived looking sickly with his belly swollen with parasites. They fed him, took care of him, and treated him pretty much like a son. In exchange he was their errand boy. That boy is seven now. He’s one of my best friends here. But a few months ago his birth mother showed up and decided that she wanted to have him spend some time with her in the city. She admitted that she was scared that he wouldn’t remember her when he got older and thus would neglect her in her old age. So she dragged him away kicking and screaming; she was a complete stranger to him. She returned him after a few weeks only to come back for him a few months later. This time, surprisingly, he was fine with going. She kept him for another few weeks. Apparently he decided that he liked the city better than the countryside, and since things hadn’t been going so well at home for the past few months before he’d left for the city he said that he didn’t want to go back to the country. But his birth mother had only wanted him with her for a few weeks and the man who’d raised him as a father got angry and called the little boy ungrateful for not wanting to return after all they’d done for him so they dumped him off with an elderly widow, a complete stranger to the boy. Now he’s her errand boy.

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Many urban Dominicans love to try out their English whenever they meet Americans. Once as Anna waited at an office the watch guard on duty practiced phrases from his English class with her. One of the phrases his textbook wanted him to learn was, “Oh what a peeping tom he is!”


-Hasta la próxima