Third-World Living

I live in a 2-room wooden casita, a term that sounds quaint, but that really refers to the modest dwellings of those who can’t afford a more spacious, sometimes concrete, house. My room has one window, which opens to an outdoor kitchen where my doña cooks over a wood fire for an army, including her adult sons, innumerable niños, neighbors, and Haitian farm workers. In the other room, separated by thin boards at the bottom, poster board higher up, and nothing at the very top, lives a family of 4. The 3-year old wakes up crying at some point every night. Even more people live in the, albeit, larger house on the farm. This is third world living. But not quite – I don’t share a room with 3 other people.

observ(ed)ation

“El Profe”, the exuberant school director recounted the history of the modest but handsome school building we stood outside of, explaining how its construction was made possible by funds from the U.S. and how grateful he was, as a way of introducing the awkward new Americano in town. Trying to initiate a discussion in front of the eager crowd seated in miniature school chairs about how with a history of exploitation from colonialism to neo-colonialism IMF and FTA style, the pittance given out in aid might not exactly be gracious, would have been difficult. “El Profe” continued, saying that the Americano was there to build to build an aqueduct. Whoa, whoa, whoa… suave. Here I had to interject. We’re here to build an aqueduct… together.

Really, we´re here together to build solidarity.

One of my assignments during my initial site visitation week was to “observe” the local school. Well, as with any other observation, any distinction between observer and observed is blurred, and what you really end up observing is yourself. My entrance into the classroom had to be a big spectacle, with the school director giving a long-winded address and then having each student stand up to introduce him or herself. And they insisted that I have a box of milk from the school milk program. And they’d already decided to end the already too-short school day an hour early for the water meeting.

Not the initial impact I wanted to have.

I’ll end with a quote from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

“This person (the radical) does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”

How can the construction of a community aqueduct, with the hands of the persons in the community, be a process of liberation? How can I shape my role to allow this process to evolve, rather than perpetuating the traditional paternalism?

a buen tiempo

“A buen tiempo.” It’s one of the many idiomatic expressions that distinguish the Dominican language. If you walk in on people having a meal, a snack, or cualquier cosa, “a buen tiempo” is an invitation to compartir, to share, and I’ve heard that in the absence of more food in the pot, people will give you half of what they have on their plate. Compartir. House visitors are virtually always offered something in the way of food or drink… maybe juice… more often coffee – just a shot, but strong, pretty much espresso. If nothing else, visitors are offered a piece of candy… often really a cough drop… maybe sometimes bubblegum.

And my ass is made of bubblegum. As a major component of our technical training, we’re augmenting parts of an existing acueducto. Our current project is the construction of a sedimentation tank. The concept is that water should flow through the tank at such a rate that it remains in the tank for a sufficient amount of time to allow sediment to settle to the bottom. It’s a big concrete box, constructed with little more than brute strength and steady hands, two things I am in short supply of. But the view, sometimes blurred by the sweat in my eyes is worth any numbness from the daily combination of physical and mental exertion: milder slopes covered in fields growing onions, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and beans to steeper slopes covered in trees ranging from palms to pines to some fruit trees, and even some cacti.

There are moments every day that make me feel like bubblegum. One time I was León trudging up the hill, hunched over, hauling a massive concrete vaina (something) on his shoulder. I don’t know what this vaina was, but it looked big and heavy. León is a frail looking old man with long fingernails, fewer teeth than fingers showing in his perpetual grin, always plastic sandals barely holding together with string, and always with his machete strapped to his side as any self-respecting campesino would have. León walks past the work site daily, his arms outstretched to give each person a hug while giving his greetings in a dry, raspy voice, “hermanito… ¿como está la cosa?... hermanito… vaya bien… hermanito.”

Up to my knees in concrete, I hit a wall sometime Saturday afternoon and I couldn’t have told you if it was made of block, stone masonry, or ferrocement. On the other side is the obligatory Saturday night, after the long week of work. In the next community down the road, there are two colmados (general store/bar/dance hall) that try to outdo the other in attracting business with the volume of their music. But the gemelas, the twins, only hang out at one of the colmados. It’s about as absurd as those Coors Light commercials, as if a small piece of the Purple Martini was transplanted onto a dark, lonely campo road. I’ll save a discussion about machismo, tigures, and the exploitative conquista of women, but the campo colmado scene seemed so out of place, and yet so fitting. We’d stop by after the work day, still in work boots and blue jeans still caked in mud and concrete – I feel like a gringo when I’m clean and I feel like a gringo when I’m dirty.

Up to my knees in mud, I trudge through the most treacherous part of the road to the nearest pueblo, San Jose de Ocoa, a perpetual landslide, where on a couple of occasions, I’ve seen the front-end loader that’s there to clear the road has become stuck, and has sat precariously close to plummeting off the steep face to one side. Oftentimes, the only way to travel in the campo, is by vola, by hitchhiking, usually on the back of a long-bed Daihatsu truck or a pickup carrying produce down to market. When road conditions are bad, you have to take one vola to the landslide, roll up your pant legs and remove your shoes and tramp through the mud, and then hitch another vola to town. And Dominicans seem to nearly always maintain clean clothes and shoes. I feel like a gringo when I’m clean and I feel like a gringo when I’m dirty.

In some parts of the campo, the only way to get around is by motoconcho, motorcycle taxi. I recently went to the southwestern part of the country, near to the pueblo of Las Matas de Farfan, in the province of San Juan, near to the Haitian border, to see the nearly-completed acueducto of a second-year volunteer. Being on the drier side of the mountains, the dirt roads are more dust than mud. The word “matas” translates to “bushes” and as the name implies, the landscape is dotted with small bushes, and also grazing cattle. My impressions over my limited time there were that this frontier zone is more underserved than the campo outside of Ocoa. Travel along the main road is briefly interrupted by periodic immigration check points. Which way do the immigration vectors point? Well, suffice it to say that my campo host family owns a modest, but substantial piece of farmland and the labor is performed almost entirely by Haitians. I feel I have no need here to draw comparisons to similar dynamics in North America or in Europe. Anyway, in this particular campo in San Juan, there is only one family that owns a motored vehicle with 4 wheels, so the vola situation isn’t exactly practical. Therefore, you have to hire a moto. With two gringos, feet flailing, clinging to the side of the seat and to the rear fender for dear life, our passing moto must have looked something like 3 krusty the klowns crammed on a miniature tricycle for a circus trick.

The water system, though close to completion, had seen its share of obstacles, including the meddling of mischievous, disapproving indios. Now, the Spaniards quickly wiped out the indigenous Tainos soon after their arrival on Hispañola, so the impish indios mysteriously breaking pipes underground aren’t the literal ancestors of those living in the community, but rather adopted cultural ancestors. If indios interfere with your water project, you have to have a party at the site of the problem. I guess there’s nothing like pouring out a little Coca-Cola on the earth to appease the ancients. Really, people didn’t seem to seriously buy in to the whole indio thing – it’s just a story to account for sometimes enigmatic problems, and an excuse to have a party.

The Monday after returning from was the Día de San Miguel, a fiesta de palos. I didn’t know this until the day of, when a good portion of the community up-and-left to partake in the festivities in the pueblo. Fiestas de palos, which literally translates to “drum parties” are not nationally sanctioned or celebrated holidays, but are more regional affairs. Some pueblos have a sort of patron saint associated with them, and therefore have celebrations on the day associated with the given saint on the Roman Catholic calendar. In order to preserve and continue their religious traditions, African slaves masked their gods with the names and images of the catholic saints, and the surviving remnants of this practice are known as santería on this side of the border. The fiestas de palos are, in part, santería festivals. For many, they’re just another excuse to have a party, with drums, dancing, and drinking rum. When people returned the community that night, there was a feast of espageti, cooked in a big cauldron over an open fire. A buen tiempo.

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.

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.

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.