Voluntourism

My batey and others like it throughout the Dominican Republic are well accustomed to having groups of foreigners (almost exclusively Americans and Canadians) drop in for visits. It is almost always a Christian group on a service trip or from time to time a group taking a day trip from their all-inclusive Caribbean vacation to see how the other half lives. The visitors usually make a loop around the batey, snap a few pictures with children, hand out some new toys or used clothes and promptly return to their beachfront hotel feeling very good about themselves and the momentary impact they have made on people living in poverty.

I have very mixed feelings on these frequent visits. While these visits can potentially be positive cultural exchanges, there is rarely an actual exchange that takes place. The visitors rarely speak Spanish. They are only here for an hour or two, an insufficient amount of time to exchange names and phone numbers, let alone culture. The visits often amount to nothing more than a group of white people dumping off loads of used stuff and coming dangerously close to what I would define as exploitation.

A good (and admittedly cliché) way to look at Peace Corps service and an overused Chinese Proverb says:

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,

Teach a man to fish and you teach him for a lifetime.”

I have two years of Peace Corps service in which to share some culture, drop some knowledge and, with some luck, make an impact on a number or individuals or (with lots of luck) an entire community. Whether it is through basic literacy, sex education, gender empowerment, volleyball skills, proper marshmallow roasting or English language curse words, I’m trying to teach something and create sustainable projects and knowledge that will continue long after I’m gone.

Few things can be more undermining to that process than for a busload of Americans to pull into my site every two weeks and hand out free fish of all shapes, sizes and shiny colors. I can’t compete with that. I have no fish to give away. And I don’t blame the people here for preferring free fish to the hard earned kind. Life is already hard. Why complicate it by learning new skills when someone is going to give you what you need? After tourism, the second highest form of income in the Dominican Republic is receiving remittances from friends, family and myriad baseball players in the U.S. and other countries. This is a culture well accustomed to and very comfortable with waiting for help from outside and not always willing to fix problems from within.

This past Friday I had a chance to host and plan a productive visit in my community with a group of study abroad students from Virginia Tech. The students are spending the semester in the DR and, as part of a course on agriculture and economics, they wanted to visit a batey / small agricultural community and see and hear first hand how difficult the life of a cane cutter or of people living in bateyes can be.

Having an opportunity to actually plan the activities and arrange for community members with intimate knowledge of local agriculture and cane cutting to lead and participate in activities made for an excellent opportunity for experiential learning. My superstar youth and community leaders gave a tour of the batey while I translated. We visited a nearby parcel of land where the community members communally grow all different kinds of crops and food. We walked through sugar cane and later had a productive discussion about the life of a cane cutter, life in the batey and life in America. Later that afternoon the students visited the batey of a neighboring volunteer and learned even more.

It was an extremely positive experience and showed me how productive these visits by gringos can be under the right set of circumstances and with some guidance. It hurts to know that after this productive visit, it is just a matter of weeks before a new group of white people shows up and puts us a step back after a large step forward. So it goes.

Peace Corps as an organization has 3 simple goals:

1. Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

The visit by the Virginia Tech students succeeded in fulfilling both Goals 2 & 3. All in all a successful day in the life of a Volunteer.

Tour of Batey Cachena

Community leader Wilfrido showing off guandules (pigeon peas) and discussing local agriculture.

Carnaval

February 27th is a very busy day in the Dominican Republic. It is both the Dominican Independence Day and the height of Carnaval.

Carnaval is best spent here in the city of La Vega, where parades of masked and costumed persons and thousands of onlookers fill the streets to partake in all kinds of debauchery. Innocent bystanders are routinely pummeled in the ass with inflated pig bladders. So it goes.

Traditional La Vega Carnaval Masks and Costumes

I am disappointed to announce that I did not make it to La Vega for the second year in a row. I instead was in my site where, due to an ever-increasing number of Christians living in my community, they no longer celebrate Carnaval. Christians here are not allowed to participate in the drinking, dancing and other devilish components that make up Carnaval.

Some of the non-Christian children did get into the spirit and painted their faces. A far cry from the shenanigans in La Vega, but mildly entertaining nonetheless.

Mama with face paint and pelo loco

Gone Retro

My Engineers Club has now completed half of the 12-week course we set out to do in January. This week we did what was easily my favorite, and most of the boys’ favorite, experiment to date. We went retro and made lava lamps.

I went through a phase in junior high in which my bedroom walls were covered with black light posters. Long, fluorescent beads hung from my doorway. A black light illuminated the many posters while a strobe light simultaneously flickered in the background. I also had a lava lamp. The only thing missing was Grateful Dead music and illegal substances. Those came in a later stage of life.

The Soy Ingeniero manual a fellow volunteer put together has instructions for doing a great number of scientific experiments and activities. Lava Lamps are one of them. With a 2-liter bottle, some cooking oil, water, food coloring and Alka-Seltzer tablets, you have a homemade lava lamp. Granted, these do not plug into the wall and bubble for hours, but we rarely have electricity anyway so there’s no need. The boy’s loved making the ‘lava’ bubble and I felt like a giddy 13-year old as I watched the Alka-Seltzer do its thing.

As a celebration for completing half of the Engineering course, I put on a movie night for the boys. Popcorn, soda, Valentine’s candy from the US of A (thanks Mom!) and my laptop and we were set. We watched Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (or Lluvia de Hamburguesas in Spanish). It is a pretty stellar animated film that incited a lot of discussion amongst the boys about science, invention, right vs. wrong and other topics. It was great to see that even while full of caffeine and sugar the boys were able to have a discussion about the movie before going home and bouncing off their parents’ walls.

Movie Night

Cupcakes!!

P.E.

I'm kind of a P.E. teacher.

For the past 3 weeks (and the next few months) two of my superstar youth and I have been spending Wednesdays in the local school teaching Deportes para la Vida (Sports for Life).

Deportes para la Vida (DPV) is the program I received training for in December. It’s a really great program that uses sports and games to teach kids about HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy and other problems facing Dominican youth.

In our local school there is an hour set aside for P.E. every Wednesday and Friday. But as there is neither a P.E. teacher nor any athletic equipment or guidance whatsoever, P.E. hour is spent sitting in the shade and/or throwing rocks at one another. I don’t blame the teachers for wanting an hour of rest since students here have the ability to drive one completely insane, but that P.E. hour could be put to much better use. Enter Deportes para la Vida.

So far we have worked with 6^th, 7^th and 8^th grade students, as those are the kids best able to grasp what HIV/AIDS is and the ones most likely to have hormones in overdrive and/or be sexually active. The kids have been really responsive to the program and we can see instant results in their knowledge about HIV/AIDS after each activity. The students might be little monsters in the classroom but, for whatever reason, they have been really attentive and engaged when given the chance to run, play, compete and learn outdoors.

So it seems that for the spring semester, I am more or less a P.E. teacher. The great thing about the DPV program is that what I am actually teaching is Sex Ed and Life Skills but the kids feel like they’re in P.E. A nice head fake to trick the kids into learning.

Ingenieros Dominicanos

Easily my favorite ongoing project and looking forward a true passion project of mine in the year to come is my Boys Club. A group of 15 muchachos aged 10-14 who meet weekly to work, play, learn and experiment. We have recently starting working with a fellow volunteer’s Ingenieros Dominicanos, Dominican Engineers, manual. The manual is full of interesting activities dealing with science and engineering and, so far, the boy’s are eating it up.

Last week we did an exchange with another volunteer’s boys group in a nearby batey, which was a huge success. We spent the morning doing fun and educational activities and the boys got to leave their communities and meet new muchachos.

The boys of Cachena and Experimental at the intercambio.

This week in our Engineering Club we made volcanoes, a science experiment each and every American has done but that my kids could have never fathomed before today. They might still have trouble explaining what a chemical reaction is but they relished the opportunity to make their own volcanoes and especially enjoyed making them erupt.

Showing off an erupted volcano.

Raudy getting his hands (and no doubt his school uniform) dirty.

With the leftover flour all the boys made a giant pot of bollo, a typical local dish consisting of little more than flour and water that migratory workers from the lower Antilles brought to the DR and is especially popular in the bateyes in the east.

The boys preparing bollo.

Enjoying the finished product with salami.

To the Batcave

Last weekend I made a quick trip into the mountains here in the eastern region to scout out a site where we would like to hold a boy’s camp. While I live in the sugar cane-covered plains, the mountains are but a bus ride away. Just ninety minutes on the guagua brought me to the beautiful mountain pueblo of Pedro Sanchez.

Pedro Sanchez from the Loma

My primary objective of the trip was to scout out the sight for the camp but I had the good fortune of tagging along on a bit of an excursion as well. The local guides group was climbing up a loma to some caves in order to clean up the trails and clean up garbage in the caves themselves. The guides group has had a Peace Corps volunteer working with them for the past few years and currently have a new volunteer as they try to attract tourists to their beautiful mountain setting.

I gladly tagged along on the trip and quickly learned how out of shape I am after a lazy holiday season and some time spent stuffing my face in the US of A. After struggling to the top of the loma, and a nice long descanso, it was time to dive into some caves.

We went into three caves in total and each subsequent cave was deeper, darker and home to more murciélagos, or bats. In America, if you are visiting caves as a tourist you will most likely be walking along carefully manicured and well-lit walkways ensuring one’s safety. In the DR there is none of the above. We climbed down rocks and boulders in the dark with only a few headlamps to lead the way. The deeper we got, the darker it got. The darker it got, the more bats there were. The more bats there were, the more guano there was to trudge through.

It was fascinating to watch the young Dominicans who had been visiting these caves since their childhood run and jump through the dark with ease without a single misstep. It is akin to the Dominican children who live near the beach that have the ability to climb a palm tree, knock down a coconut and climb back down in 8 seconds flat or the kids from my site who can cut down a stalk of sugar cane and tear it apart with their bare teeth without a second thought. Dominican kids develop some fun abilities.

The bats were at both times cool and eerie. They could be heard but not seen, without the flash of a camera that is. They would begin to stir each time we approached and the entire cave would echo with their movements. The third and final cave we visited is home to an estimated half million bats.

Entering the 3rd Cave

The ground in the cave was covered with guano that locals collect to use as fertilizer and that gringos like me inadvertently slip-n-slide through. All the Dominicans had huge rubber boots with great traction and I was roller-skating around with sad excuses for hiking shoes.

By the time we had gotten in and out of the second cave most everyone was completely covered in bat poo. The guides and locals were covered because they had a bat poo fight the way Iowans would have a snowball fight. I was covered because I slipped and fell a dozen times. So it goes. Thankfully Dominican doñas can rid of any stain and have no problems with poop.

It was a fun excursion and succeeded in physically kicking my ass. I learned that I will need to work out a bit before finally deciding to tackle Pico Duarte, the tallest mountain in the DR and all of the Caribbean, which is a volunteer rite of passage to climb during their service.

Murciélagos

Las Estrellas Orientales

The Dominican Winter Baseball League takes place each year between October and January, when the Major Leagues are in off-season. The league consists of just 6 teams. A number of Major League players and up-and-coming farm team prospects participate in the Winter League to hone their skills for the upcoming MLB season.

The team nearest to my site is the Estrellas Orientales, the Eastern Stars. As I live nearby (about 15 miles), I have deemed myself an Estrellas fan based solely on proximity. They play in San Pedro de Macoris, the mecca of Dominican baseball, where many of the great Dominican peloteros call home. This year marked the 100^th anniversary of the franchise. In all of those 100 years, the Estrellas have won just 3 titles. In a league of just 6 teams.

The Estrellas are the (not so) lovable losers of the DR league. The Dominican equivalent of the Chicago Cubs. Due again to proximity and a lack of a professional team in Iowa, I regard myself as a Cubs fan. Both teams have a tendency experience long spells of losing seasons followed by teams with great promise who choke and leave their fans again disappointed. The Estrellas last title was in 1968.

One difference between the Cubs and Estrellas is that the Cubs inability to win the big game has become somewhat of an endearing trait. They have one of the country’s largest fan bases. Many, myself included, can’t help but fall for the lovable losers from the North side. Fans stay loyal and each October dutifully utter the words, “maybe next year.” The Estrellas fans don’t find the losing reputation to be quite so endearing. Many have given up entirely and taken to cheering for one of the other 5 teams that win from time to time.

This year the Estrellas made it to the league championship against the fellow team from the eastern region, the Toros of La Romana. It would have been fitting for the Estrellas to end their 42-year title drought in the 100^th year of the franchise. But in true Estrellas form they lost a best-of-9 series 5 games to zero. The whole San Pedro area was abuzz only to see their team break their hearts once again in a rather embarrassing 5 games to 0 fashion. I’ve yet to hear anyone suggest “maybe next year.”

The Estrellas playing Escogido in the Capital

For more on the Eastern Stars and an interesting read check out this book, Eastern Stars, that is making the rounds amongst volunteers living in and around San Pedro.