lunes, 29 de septiembre de 2008

imagenes del campo

I stand at the doorstep, caked in mud nearly up to my knees. My doña shakes her head, not amused. It’s about 10:00 at night. Before I know it, my doña’s going to work with an old hairbrush and a bucket of water. “Yo puedo…”, I contend, but my words fade into the ambiente tranquillo of the campo night and my doña will not relinquish the brush. These awkward moments occur frequently.

I only comprehend isolated words in the campo Spanish, where half the syllables and especially any containing the letter s are omitted, and l’s and r’s are switched. So when I heard something about “gravilla”, “camion”, and “Felix”, I thought, bueno, our mason and all-around handy man Felix had arrived at the latrine worksite with the gravel we’d been expecting and needed help unloading. Nope. The truck was stuck in the mud miles down the road to the pueblo. The road had only become passable a couple of days previous after the continual rains from tropical storms lettered F thru I had caused flooding, landslides, road collapse, ect, ect. A crowd had gathered as three pickups chained together in series attempted to pull the truck out. No dice. Tempers in the crowd began to rise like mud over ankles as tires spun and buried themselves deeper. A line of trucks accumulated behind the incident, loaded with freshly-picked produce on its way to market. Men removed their shoes and rolled up their pant legs as the hauled crates on their shoulders to meet trucks arriving on the other side to carry the produce the remainder of the way to town. The truck was finally pulled out of the mud, but only after transferring some of the gravel to other vessels and, unfortunately, dumping some of the remainder on the ground.

My first week in the campo can be described by a series of still-frames. The sight of mist-shrouded mountains that rise from behind the house when I go out to the latrine first thing every morning. Four generations of a family huddled together on the veranda, all removing guandules from their pods. Conversely, a family who´s only had electricity for 3 months watching four Chuck Norris movies in one night. An abuelita, physically frail, but still full of piss and vinegar, lighting up a pipe loaded with locally-grown tobacco. A man washing a motorcycle at a river ford, spinning the rear wheel, splashing up water like a garden sprinkler to the delight of the kids there bathing. The play, sloping upwards from home plate to the outfield, where passionate games of pelota happen every Sunday, and the peloteros argue about whether a ball landing at the outfield boundary with the neighboring finca on the mountain is a jonron or a ground-ruled double, while in the background, farmers tote tanks of pesticides on their backs to spray their tomatoes. A chicken strung up by its feet, flailing its wings one last time as it bleeds from the neck. The face of a campesino illumined by the faint flicker of a light bulb outside of the banca (not a bank, but a lottery ticket vendor) as he contemplates his next move in a domino game.

I haven’t been here long enough to have the confianza I’d like to have to be able to snap the actual photographs. And I almost lost the opportunity to snap any photos at all when my camera fell out of its case on the way to view the local aguaducto – broken zipper. When I returned to look for it later, I came upon a campesina riding a burro down from the tomato fields. She pulled it from her saddlebag and gave it to me, an act that seems to me to exemplify the gente de confianza in this campo.

the journey of a t-shirt in the global economy

A t-shirt is made in a zona franca in the Dominican republic. Following the Calle Triste from my abode of 3 weeks in Santo Domingo, I’d reach one of these free-trade zones within a half mile. When a fabrica (factory) is built, a barrio will quickly spring up around it, a phenomenon contributing to the growth of Santo Domingo from 300,000 to 3 million since the fall of the caudillo Trujillo in 1961. A t-shirt made for $2 in the zona franca is sold for $20 in a mall in the U.S. (don’t quote my numbers), is thoroughly loved for a short time, and then given to Goodwill. Goodwill’s overloaded on donations and can’t sell it, so it’s bundled up and sent back to the Dominican Republic, where you can haggle the clerk to sell it to you for 40 pesos (a little more than a dollar). If the t-shirt is embossed with a witty phrase like I’m a black belt at keeping it real, it’s only amusing if you’re a Peace Corps volunteer. If you’re a Peace Corps volunteer looking for grub clothes for building aguaductos in the campo, this is where you go to shop.

sábado, 6 de septiembre de 2008

goin' with da flow

Flow is one of many English words that has been imported into Dominican Spanish and that has been given a new meaning by the adoptive parent language. Flow is a manner of style, asses shaking back-pocket bling embroidered on tight blue jeans, baseball caps with brims flattened, tigures mouthing meren-rap tiguraje words like flow. To the unaccustomed ear, the rapid-fire slang is muffled beneath meringue and bachata keeping the night moving at the local carwash, maintaining the appearance of a car wash by day, but functioning as an open-air dance club by night. If you got flow, then you got game. Entonces, yo no tengo flow.

Determining flow from the source, ideally a spring but more likely a stream, will be among my first orders of business when I finally reach my work site at the beginning of November. Since flow may vary over time, I’ll need to rely on the accounts of elders in the community to assess the long-term character of the source, to determine if the flow will meet the projected consumption needs of the community. Though that day is still some time away, I already have reason to be reasonably sure that I’ll be placed in the northwest province of Puerto Plata, somewhere inland, though not far from the coast and somewhat close to the Haitian border.

Recent flows have been too much for cañadas to handle. Low-lying areas adjacent to these waterways have sustained significant flooding with the persistent heavy rains from Fay, Gustav, Hanna, and some tropical depressions over the last 3 weeks. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that the country had undergone a period of drought prior to these rains. A house collapsed in a landslide during Gustav, killing 8, a storm that also killed some 50-60 people in neighboring Haiti. Hurricane Ike is supposed to pass north of Hispañola tonight and tomorrow morning, so the rains won’t be letting up any time soon. It should pass far enough north that we shouldn’t experience any more than that, though.

Until next time, I’ll keep the litros of Presidente flowing, though I´ll try to not let them flow too fast.

viernes, 5 de septiembre de 2008

la zona colonial

Toes clutch the sparse remains of well-worn flip-flops that frantically pace the cobble-stone streets of the old part of the city. The struggles of the present overlaid on an opposing memory of the past, a magnetism that keeps the limpiabotas from being raptured into el cielo. They sneak up on you, these shoe-shine boys, each with his wooden crate / stepping stool filled with rags and shoe polish. Many of them are very young, maybe 9-10 years old. I could picture them polishing the shoes of the Spanish monarchs portrayed in portraits in one of the museums. But, unfortunately, the kings of today like to wear sandals.