Cogiendolo suave

Irene has come and gone. In Santo Domingo the heavy sweat of summer has again huddled over the city. It sticks to everything. Just a walk to get a frozen yogurt leaves me complaining and uncomfortable. I do love the comforts that Santo Domingo offers: frozen yogurt, internet access, high quality cheese, a hot shower if I’m lucky, and, well you would think the list would be longer but it really isn’t. Apparently I’ve gone country.

We’re stuck here in this noisy, hot, polluted confusion of a city until roads get repaired. Flooding from Hurricane Irene washed out a large bridge leading up towards our community. To make matters worse a few miles past the bridge a large landslide completely buried the roadway so the towns in between these two points are inaccessible to vehicular traffic. This all happened this past Wednesday and supposedly on Friday heavy construction equipment started towards the disaster area to remove the landslides and start work on making the river passable again.

We live on top of a ridge so according to my neighbors our communities suffered very little damage compared to the neighboring areas in the lower valleys. Initial reports state that quite a few families lost their homes and a coffee nursery and many greenhouses were flooded. Many of the vegetables that weren’t flooded rotted because the roads were impassable for a few days.

The problem is not only that Hurricane Irene was rather forceful in this part of the Dominican Republic, but also that the government just invests so little in the infrastructure of the area. Granted it rained enough to flood a lot of houses and agricultural areas, but one of the main problems the province of San José de Ocoa is facing right now is that so many roads are closed due to landslides and damaged bridges.

I was scouring the internet for photographic evidence of Irene’s wrath when I came across a picture of a washed-out bridge identical to a photo that had appeared in Thursday’s newspaper. The only difference was the date – September 2008. After some more research it became clear that the same part of the bridge also disappeared under Hurricane Ike’s waters three years ago. reports at the time have almost identical wording to those from this past week. They report government officials promising to properly fix the bridge and to channel the river through a canal of sorts so as to avoid the erosion of the bridge’s approach areas when flood waters rise. Although I hope they actually carry through with their promises this time, you won’t see me crossing that bridge during any future hurricanes.

I called a neighbor of ours after the storm to see if the roads were passable. She assured me that they were, that trucks were fording the river, and that Anna’s project partner had made the trip the day after Irene passed through. It was only a few hours later when I finally reached Anna’s project partner on the phone that I realized just how bad the roads were. She had indeed traveled from San José de Ocoa up into the mountain communities, not by truck but by helicopter. She works for the mayor’s office and the government has supplied helicopters to fly food supplies to the stranded towns. It can be frustrating that as Peace Corps volunteers there is very little we can do in situations like this. We have no funds, no vehicles, no material resources of any kind. About the best thing we can do is just stay out of the way, even if it’s difficult not being there right now. It sounds like it will be at least a few days until the main road is passable. Traffic has started traveling on an alternative route across the Cordillera Central from the north. This route is often called a lucha (fight or struggle) by those who travel it because the road is in such awful condition. We plan to head home tomorrow.

Here’s a short summary of our August activities. We also got trapped in Santo Domingo for a few days during Tropical Storm Emily as we waited for the rains to pass. Thankfully there was very little flooding during that storm. And we finally finished painting the map mural we’ve been working on. The long-awaited avocado and passion fruit season is here. If you’ve never had fresh passion fruit (also known as maracuya or chinola) juice then find some, even if you have to fly to Latin America to find it. It’s worth it. Add a splash of Caribbean rum and you won’t know what hit you.

I go out with the neighbor kids and we spend an hour or so knocking down avocados and filling sacks. We often come home with about fifty pounds of tree-ripened avocado. Here are some ingredients for happiness: mash some fresh avocado, add some salt, some onion, some lime from the tree in our backyard, some fresh tomatoes from a neighbor’s field, and spread it all over campo corn-chips (deep-fried cornmeal mixed with water). Then pour a deep cup of rum and passion fruit juice, and enjoy the delectable flavors as you watch the last sunlight shimmer and edge down over the mountain as fireflies, furtive, flit out into the newly dark valley.

That was a big chunk of August. Here are some pictures.

Yes we worked some, but we are waiting on a lot of different things right now so most projects are in some sort of fermentation stage. At least I hope they’re fermenting and not staling. Only time will tell.

I will be in Pennsylvania in October. In return for my participation in the PA Twin Studies Program in which I have to spend a day as a lab rat in Chicago, I get a free trip to the States. I’m quite pleased with myself for being a twin. And of all the times in my life, now is the best time ever to get a free trip to the US. I’m looking forward to apple cider, Lapp Valley ice cream, bicycling, general gluttony, and of course seeing family and friends. Anna will also be there.

Speaking of twins, my twin came to visit me here in the DR last week. Whenever a fellow volunteer visits our site our neighbors always thinks they must be family. Even Anna and I often get asked by Dominicans who don’t know us if we are brother and sister. Of course all that just seems plain silly, but finally Dominicans had a good excuse for thinking that two Americanos look alike. Only moments after we arrived at our house together two neighbor boys showed up all excited. They had seen us all sailing by on motorcycle taxis. They said they saw Anna go by, and then I went by, and then I went by again a few seconds later, so they came running to see what was going on. (I assured them that the space-time fabric most certainly hadn’t torn and that calmed them somewhat.) Still they spent the next twenty minutes excitedly looking back and forth between the two of us as if they just couldn’t believe their eyes. Word soon got out among the kids. Anna and Leonard went walking down the road that evening as I finished washing the supper dishes. They both pretended that he was me and just let Anna do most of the talking. James, a neighbor of ours, had chatted with them a few minutes when some of the kids, who had already seen both of us, told him that this wasn’t really Leon, that Leon was actually still in the house.

I was rinsing off the last plates when I heard footsteps outside our door. I stuck my head out and James greeted me emphatically, saying, “I came down here to undeceive myself.” He looked thunderstruck. He said, “The kids told me that that wasn’t Leon up in the street but I didn’t believe them. And here you are. But you were just up there too!” He stayed for a few minutes, hands on his hips, swaying back and forth as if slightly tipsy, muttering about how this just couldn’t be. For the next few days people streamed by our house. A lot of these people had never even visited us before, but they came just to stick their head in the door for two minutes to see the two Leons, as they called us. This is so much funnier in Spanish since leon is the Spanish word for lion. The kids had a heyday.

Our neighbor boy Pilo, who’s a frequent visitor, came by because I’d called him to send him to the colmado for sugar and eggs. I tried to get him to go out under the mango tree where Leonard was reading and meet him. He refused. His seven-year-old logic was simple: “But I don’t have to go meet him because I’ve already met him. Every time that I’ve come to visit you I’ve visited him. I already know him because I know you and you two are clearly the same person.”

It was a hilarious time. I must confess that I was a bit confused at the level of pandemonium that we caused at first. After all it’s not like identical twins are unheard of here. One of our neighbor families has identical twin girls and no one seems too disturbed by the fact that they look so much alike. On a side note, it seems that a common Dominican tradition with identical twins is to give them identical names, except to reverse the order. For example if twin one is named Marie Anne then twin two is named Anne Marie. But eventually I think I figured out why it was perhaps such a shock for my community to see two of me. We live in a very rural area and I am one of the few foreigners anyone ever gets to know quite well. Peace Corps volunteers often joke about going into celebrity status withdrawal when moving back to the States because they will miss walking or riding through their communities and hearing people yell out their names. Our community members tend to see us as very unique, never for once imagining that there are more than 200 of us swarming busily over all corners of this tiny high-on-sugar island. The point is that their perception of a volunteer’s uniqueness is so artificially heightened that to see two is just barely comprehensible. I truly felt like a magician.