Llegó la Lluvia

The rainy season has officially arrived. After watching much of April and May pass by in relative dryness, it has been raining for almost a solid week and with no end in sight. The showers have even been accompanied by the only thunder and/or lightning I have witnessed in this country. While I normally would be looking forward to the next thundershower and the lazy day that accompanies it, rain (and lots of it) completely alters the pace of everyday life here in the DR. Dirt roads become mud holes, rivers rise, tin roofs leak and daily life becomes more complicated. All those things together make for extremely slow days when people rarely leave the house and work and school become optional. I’m enjoying the down time and there are few things better than sitting on the porch with a book while the rain falls, but I really hope the rains leave with the month of May. That said, hurricane season opens in June and all predictions say that this season will be active, so the rain is likely here to stay.

As the rainy season begins, the election season has come to an end. ¡Por fin! Election campaigns have been in full swing since the fall and are possibly more obnoxious than U.S. elections, if you can believe that. Politicians and politics in general are equally ridiculous and corrupt here as they are in the States, but here the ridiculousness is far more overt. Political favors are done in the open rather than under the table.

The senatorial race in my province was especially bizarre in this cycle. I won’t bore you with the details, but at the end of the day an aging man with zero political experience won in a landslide over the incumbent. Only after it was determined that the aging man’s popular young son was constitutionally unable to run for office in this province did ‘Papá’ get named as his replacement. Like in America, politics is a ‘What have you done for me lately?’ game. And the ruling Purple Party has paved roads, erected buildings and paid straight cash in exchange for votes. With a résumé like that, there was never any doubt they would win and win big. 31 of 32 Senate seats big. Talk about a supermajority.

Politics have been at the forefront since I arrived in DR last August, but the months of being inundated with all things electoral are over. The trucks carrying banks of blaring speakers and caravans holding up traffic are gone. The television and radio ads have ceased. The political favors have been put on hold for another 2 years, when presidential elections set the events of political lunacy into motion once again.

So for now it’s less bulla and more lluvia. Lots and lots of lluvia.