Cachena

Integrating into a new community is certainly easier when you understand what people are saying and why they are doing the strange things they do. Having a grasp on the language and culture of the DR has made for a smooth transition into my new community, Batey Cachena.

Cachena is a small community of approximately 250 people set in the sugar cane-filled plains of the eastern Dominican Republic. The entire community consists of one dirt road lined on both sides by barracks constructed decades ago for migratory sugar cane workers. The migratory workers no longer migrate nor work in the cane fields. They have made a permanent home of Cachena.

Two things stand out as interesting:

1. Whereas most of the migratory workers brought to the DR to harvest sugar cane came from Haiti and many bateyes have a majority Haitian or Dominican-Haitian population, the workers in my community were brought from the lesser Antilles island of Anguilla. Rather than Creole, some of the immigrants here speak Caribbean English comparative to that of Jamaica. Unfortunately, very few people here still speak this English and the younger generations born here speak only Spanish.

2. My site is about 15km from San Pedro de Macoris, the Mecca of Dominican baseball where superstars like Sammy Sosa and big league shortstops galore call home. Baseball here is the escape that basketball is in many American inner cities. To many, it is the only perceptible means of escaping an impoverished life. People live, eat and breathe baseball with the hopes of being seen by a scout and whisked away to the US of A. From my small community alone, there is one major league player, three minor leaguers, multiple teens waiting to be called up and a handful of adults who spent a short time playing in the States before seeing their life-long dream disappear far too early.

I am still in the initial stages of getting to know everyone and spending endless hours sitting on porches and complaining about the heat, a volunteer rite of passage. Remembering names and faces, playing Uno with the local kids, daily basketball games with the local dudes and waiting for the electricity to come back on takes up most of my day at the moment. The transition from one site to the next was far easier than expected and I most certainly made the right choice in changing sites.

*Pictures forthcoming.