Wednesday, September 29, 2010

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.
  1. 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.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Moving Day

After two long months of being stranded in limbo between two places, I am moving to my new site on Monday. The past two months have easily been the most mentally and emotionally difficult of my service. Now I get to tackle the mental and emotional stress of integrating into a new community and starting all over again.

While my new site is very much different than my old site, it is just one hour down the road and not a huge adjustment geographically. I will still be in the same eastern region of the country and can even take the same bus to and from the capital. The way of life will take some getting used to though as I am moving from a pueblo with good infrastructure, 24-hour electricity, indoor plumbing and many ‘modern’ amenities to a batey with poor infrastructure, sporadic electricity, latrines and a complete lack of ‘modern’ amenities.

Bateys are communities found here in the Dominican Republic created years ago by sugar cane conglomerates. The bateys are situated in and around sugar cane fields and in the past were populated by migrant workers, brought primarily from Haiti, to harvest the sugar cane for extremely low wages. Over time, many migrant workers have stayed in the DR and began families and lives here. Bateys often have large Haitian populations and are among the poorest and most underdeveloped communities in the DR.

The physical layout of my community is strangely familiar. Situated in the eastern plains of this country and surrounded on all sides by sugar cane fields, the views from my community very much resembles the small towns situated in the cornfields of Iowa. The similarities end there.

I’m looking forward to meeting my new community and getting back to work after many idle summer months.