Thursday, February 16, 2012

Echando pa' 'lante (Onward, ho)

I realized last week that it’s almost three months since I’ve updated my blog. The original point of this blog was to help share the excitement and exoticism of living in a foreign culture. So what do I say when the culture no longer seems so foreign or exotic? Increasingly it’s the American life that seems strange, not the Dominican. For example, last week Anna was reading a home decorating magazine that she had scavenged from a passing visitor. On page five there was a picture of a bright yellow door with the caption, “A front door says a lot about who lives inside. Is yours friendly? Low-key?” After my initial shock at the fact that some people get to choose what front door they have on their house, I wondered what it says when you just have a cracked door made of nailed-together wood scraps with the paint peeling off in chunks and strips of tin to cover the rotted holes. Low-key? Definitely. Friendly? Well it’s certainly unimposing. Then I noticed that the bronze door handle alone cost $278. About the price of a really nice functional latrine here, more than twice the average monthly salary of many of my neighbors.

There are of course those silly moments when I realize that I could only be in the highly-caffeinated culture of the Dominican Republic, and that’s what I tried to convey in the last blog. But increasingly there are less moments when I feel like an alien. This morning a neighbor boy hung around my house for about 15 minutes before he finally broached the reason for his visit. He had to make a trip to the city and had no money (since he hadn’t been paid for picking coffee because his employer hadn’t been paid for selling the coffee) so I loaned him 500 pesos (about $13). “No money” in the US means that you’re almost broke but probably have, at the very least, a few hundred dollars in the bank. And the ATM is a few-minute drive away. Here it means what it says. No money. Nada. Ni un peso. Most people don’t even have a bank account. So someone is always borrowing a few pesos from someone else until they get paid for their coffee or their beans. When I go to the colmado to buy food I occasionally don’t have enough money with me for everything I need, so I take it on credit until the following week when I have the cash to pay. A country where stores only allow you to buy what you can pay for in the moment, even though you need to buy the rice for lunch today and will have the money next week, seems cold and harsh. Although I guess that´s why Americans have so much credit card debt, they plan on paying tomorrow.

In the States I used to go to the supermarket or farmers’ market about once a week to stock up on food supplies. Here I buy most of what I need on a daily basis. The colmado is a two-minute walk down the road. If I start to make banana bread and find I’m short on sugar or eggs I’ll walk down to the colmado or yell for a neighbor boy to go. Imagining a life with unlimited electricity becomes increasingly more difficult. We’re at least fortunate enough to have a solar panel which provides for more than our electrical needs most of the year, except for the cloudy winter months. But most communities only have electricity a few hours a day, and over half of my neighbors have no solar panels which means they never have electricity. I was at a conference last week and beforehand I had made sure to ask if there would be electricity so that I could show a video. They replied that that particular town’s electricity usually lasted until seven or eight and as it was still only six o’clock I would be fine. I accepted the answer without pause, and only later began musing about how strange it would be to have electricity all the time and to live where neighbors never bring over their cellphones to be charged. I also no longer view having a private vehicle as the norm. If you have a personal car, no matter how beat-up, you’re somewhat well off. If you have a jipeta (SUV) you’re rolling in the money. Don’t be surprised if I ask you for food.

In January, I believe it was the 19th, we woke in the middle of the night to find the house shaking and rattling. As Anna succinctly put it, “It felt like we were inside a large box that an unruly giant was shaking as hard as possible.” As I came zooming up into consciousness from a deep REM sleep my first thought was that some cow was outside scratching its flanks against a house corner and thus rocking the house back and forth. I dove out from under the mosquito net and ran to the front door to scare away the cow. As my left hand opened the door and my right hand grabbed my machete from the wall the house stopped shaking and my dream-stained brain cleared. As I jumped out into the dark I realized without even looking that there was no cow. The next day everyone was talking about the (approximately) 5.3 tremor that had shuddered its way through the night. Naturally my neighbors wanted to know what the Americans did when they felt the earth quake. They mocked me when they found out I had thought that it was a cow scratching itself. But the simple truth remains, a large cow could give my tiny house a very dramatic and scary shaking. The DR had several tremors over the magnitude of 5.0 in the month of January. I only felt two, the one described above and other that made my plastic chair sway as I sat at an internet center in Ocoa. As I was working intently at the time I thought that someone had brushed my chair, and it was only about five minutes later as the room erupted into a roar as everyone found out about the tremor that I realized what had happened. As far as I know no one was seriously hurt in any of the tremors and property damage was mostly limited to cracked walls in a few houses.

Between riding out earthquakes and eating fresh lettuce and radishes from our garden we’ve been building latrines. I want to thank all of you that have donated to our projects. We’ll send you more specific information about the latrine projects when possible. We also hosted a fabulous bunch of friends over Christmas at our tiny hut. We went swimming in the river and ate cinnamon rolls and, on the cold rainy days, kept warm by drinking lots of hot rum toddies. We’ve also spent an unhealthy amount of time applying to graduate schools and travelling 90 bumpy minutes to get internet access. In addition we’ve also been doing a lot of translating and providing logistical assistance to a Canadian NGO that builds houses in our province. I took two boys to a mountains to sea conference in January as well, where we gave workshops on how rivers connect mountain ecosystems with the sea. In the beginning of February Peace Corps Dominican Republic celebrated its 50th anniversary. We spent a few days in Santo Domingo helping organize events, but the real reason we were there was to attend the celebratory parties and listen to the crazy stories of returned Peace Volunteers, especially those from the 60’s and 70’s.

It’s hard to believe we’ll be leaving here in May, three short months away. In truth I can’t quite comprehend it. I’ll be spending as much time here in the mountains as I can before then, hiking, chatting with neighbors and friends over rice and beans, playing with our cats, and puttering in the garden. Here are some pictures from the past months.

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