On Thursday June 2, I will board a plane in Santo Domingo and on Saturday June 4, I will land in Sydney, Australia.
My youngest sister has been studying abroad Down Under since February and the rest of the fam is going to join her for 2 weeks Aussie greatness. The journey to the world’s largest island, the only island that doubles as a continent and an overall desirable vacation destination will be a long one. But the ends will most surely justify the means.
Sirve Con Fuerza is Peace Corps’ national volleyball tournament. Teams from Volunteer’s sites all over the country come together to test their talents, practice, play, learn and meet new people.
I am far from a volleyball coach. I do live in a site where most everyone, male or female, enjoys playing sports. The boys are constantly playing baseball and hoping to be the next local phenomenon to get a Major League contract. The girls focus their attention not on the baseball diamond but the volleyball court. In November the women in my site erected two large poles into a patch of dirt, wrapped a snow fence across the poles and a volleyball court was born. Since then there has been scarcely a single day in which the girls and women of Cachena have not played volleyball.
While I’m not a coach and have been hesitant to take on a more formal role with the local players, I wanted to reward my girls for their hard work and persistent practice by bringing them to Sirve Con Fuerza. Since February I have been teaching a course for young girls called Chicas Brillantes. My Chicas group is made up of 16 girls ages 9-16. Each week we talk about a subject involving gender, gender empowerment and showing young girls what they can achieve in this machismo, male-dominated culture. A number of my older Chicas Brillantes are volleyball players and were invited to compete against young girls from all over the DR.
The tournament/camp was a great success. The teams were placed into two separate brackets based on talent levels and played lots of volleyball over the course of 4 days. My girls turned out to be one of the better teams and took home the award for Good Sportsmanship. While the girls obviously want to win, a volunteer is likely to be more pleased that their team won a Sportsmanship award than a Championship. The girls also learned about Gender, Nutrition, HIV/AIDS and more.
Since arriving back in Cachena after the camp, my girls have been playing lots of volleyball. The entire community was impressed with how much they improved in such a short time and many people made a point to come to my house and tell me how well the girls are playing now. All the boys are now begging for a Basketball Camp where they can improve their skills.
I recently received a grant to work on sports, and specifically girls volleyball, in my site and hope to keep working with these girls in the future. They will definitely be a favorite to win Sirve Con Fuerza in 2012.
It is entirely inexplicable to me. Not the mice. Not the rats. Not the snakes. Frogs. A large, fat toad will give them a start, but a small frog that an American child might keep as a pet in a terrarium is enough to set off a small heart attack in my doña.
On Friday night I was laying in bed reading and waiting for the electricity to kick on when screams came emanating from the next room. My doña and two host nieces were beside themselves and asking my assistance to kill a frog that at this point had only been heard and not yet seen. We regularly sit and watch rats large enough to abduct small children run freely in the rafters without giving them a second thought. But the possibility of a frog in the house was enough to set everyone into hysterics. They say it is because frogs jump that they are scared. Well tarantulas jump. And bite. And kill. But no one seems to be afraid of that fuzzy ball of death. The ‘they jump’ argument doesn’t hold water for me.
Rats carry diseases. The most common rat-borne disease in the DR is leptospirosis. This can be spread through rat urine and result in liver and kidney damage. Rats are known to carry over 70 diseases ranging from typhus to Hantavirus to the bubonic plague. THE BUBONIC FUCKING PLAGUE! That doesn’t worry anyone here. Only Kermit must be killed.
So on Friday night as I come out of my room, using the light from my headlamp to guide myself, I see a 5 year-old, a 9 year-old and a 42 year-old standing on the couch (The couch where mice so often like to call home). They are begging me to exterminate a frog that may exist. Using said headlamp, I eventually make out the form a frog no larger than a golf ball sat idly under a table, undoubtedly wondering what the commotion is all about. They want me to kill it. I want to name it and give it a jar full of flies.
My hesitance leads to them calling for the nearest muchacho to come take my job as exterminator. Muchachos can do anything and do it for free. Want to buy something at the store? Send a muchacho. Need to send a message to the lady down the street? Send it with a muchacho. Need to kill a 1-inch tall tree frog? Call a muchacho. They do it all.
The muchacho who relieved me of my position missed with a couple whacks of a broomstick and the frog hopped away to temporary safety. My doña was disappointed and fears its imminent return. Meanwhile mice are pooping everywhere and eating my clothes and no one bats an eyelash.
This is just another example of how strange and oftentimes irrational phobias can be. We as humans are faced with myriad threats every day and it is clowns (coulrophobia), constipation (coprastasophobia), frogs (ranidaphobia) and other random things that make people’s blood run cold. Humans are weird.
The escapee frog’s name is Arbolito. A jar of flies awaits his return. Or swift death if a Dominican finds him first.
In a volunteer’s first year, these camps are often something you simply attend and bring youth to. In a volunteer’s second year, these camps are planned, organized and facilitated by us veterans. In April, I co-coordinated my first camp.
For the past 2 summers, Peace Corps has offered Camp Superman, a camp for boys aged 11-13, in which boys camp outdoors, play and learn to be a man. Delinquency and tigueraje are all too common options for young men in the DR and through Camp Superman and boys clubs in our communities, we volunteers attempt to educate young boys about being respectful, educated, mannerly young men.
As more and more volunteers begin boys groups in their sites, the Camp Superman model is starting to take off and this year, for the first time, we held a Regional Camp Superman in my very own beloved eastern region of the DR. Two fellow youth volunteers and I did the coordinating and logistical work to make the camp happen.
Thirteen Peace Corps Volunteers and 32 Dominican muchachos went to a beautiful mountain pueblo of Pedro Sánchez to spend three fun and educational days in the wilderness. We played games. We slept in tents. We ate s’mores by a campfire. We hiked to a waterfall. We made superhero masks and capes. We discussed gender and what it means to be a man. We gazed at the stars. We swam in the river. We taught about HIV/AIDS and how it can be prevented. We had a great weekend in which everyone, volunteers and boys alike, thoroughly enjoyed themselves.
The Regional Camp was a success and did much to prepare us for the upcoming 5-day National Camp in July. My life as a semi-professional camp counselor continues into the summer and my life as a camp planner and coordinator is about to kick into high gear in the months ahead.
For the past few months I’ve been able to look across the endless, llano plains covered in cane and see orange glows in the distance. Faraway cane fields being burned. The glow is actually quite breathtaking. The deeper into harvest season we get, the more glows that can be seen each night. I am staring at one right now that is at least one mile away but seems to be engulfing the entire batey. The ash falls like a light snow and leaves everything covered in a layer of cachispa that the children catch like snowflakes and shove into their mouth (claiming it tastes like boiled eggs).
The cane is lit on fire to burn away any dead or excess leaves and to scare away any critters, vermin or snakes calling the cane fields home. After being burned, the cane is manually cut by able-bodied men (primarily Haitian immigrants) wielding machetes, collected into large trucks and driven to the nearest processing plant.
In the past week I’ve gotten to see the cane cutting first hand. The sugar cane around Cachena was burned and the picadores got to work. The cutters often work shifts of 12+ hours (in the baking Caribbean sun) and are able to cut between 3-4 tons each day. At the moment, they are paid approximately 150 pesos ($3.80) per ton. Somewhere around 13 dollars a day for impossibly difficult physical labor. Meanwhile the sugar cane companies make bank by exploiting people living in abject poverty. A large number of bateyes are owned by the sugar cane companies themselves and only cane cutters and their families are allowed to live there. It is the closest example to indentured servitude I know of.
The landscape looks much different when not covered by seas of 10-foot tall sugar cane. Nearby communities are visible for the first time in a year and mountains can be seen in the distance. It’s an interesting time to be in the batey.
Already, new sugar cane is growing like a weed where it was harvested just weeks ago. The cycles begin again. One of the growing and harvesting of a crop. One of human rights violations. Both of which will continue long into the foreseeable future.
