Llegó el fin

It’s seems like a dream when I realize that my time with Peace Corps Dominican Republic is over. I’ll be back in Pennsylvania for the summer on May 24. And who knew that leaving was going to be the hardest part?

We spent our last few months finishing up our latrine project. Here are a few photos. The school kids helped me paint a mural of Hispaniola. We played with our cats. We harvested a lot of lettuce and radishes from our garden. We hiked Pico Duarte, the highest peak in the Caribbean. I spent a few days hiking through the national park Valle Nuevo that connects our province, San José de Ocoa, with Constanza, the high mountain valley to our north that produces such wonderful, but un-Caribbean produce like apples, strawberries, cabbage, and broccoli. And of course we spent a lot of time just trying to savor the last few weeks in our peaceful shack surrounded by wonderful neighbors, clever kitties, and verdant lush mountains. And now it’s over.

We also traveled to visit several other volunteers’ communities. The DR continues to astound me with its biodiversity. We visited a batey in the southwest. Batey’s are small communities where agricultural workers live in close proximity. They spring up around sugar-cane, coffee and cacao plantations. Some bateys only have inhabitants during harvest time, while others have become permanent communities. Traditionally bateys were filled with migrant Haitian workers. But in many cases a lot of those migrant Haitians just stayed so that several generations later these bateys have become small communities of mostly Spanish-speaking people of Haitian descent. This was the case for the batey that we visited. The people in the bateys still subsist off of working on large agricultural plantations, and in the south this consists mostly of working in the sugar-cane fields. The culture and cuisine of the bateys have distinct Haitian influences. The most important food influences, to me at least, are the Haitian bread called biskwi, and the (often spicy) peanut butter called mamba. While in the southwest we also visited the town of Los Rios beside Lago Enriquillo, a salt lake approximately the size of Manhattan. Unfortunately for the farmers surrounding the lake, the lake’s water level keeps rising at a substantial rate engulfing dozens of acres of farmland each year. Deforestation in the Sierra de Neyba plays a large part in the rising water level. Fewer trees mean that the soil cannot absorb as much rainwater thus much more runoff ends up in the rivers that feed Lago Enriquillo. We also visited Los Guineos in the northeast where a fellow volunteer is working on a kayak tourism project on Laguna Limon, a large freshwater lake that occasionally overflows into the Atlantic Ocean just outside of Samaná Bay. From there we took a boat north across Samaná Bay to Samaná Peninsula and visited a few of the most beautiful beaches that I’ve ever seen.

After completing my service I also spent a few days in Haiti. It was very interesting to see the other side of the island. Here are some photos. The DR and Haiti have much shared history and geography, and yet they’ve turned out, so far, very differently. About 27 percent of the DR remains forested while Haiti has only about 1 percent forest cover. This has huge ramifications on things as far-ranging as soil erosion, amount of rainfall, soil quality, and hydroelectricity potential. In terms of development, even when accounting for all the damage caused by the 2010 earthquake, Haiti is a long way behind the Dominican Republic. This is even harder to understand when you realize that at the end of the eighteenth century Haiti was the richest colony in the Americas. Today it’s one of the poorest countries in the entire Western Hemisphere. I have been fascinated with the question of why the two countries, they share the same island after all, have turned out so differently. My visit was partly a continuation of my quest to understand how two countries on one island can have such distinct outcomes.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I signed up for Peace Corps. I knew that I’d be living in a foreign country for two years, and that was enough. But Peace Corps for me has been so much more than just 27 months on an exotic, unimaginably beautiful subtropical island. Like all unique experiences, it’s very difficult to put into words. If I had to pick one single most important thing that I’m taking away from Peace Corps, I would probably choose the perspective on life that it’s given me. Being part of a close-knit community for two years not only taught me about cross-cultural relations, but it also taught me a lot about how communities in general function. The world is big and very complex, much more so than most people believe. What makes perfect sense to you might make no sense at all to someone from a different culture, and like it or not, that’s just the way it is. Open-mindedness, patience, and adaptability are some of the most crucial skills in surviving and working in a foreign culture. Some cultural differences are fun, some are quaint and amusing, and some are just plain infuriating. But, for the most part, they are almost impossible to change. But it's amazing how much more sense all of the differences make when,through living their lifestyle, you try to see the world through the eyes of people from a foreign culture.

Peace Corps has taught me to value friendship more. It has taught me that individuals, as opposed to their environment, can often be the limiting factor in trying to achieve their dreams. I deal better with failure. I can relax more when things are out of my control.

As sad as I am to leave I will not miss LOUD music (I’m pretty sure that I’ve experienced hearing loss), the it-will-eventually-happen attitude which makes everything take 10 times as long as it should, blatant animal and child abuse, the culture of procrastination, and lack of waste management.

I will however miss neighbor kids who pop in to visit at any hour, the view from our kitchen window, the freedom to take siestas almost whenever I want, colmados, free lunch at any doña’s house when I visit over noontime, the culture of sharing, Peace Corps friends, public transport that can take you anywhere in the country, and just generally La Gran Libertad of this crazy island where pretty much everything goes.

It has truly been an incredible life-changing adventure. Thanks for sharing it with us.


-Leon

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.

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

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.

Summertime

Summer is bounding by and I have been too busy (and too much of a procrastinator) to update my blog for a while. Here’s what we’ve been up to in the last two months. As far as work goes we’re still working on building a few more latrines, as well as waiting to see if we get more funds donated. I am also in the process of trying to organize a group of coffee farmers in my community to get together and start a large coffee nursery, but that project is still formulating so it makes for rather boring talk and even more boring photos.

In June we started painting a map mural on the wall of the local school. That has been great fun and the some of the neighborhood kids have really enjoyed practicing their drawing and painting skills. Check out the photos. The only real problem has been that the night watchman of the school leaves to work in his fields early in the morning. This in itself is not a problem because he can leave the keys at a neighbor’s house. And he sometimes does, but other times we’ll walk the 20 minutes to school only to find out that the watchman carried off the keys so we have no other choice but to walk back home. I have talked to him many times about this and in typical Dominican fashion he is very agreeable and promises to leave the keys the following morning. But as so many of us volunteers have learned, there is often a big difference here between what you say and what you do. People mean well, but they often have a mindset like the man who recently chided me when I was in a hurry, “Life is short, slow down and enjoy it.” This, I’ve recently realized, is one of the reasons the DR is such a wonderful place in which to play and travel. But when it comes to organizing work projects, expect your share of setbacks and headaches.

Early July was a rather difficult time as our wonderful cat Schnickelfritz died of apparent poisoning. I know that various neighbors put out rat poison and he must have found something contaminated. It was a sad day. On a brighter note, about a week before this a starved little kitty showed up at our house one morning and, after we gave it some food, moved in with us. We christened him Clunkers because the name seemed to suit his ratty condition. The neighbor kids called him ratoncito (little mouse) for a few days.

Over the fourth of July we went hiking in the Cordillera Central and then spent a day in the beautiful valley of Constanza. Enjoy the photos.

Also Anna’s parents came to visit the past two weeks. We had a wonderful time introducing them to our communities and then spent a few fabulous days at a beautiful beach. Just check out the pictures.

A Walk In The Woods

I decided to document one of my days in pictures listing the time when the photo was taken so that you can get an idea what my day looked like. Of course I focused on the moments and colors that caught my eye, but the photo gallery gives you a good idea of life here. This particular day I went to visit various latrine beneficiaries to check up on how they are doing with their latrines. The community in which I work is located on the banks of a small river. The vehicular road ends at the river where you can cross a footbridge or wade across the river to other side where about half of my community lives. To get to their houses across the river people either walk or ride a horse or mule. There are quite a few families who live a 30-60 minute walk from the footbridge that crosses the river. Most of these photos are taken across the river where quite a few of the latrine beneficiaries live.

As you may remember I live a one hour walk, in the opposite direction of the river, from my community. The first public transport of the jeep of the day usually passes my house around 7:30. They’re used to my hitchhiking on the back by now. When I hear the jeep climbing up the hill before my house I grab my backpack, run up the steep hill by my house to the road, the jeep slows down, and I jump on. It’s usually at least a 20 minute ride to the river, which gives you an idea of how bad the road is when I can walk the same distance in 60 minutes.

Enjoy the photos.

Chivos sin Ley

Dominicans have the expression Chivos sin Ley (Goats without Law) for good reason. This is one of the more noticeable aspects of Dominican culture and everyone who has spent any amount of time here can usually recount dozens of incidents to illustrate this. What does it mean to live like a chivo sin ley? Well imagine a frisky young goat that is smart enough to always get out of its pen and then it wanders about wherever its whims lead. A lot of Dominican public life is just that.

Imagine a life with no rules. If you are driving down the road and you get thirsty, stop. Walk into a colmado, pay no attention to whether there is a line or not, walk up to the counter and shout for a cold one and some chips. Don’t settle for a small beer; get a whole liter while you’re at it. Grab the beer and get back on the road. And now that you’re feeling so good with that ice-cold liter in your hand you might as well driver faster because that will just enhance the good feeling. You finished your bag of chips. Bag goes out the window and the wind cartwheels it smack against a no-littering sign. Forty minutes later that jug of beer left your bladder bloated. The next rest area must be five minutes away. Stop, no matter where you are, relieve yourself on the highway shoulder or on the sidewalk.

If you are in the city only stop at red lights if you’re on a four-lane road. If it’s a smaller road you might consider slowing down so that you can look left and right as you breeze through. If it’s a stop sign just speed up and lay on your horn to scare off any incoming traffic.

If you need a parking spot at your barber’s and none exist just drive to the closest bank, park right in front of the “Parking for Clients Only” sign, and walk jauntily away from your vehicle. When the bank guard (who’s holding a sawed-off shotgun) yells at you that this parking spot is for clients only, you menacingly reply, “But I am a client.”

Last month, in an attempt to clear some land for pasture, a neighbor of mine started a giant fire up in the mountain. It burned for days and piled smoke high into the sky. The green trees have been replaced by an ugly singed scar. It’s illegal to burn down forests, as you might well imagine. So on the fifth day some police arrived and demanded that the owner of the land appear at court in the provincial capital. A few days later I overheard someone ask the culprit’s nephew how much the fine was for burning down so many trees. The nephew inhaled deeply on his cigarette, leaned back against the painted palm-board house and spoke though the swirling smoke, “Nada, tuvo conexiones” (Nothing, he had connections).

I was standing at the hardware store one day ordering supplies when the guy behind the desk who had been helping me suddenly picked up his phone and as a look of consternation crossed his face he ran out into the street, jumped on a motorcycle, and roared away. Confused I asked another worker what just happened. He shrugged and mumbled something about someone taking their truck. Taken aback and curious I kept asking him until finally it was clear that a policeman had stolen their work truck. Yes, you read right. A policeman walking by jumped into their truck, apparently the keys were sticking, and drove off. After persistent questioning the story came clear. To get sand (for cement mixes) from the local river you are required to get a permit from the ministry of environment. The hardware store had just illegally picked up a load of sand at the river and brought it up to the store to sell, and that’s when the policeman walked by and took the truck. After completing my purchase I walked back to the motorcycle stop to catch a ride home. On the way as I went by the police station I saw the guilty truck weighed heavy with sand and the hardware store owner and the policeman were leaned lazily against the truck bed as if discussing the previous night’s baseball game. The following week when back at the store I asked the hardware man how much the fine was. He gave me a noncommittal shrug and said, “Nada, lo arreglamos” (Nothing, we got it straightened out).

I was on a public bus the other month and it was the first time I had gone on that route. The fare attendant told me the price was 300 pesos so I paid. A few minutes later a friend of mine who was a few seats back asked me how much I’d paid, and when I told him he replied that it was actually only 285 pesos. I jumped up and asked how many of the passengers had been overcharged. Most of them had. I then turned my attention on the attendant who by now was angry that his secret was out. After much protesting on my part he’d just reached into his pocket to get my change when apparently something I was saying really got his goat and he abruptly withdrew his hand from his pocket and sullenly slurred, “Now your trip really is going to be 300 pesos.” I admit I too got angry. I tried to get the other passengers (after all they’d all been robbed as well) together to do something but they pretty much ignored me.

As a side note, this really puzzled me at first because in my poor community, trying to overcharge one person 5 pesos is enough to set the entire bus in an uproar, but here the attendant had just overcharged pretty much everyone on the bus 15 pesos and no one bothered to say anything. I soon realized that most of the passengers were residents of Santo Domingo where apparently 15 pesos doesn’t matter as much as it does to a poor farmer.

Back to the point, no one would help me in arguing against the attendant so I heckled him every few minutes for the entire three-hour bus ride. Finally after everyone else had already left the bus we came to my stop but I wouldn’t get off the bus. I just stood in the door calling him a robber. The crafty attendant then yelled to the driver to accelerate and I had to jump of the bus as it sped away from the sidewalk. You win some you lose some. But the point here is that even if 15 pesos meant nothing to any of those other passengers they should have stuck together and demanded their money back just for the principle of it all. Dominicans love to talk politics and about how politicians and other leaders are ruining this country, and from what I see they’re quite right. But there is another factor ruining this county and it’s those chivos sin ley.

Interestingly enough, just two days previous to the very disagreeable bus ride just mentioned I had hitchhiked across a substantial portion of this tiny island. Among the many helpful Dominicans who gave me rides were two public transport vehicles. When I flagged them down I asked if they’d please just give me a ride, and they did. And they were not in the least resentful that I was riding for free. Imagine that happening in the states.

This should go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: not all Dominicans live like chivos sin ley. A lot of people are actively campaigning to try and change this mentality. The government has actually put up traffic signs up that say “We can’t live like goats without law; please obey posted traffic laws.” Now if only government leaders would take the message to heart as well. Many Dominicans, when questioned, will admit that the chivos sin ley method is not a good way to build a society. But they will also admit that they’d miss their freedom if they had enforced laws like the US does. Apparently when most of the other chivos are running around free outside the fence, it’s really hard to not get out there as well.

April, 2011

It’s hard to believe we’re already in May. This month we’re getting ready to celebrate the completion of one year of Peace Corps service. And that makes it one year to go. April was quite busy for us. We managed to get started on our latrine projects with the grants we’ve received. I also took two teenagers from my community to a weekend-long Brigada Verde conference where Peace Corps volunteers presented a lot of environment workshops to the youth. The third week in April is Semana Santa and in the DR nothing much, besides a big party, happens. Dozens of cars and trucks rolled by our house all week long as city people headed to visit their rural relatives and friends where they hung out by the river and chattered and drank and swam. We spent the week relaxing at home, catching up on reading, and working in the garden. I also applied more roof pitch to the numerous holes in our would-be leaky roof.

May promises to be very busy as well as we plan to start stove projects and we have a mid-service Peace Corps conference where we get together with other volunteers to talk about what worked (or didn’t work) in the past year and plan projects for the coming year. I’ll keep you updated. Meanwhile here are a few pictures from April.

One year in the DR

Here are a few pictures that give you a glimpse into our daily lives.

I’ve found it difficult to update since we’re back from vacation. Part of that difficulty is to be blamed on a pair of ladrones who managed to swipe my laptop and other electronics. I was on a carro publico, squeezed in the front with the driver and another unsavory passenger, when the driver asked me to adjust his mirror. He kept shouting that I was not adjusting the mirror right, saying that the gringo didn’t understand while in turn I was yelling at him that yes, I did understand and in fact the confusion was his fault because he clearly didn’t know up from down. Meanwhile his clever-fingered friend was talented enough to get a zipper open on my backpack and amidst the yelling confusion he nicked my laptop. I of course didn’t realize it until later when I opened my bag to get something and realized my computer was missing. After thinking carefully over the previous trip it became obvious that the only place I could have been robbed unawares was in the carro publico.

Yes it was partly my fault. I should have been more careful. Hindsight has 20/20 vision. I’ve been living here a year now and in my campo things are really much more tranquilo. I think if someone robbed me there my neighbors would find out who it was and tar-and-feather them. So I guess I have been too lax in the capital. Thankfully I have insurance so I mostly just lost some photos and various work-related documents.


Thanks to insurance I now have a new computer so I will again be able write updates at home. I didn’t have much internet access this past month and most of my internet time was used up on work-related business.

Our latrine projects are moving forward. We spent a lot of time these past two months in visiting homes, deciding exactly which homes have the greatest need for bathrooms, and getting everything set up so that we’ll be ready to actually officially start soon. We bought materials last week and construction on the first bathrooms is slated to begin the first week in April. I’ll keep you updated.

Last week I organized a tree-planting activity. Along with the school-kids and a neighbor guy we planted about 40 trees around the cisterns of the aqueduct system. The previous week community members had fenced in the cisterns to keep out nosy cows that wander through the pasture and these trees will eventually help shade the cisterns to keep the water cooler.

I took two young boys from my community to a weekend Brigada Verde conference in the beginning of March that was held at a conference center in the south. I gave a talk on deforestation so as part of my class I carried along some tamarind trees and another volunteer brought along a cherry tree, a mango tree, and an avocado tree so as part of learning about the importance of trees the kids actually got to plant trees at. Hopefully future kids at the center get to enjoy the fruit from the trees.


We finally got a saddle for our horse Lucero, affectionately known as Luci. I haven’t ridden her very much. I’m still learning how to ride as I’ve hardly ever ridden before but Anna spends a fair amount of time with her.

As you may know cockfighting is a major sport here in the DR. A cockfighting ring is called a gallera. This is where the parties happen. In my community cockfights are held most Sunday afternoons and it often is as much a part of the day as going to church. It’s where the guys get together to drink a little Dominican rum and roughhouse around betting money on crazy roosters while the ladies hang out gossiping. For some reason they pluck all the feathers off of the fighting roosters’ legs and thighs. I asked my neighbor why and he said that it makes them más fuerte, stronger. I’m pretty sure that it just desensitizes them to pain on the lower part of their body. Another neighbor boy has a fighting cock that has developed a taste for beer. Sometimes on the way to the gallera he stops for a beer and when he does the rooster that he’s holding will drink beer directly out of the same plastic cup that he’s using. Apparently this isn’t all that uncommon. Another neighbor told me that immediately before or after a fight he will often let his rooster take a few sips of rum to really boost its energy. Many men also give their fighting cocks some sort of energy pill (I don’t know what the ingredients are) about an hour before a fight so that their rooster is more aggressive and stronger in the fight. A lot of money is bet on these cockfights. In my rural community I’ve heard that people sometimes bet up to 1,000 pesos($26)on one fight. I know one young guy who is saving up his winnings to buy a motorcycle. At the galleras in the bigger towns hardly anyone bothers with 1,000 peso bets. I know my neighbor kids go to watch the high-tension cockfights in neighboring towns where you supposedly have to pay 25-100 pesos just to get into the gallera. The sizes of the bets there make their eyes bulge. They have reportedly seen bets of over 50,000 pesos (about $1,322) placed on a single cockfight. For obvious reasons tensions are usually simmering in the alcohol-soaked air of the galleras. Just last month a young twenty-something Dominican was killed in a machete fight at a neighboring community’s gallera. Two days ago in a jeep coming down off the mountain I heard about another guy who was killed in pistol fight at a local gallera. I have yet to go to a cockfight and hopefully I’ll never go. Cockfighting is clearly a mistreatment of animals and I’ve met various Dominicans who don’t raise fighting cocks because they just don’t like the bloodiness of it all. But they are in the minority. Cockfighting has been and continues to be a huge part of many Hispanic cultures. Obviously many people find the strong mix of blood-stained roosters, dusty shout-filled air, seemingly endless alcohol, and gambling to be an irresistible and heady combination. So unfortunately for the roosters involved it doesn’t seem likely that cockfighting is about to die out anytime soon.

More photos: mangos and auyama seeds

I really don't have much more to say with all this updating I'm doing today. But I do have more photos of the past months. Salud.

High Technology

This Dominican mixture of extremely rural living mixed with what the Mennonites would call High Technology just gets weirder. Yesterday I wanted to make a kitty hole in our house wall for Schnickelfritz. I finished the hole (using only a flat screwdriver and a hammer) in under 10 minutes. And it's cute and perfect for when kitty gets the wanderlust. That piece of rotted wall seems so incongruous with the lovely solar panel perched above it.

Now today I am sitting at the local school, a 15 minute walk from my shack/house, connected to high-speed internet when we don't even have electric lines. Apparently the ministry of education gave all school directors a laptop and a wireless internet card (it runs off the cell phone network and is faster than some internet centers here). What the government didn't do is teach the teachers how to use this High Technology. So in exchange for computer and internet lessons the director here lets me use his wireless card. So hopefully I will have internet access at least once a week and hopefully sometimes oftener.

In other good news the mayor finally came through and today the township began grading our road for the first time since we've been here. Everyone is so excited that most men in the community are just out following the grader around and watching. There is a sort of jubilant ecstasy in the air that the grader has finally arrived. They can get more crops out faster. And they don't have to steer their motorcycles around foot-deep ruts. My question is what the community will talk about now. The road was so rutted and eroded that it was (and rightly so) a constant topic of conversation these past months.

We just (some weeks ago) discovered that a local family makes something akin to ricotta cheese. It's called boruga and the Dominicans eat it with lots of brown sugar. They let fresh cow milk turn into buttermilk and then dump off the buttermilk water into another container. Then they slowly add more milk to this buttermilk water and the boruga forms on top. I've never bought food with live cultures so cheaply before. I tried it the Dominican way with sugar and it's utterly repelling. We eat it salted with Anna's fabulous flat-bread and fresh peppers. I can't really describe how wonderful it is to have a fresh milk-product to eat regularly after so many months of cheese deprivation.

Noah comes to life

The following is written Tuesday August 24.

First, here are some photos.

Yes it’s been a long time since I updated. The reasons are many: lack of internet time, lack of personal computer, lack of electricity, lack of a kitty . . . oh wait, that’s not a reason. Well you get the picture. The news is all good. So many wonderful things have happened that it’s hard to know where to start.
We finally moved into our own house on August 1st. And life is suddenly so much better. Well to be fair to our previous host family a great part of the better-ness comes from it not raining every day anymore. But the food has also improved greatly. Yes we have sun and lots of it. From May 14 to the end of July we had about 17 days saturated with rain plus another 15 days of long showers. And that’s not counting the days where it just spritzed. So we sat in our little room and read and read and read and wished for a home of our own where we could at least be cooking and not be cooped up in one little room with not much privacy.

We’ve been eating a lot of fresh oranges and avocados. So lots of guacamole with Dominican corn chips that Anna makes from mixing water and corn flour and pan-frying it. The chips are much better than the ingredients suggest. Our communities grow lots of tomatoes and peppers, so we’ve also been making fabulous salsa from fresh tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, and basil or cilantro. It beats the boiled viveres every time. We eat a lot of potatoes as well as the traditional Dominican rice and beans. But even our rice and beans are better. First we use brown rice; it’s not even very much more expensive but so much tastier and more nutritious. And then our brilliant chef-in-residence, Anna, makes bean-and-rice burgers. We boil the beans and rice together and then add salsa and egg and fry them into a burger-shaped mound of comida rica. Just don’t forget to add some guacamole. Admittedly the burgers don’t always stick together that well, but it sure beats the daily Dominican grind of heaping a mountain of white rice on your lunch plate, forming a deep crater with your spoon, and then filling the crater to overflowing with soupy beans. Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the passion fruit juice. We have all we can drink and then some. The juice is so sour you have to add quite a bit of sugar to make it perfect, and perfect it is with Dominican rum and popcorn. But with all the sugar I just can’t drink a lot of it every day. When our neighbor found out that we were buying some she tried to sell us a 100 fruits. We finally agreed on 30 and then she brought us 30 more the following week. Now every time she walks by she yells, “Leo, no quieres mas chinola?” “Do you want more passion fruit?” I assure her that I’ll let her know once we’ve gobbled up all the ones that we have, but all the same she incessantly keeps asking.

In the beginning of August I finally got my new computer, a tiny cherry-red netbook that is almost as cute as it is useful. This finally allows me to write while I’m at my site so that when I get to the internet I can use that preciously small amount of time to do the online work that’s always waiting and still get emails sent. So I should be able to update more frequently in the future. Since we have the computer we’ve been working a lot on grant writing this month. In September we each plan to send two grants soliciting funds to build latrines and we each also plan to apply for funding to do stove projects. I still have a bit more work to do on my price lists, but the grants should all be ready to send off by mid-September.

As of today, our own latrine is finally finished. It was quite the long process, but I guess one month is about right to build a seven-square-foot latrine. The deal was that I pay for the materials and pay the mason to do the cement work instead of paying rent, and then he would finish the job. But my landlord is semi-retired and rather lethargic, so it took some pushing and finally some hard manual labor on my part, but we eventually finished. I helped one day put to up the boards. They use palm boards which are so hard that you have to drill a hole before nailing because a nail just splits them. These boards reputedly easily last a hundred years on the outside of a building as long as they aren’t constantly getting wet. Our drill was a hand-held, manually operated (by me) contraption called a bar-b-king. I have no idea where that name comes from, but it makes me smile every time I say it because I feel like I’m ordering fast-food. And this thing makes you feel about as bad as fast-food does. For a drill bit we used a sharpened nail. So basically what made the hole was not the nail, masquerading as a drill bit, but me pushing against the bar-b-king with my chest. My chest bruises lasted several days. And then I spent another day helping Mr. Lethargy, who actually worked really hard the two days I helped, hang the door. The door frame was bigger than the door so he found a four-inch-thick post to close the gap. Smashing, except that our biggest nails were, you guessed it, four inches long. So we spent a pleasant 45 minutes under the shade of a lemon tree while he used a hammer and somewhat dull chisel to carve out five square holes about an inch deep in the side of the post so that we could get the nails in deep enough to bite into the existing door frame. Oh and the lovely door is about five-and-a-half feet tall. If you lift it off the floor about three inches that puts the upper door frame at just about my eye level. It’s a perfect pain when I’m leaving the bathroom in a hurry.

We dug a small garden at the end of July. Yes, we did it the hard way like real PCV’s trained by Tim Kiefer. We dug the double-dig. Our house sits on a small hill and the surrounding soil is very sandy. Not Caribbean beach sand, but grainy sand that when dry turns into cement-like rock. Needless to say, this made digging the latrine hole great fun. Any topsoil that existed close to the house was pushed down the hill when a level spot was cleared for building. So we dug our garden partway down the hill where we still found a decent amount of good topsoil. Yesterday we planted sweet corn, string beans, and zucchini in the garden. We also have tomatoes, cilantro, chives, and broccoli germinating in pots in the house. Some weeks ago we transplanted some basil clippings from a neighbor’s garden and the basil is thriving.

You may recall that our community has no electricity. About 15 – 30% of people have small solar panels to power light bulbs and charge cell phones. So we bought Noah, a two-foot-square, 12 volt, 50 watt solar panel. We now have plenty of power to charge our phones and, more importantly, our computer. In case you’re unfamiliar with solar power, I’ll give a quick explanation of how it works. Noah converts the sun’s energy-filled photons into DC electricity and sends the electricity through a charge controller which then charges our 150 amp hour battery. The charge controller makes sure the battery doesn’t overcharge or get too empty. We have an inverter that converts the DC electricity in AC so that we can charge our electronics. When the sun goes down I clip the wires from my 12-volt light bulb directly to the battery and, voila, there is light. Also the schools in our communities recently got solar power as well. The German embassy supplied the funds while a Dominican group supplied the labor. Each photovoltaic system produces around 2-3 kilowatt. They also provide the school with an inverter and a computer and a printer. These groups supplied eight schools in the DR with solar power this year. The big inauguration was in my community. In typical Dominican fashion, a culture that loves the glitz and the fanfare of the openings and beginnings of things, they had hung balloons everywhere and had dragged in one of those boom-box trucks with the bed filled with ear-splitting speakers. After we waited over an hour the German ambassador himself rolled in with his entourage. Then we sweated through various speeches and thank you letters, but it was all rather exciting. I am a big fan of solar power, anywhere in the world. I helped install a small photovoltaic system at my college that was mainly being used as an educational tool but that would power approximately one entire computer room. That experience was amazing. Here I lived for only three months without electricity and then wired up a solar panel which allowed me to charge my phone and computer and to use a light bulb at night. This one small panel is such an enormous help to my work here (not to mention my recreation) that I’m still in awe in each day when the sun’s first photons slip over the morning mountain and my charge controller kicks into carga profunda. Imagine if you were an 80-year-old man who never thought he would see a light bulb in his community and then, boom, the community group solicits aid and in a year some people show up and without even bothering to build electric lines they just put some funny boxes on the school roof and your school and community center have light for meetings. As wonderful as solar power is as an alternative energy source in developed countries, it becomes much more ideal and incredible and delightful when it’s installed where there is absolutely no other electrical source. It just means so much more.

In other exciting news a neighbor gifted us with a lovely little tabby kitten which we named Schnickelfritz. For those of you not on the fast track with Pennsylvania German, a schnickelfritz is a very mischievous person who generally is so cute that she is often able to get away with her mischievous capers. Since he is so travieso we named him Schnickelfritz, or Fritz for short since the Dominicans can’t even begin to pronounce the full name. Even their pronunciation of Fritz sounds like “Freece” to rhyme with fleece, but with the ”r” slightly rolled. It doesn’t sound remotely like Fritz, giving us much amusement and allowing us to laugh back at all those who laugh at our Spanish. In typical Dominican fashion Fritz has another nick-name, Kitty. Since we often say kitty kitty when we call him, various people now also call him Kitty. Fritz is a great lover of eating until his tummy swells alarmingly, climbing up into a lap (ideally in the sun), and then stretching out and purring so loudly that it sounds like a small motorbike. Pilo, the seven-year-old neighbor boy who visits a lot and likes Fritz so much that he tends to hug him so tightly that Fritz gets scared, says that “Fritz has started his motor” whenever he hears the loud rumbling purr. In his other pastimes Fritz climbs ladders, chews on grass and shoes, and climbs our mosquito net. We awoke one morning to find him, meowing loudly, on top of our mosquito net. When he saw we were awake he started purring loudly and fumbled about up there for a full half-hour like an out-of-control trapeze singer. He kept trying to get closer to us while we lay below and mocked his staggering lunges. So far Fritz is mostly meowing in Spanish. When he’s really hungry he will sometimes switch to English to get us to understand, so it seems he’s capable of that language too. What seem to give him the most difficulty are those guttural German growls. But we expect him to live up to his name and learn eventually.

Water in my paint

I have never experienced this much rain in all my life. Since we got to site in mid-May, we´ve spent almost 3 weeks lounging around reading, pretending to be working, and reading some more while the rain proceeded to turn our road into an impassible hill of sludge. The locals claim it usually doesn´t rain this much in the summer. I feel they may just be lying so that we don´t pack our bags and head to the beach until the rains are over.

I came in to Ocoa today to buy more paint. Last week we got a bed, a stove and a gas tank, and some paint. My host family is convinced that a gallon of acrylic paint needs at least a liter of water added to it. At least 5 people came up to me and asked why I had not added water to the paint. I said that it was runny enough. They replied that no, that´s what water-based paint means, it means you add water so that it covers more. I tried to explain that watery paint just needs more coats, but they didn´t agree so we stubbornly painted on. Now they think I´m wasteful as well as ignorant. Ignorant in that I´m always asking what things are called. Once I asked what a screwdriver is called. My host dad told me, and then went and fetched a screw and turning it with the screwdriver demonstrated what the screwdriver was for. Well, I hadn´t known that before. Now I know how I can get those screws to hold my new deadbolts in place.

Last week we dug the hole for our latrine. They did their best to hide their shock when they saw I knew how to handle a pick and shovel as well as any of them. Well I guess there are lot more surprises in store for all of us.

Our day in Photos.

courtesy of Anne, here are some photos of a typical day in the mountains.

100 bananas later

I've been in the capital for the past 3 days running errands. I changed my phone to a company with better service. I went to china town to buy batteries and to print out some pics from a one-year old's birthday party. And I've been desperately trying to get my laptop fixed, but I think it may finally have died. The computer shop will let me know on Monday what is wrong. Oh the horrors.

I've also spent hours on the internet researching information for possible projects like latrines, efficient cooking stoves, improved coffee-farming practices, and solar electric systems. I've thoroughly enjoyed the noise and culture of the city. Coming back here for a few days has made me realize that I don't miss the blasting heat of the coast, but I do miss - at least a little bit - the cheap beer, colmados (very convenient convenience stores) on every corner, loud music, accessible electricity, and a big variety of fresh fruit.

We always get more bananas than we can eat, and when someone from our community visits Bani (several hours away) we occasionally get a mango or two. Eventually, when in season, we will have lots of passion fruit, oranges, and avacados. And when we cook for ourselves, we can buy more fruit in the nearest town. But for now we eat bananas, raw, boiled, or fried.

One of our first days in sight our host mom gave me a huge clump of bananas. She said, "Here, here, have some bananas." I said, "You know I really can't eat that many bananas." She smiled knowingly and said, "But these are for when you get hungry."

A few days later when I couldn't stand the rotting banana smell anymore I made sure no one was watching and then opened my window and hurled handfuls of black bananas to the eager chickens waiting in the coffee field.

The next day my host mom asked, "Are your bananas all yet?" Truthfully, reluctantly, I said, "Yes."

That night I had a new bunch of bananas, this time sealed in a 5 gallon bucket to ensure that I would be blissfully unaware of their slow, slimy decay. Since I'm offered plenty of bananas throughout the day, I pretty much forgot about my banana bucket for almost a week, but then one day I thought maybe I should try to eat at least some before they all rotted. I opened the bucket inside the room. That was my first mistake. The only yellow that still existed in the bucket was the supermarket bag that contained the bananas. It took several hours to properly air out the room. My second mistake was using my hand to empty the bag, one banana at a time. It was more like one handful of slimy organic compost at a time.

I no longer accept bananas in my room; I accept only what I can eat immediately. And I no longer look furtively about before throwing away a banana. I just cluck a little bit, and the happy chickens come running.


We live up in the mountains, along a winding dirt road. It's stunning. It's gorgeous. And its rural. It takes us about 4 hours (approx. 100 miles)on a good day to get there from Santo Domingo. It takes a good half hour to cover the last 8 miles of the winding, hilly, often muddy, and (in places) treacherous roadway. We will be working primarily with 2 communities, about 4 hilly miles apart. We live in Anna's community and I will walk or hitchhike to mine when I'm working there. For now we are just walking around visiting everyone, studying Spanish, gossiping with the locals, and trying to outline possible projects. I printed out some papers while I'm here in the capitol and I hope to start teaching English soon.

Tomorrow I catch an early bus. Despite the fabulous few days with flushing toilets and plenty of electricity, I'm glad to head back. I miss the crickets, the locusts (that frequently sing so loudy that your eardrims hurt from ringing), the kids that are always hanging around, the bulky cumulus clouds hugging the mountain tops, and the Milky Way's white swirl of light overhead when I walk to the bathroom at two in the morning.

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.