Ants Marching

Last February, a barancon housing more than 40 people burned down here in my site. All of those 40+ people were displaced and a 2-year-old girl died of smoke inhalation. The cause of the fire was a candle, being used during one of many daily power outages, that tipped over and eventually reached the highly flammable zinc roof. The displaced were forced to move into already overcrowded homes with extended family and neighbors and have lived in these uncomfortable conditions for the past 9 months.

A barancon is a barrack commonly found in Dominican bateyes. The barracks were built for the migratory Haitian sugar cane workers and are simply a long concrete buildings divided into several individual housing units. Many units are nothing more than one 10x12 room where entire families live. The vast majority of people in my community live in barracks.

In response to the burned barrack, the community began to construct a new one in August, with economic backing from USAID and Save the Children, to help ease the overcrowding that was going on in homes since the fire.

After months of construction followed by weeks of institutional bureaucracy, people here were able to move into their new homes this week. Watching the move was like watching ants march. The entire community got involved and were carrying suitcases, tables, chairs, mattresses, televisions, etc, in an endless flow until all people and their belongings had been moved and situated in their new homes.

While overcrowding is still a problem, it is much less of a problem this week and a number of families are happy to be in new homes.

People moving into the new barancon as seen from my porch

Eliecel moving into his new casa.

Mwen Pale Kreyól

It has been a long, educational and stormy couple of weeks. After days spent despedir-ing a group of good friends (Felicidades 517-08-02), learning all about the ugliness of cholera and celebrating Halloween and one year as a Peace Corps Volunteer (Felicidades 517-09-02) in a beautiful beach house, I learned a new language in 3½ days. Mwen te aprann pale Kreyól.

Twice each year Peace Corps DR offers a weeklong Haitian Creole course for volunteers living in bateyes, near the border or in communities with a large Haitian/Creole-speaking population. As a volunteer now living in a batey, I got the opportunity to participate.

The training is traditionally held in a batey in the southern part of the country but due to the imminent wrath of Hurricane Tomás, this year we were sequestered to a neighborhood of Santo Domingo for the week. After the initial frustration and disappointment of having Creole training in the Capital and not in a batey full of Creole speakers, training got underway as Hurricane Tomás arrived.

Creole is a very basic language and in less than 4 days I feel like I got a firm grasp on the grammatical structure and some basic vocab. I have already sought out two Creole speakers in my community, ages 6 and 7, to practice with on a regular basis until I get brave enough chat with adults.

As Creole training ended, the brunt of Tomás, the first hurricane to make landfall on the island in my time here, was arriving in the DR. All volunteers living in various high-risk areas of the country, including the Capital where I was, were consolidated to hotels for safety and security reasons.

While hurricanes are not something volunteers look forward to, consolidation due to hurricanes is something all volunteers dream of. Air-conditioned hotel rooms with endless hot water, flushing toilets and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Magical. The amount of weight gained by volunteers during consolidation must be an astonishingly high number. It was a very relaxing couple of days spent with good friends before returning to volunteer reality.

God Hates Haiti

As anyone who owns a computer, television or reads a newspaper well knows, cholera has come to Haiti. This ugly bacterium has arrived on the island of Hispaniola and is wreaking havoc on those living across the border and still displaced by last winter’s earthquake. As if living in makeshift shantytowns wasn’t trouble enough, Haitians now must concern themselves with the threat of fatal, white diarrhea. Can these people ever catch a break?

As we share an island with Haiti, all Peace Corps volunteers in the DR were brought to the capital last week to have a crash course training on avoiding cholera when it eventually and inevitably makes its way across the fronterra and into la República Dominicana. Hay que prepararse.

As if an earthquake, cholera and a long history of colonialism, slavery, dictatorship and abject poverty weren’t enough, a potential hurricane moving across the Caribbean has changed course and has aimed its ugly head directly for Port-au-Prince. The lack of proper shelter will make for a serious disaster if and when the storm strikes areas of the country already devastated by the earthquake and currently suffering from a cholera outbreak. Dios odia a Haiti.

How the Galleta Crumbles

When I initially began this blog, I thought of it as a way to document my Peace Corps experience, update friends, family and interested parties back in the States and, in doing so, give some insight into the life of a Volunteer. I have admittedly failed miserably in Year One to do this.

Like all volunteers, my service to this point has been a roller coaster ride full of ups and downs, highs and lows, peaks and valleys. Things in my first site left much to be desired and my lukewarm feelings towards that site and my work there certainly made for a lack of blog material.

Now I am about to complete my first calendar year as a Volunteer, am living in a new site and ready to give this blog thing another go. I’ll try to be frequent and substantive in my entries in the weeks and months to come.

So without further ado, here is my week in volunteerism in the DR...

After a nearly a month of getting to know my new community, learning names and faces and completing the second community diagnostic of my service, I was finally ready to get some classes and projects underway here in my new site. We had planned to start with English classes as, naturally, that is what the youth in the community seem to be clamoring over above all else. (Translation: Sex Ed and basic literacy can wait…I want to know what Vin Diesel is talking about in all those Fast and Furious movies)

I had spent this past weekend in the Southern region of the DR at a despedida for a volunteer friend who, along with an entire group of volunteers, are about to finish their service and return to the US of A. (Congrats y Suerte 517-08-02) I passed on a scenic brunch and free ziplining on Sunday to ensure that I would be back in my site and well-prepared for Day 1 of English class on Monday. This is where volunteer reality set in and things slowly began to unravel.

As I awoke and got ready to head to the local community center to give class, I was informed that there were a group of doctors in the community center giving free AIDS tests all day. Class canceled. So it goes. Doctors administering AIDS tests to the community for free is exponentially more valuable than my teaching basic English and playing games with Dominican youth.

No sweat. We’ll start Tuesday. Unless the key to the community center has been lost that is.

The key is typically kept in the colmado across the street. On Tuesday the colmado does not have the key. The president of the Junta de Vecinos does not have the key. Nobody seems to have the key. Class canceled. Again.

Key eventually turns up, as expected, and class begins Wednesday.

Had this series of events happened last December, a month after beginning my service in my first site, I would have been frustrated and concerned that this would be a recurring theme in the weeks and months ahead. Now, after having a year’s worth of experiences in the DR, the frustration never comes. I know for a fact that this will recur in the weeks and months to come. Shit like this happens here. Así es la vida.

As a volunteer, you are to plan for each class, practice, charla, etc, while knowing that things will never go exactly as planned. Something always comes up. Doctors come. Keys are lost. It rains. Students show up 50 minutes late (or not at all). Sometimes that's just the way the galleta crumbles.

Escout

The Major League Baseball regular season may have just ended on Sunday, but teams are wasting no time looking ahead to the future. A scout from the Chicago Cubs stopped by yesterday to check out some of the local talent. A team from here in Cachena took the field against a team from the nearby pueblo of Consuelo as the escout looked on with interest. The visit seemed very informal and was more observational than anything else, but I would selfishly love it if a member of my community someday played for either the I-Cubs or Chicago Cubs. I foresee nights spent in sports bars bragging of knowing the Cubs' starting shortstop when he was still a shoeless, underfed Dominican kid playing stickball in the cane fields.

Just two days earlier a caravan of locals in a rundown guagua traveled to the airport to greet Pedro Ciriaco, Pittsburgh Pirates shortstop and Cachena native who is back here in his home community during the offseason. Tis’ the season when the big leaguers and minor leaguers make their way back here to the batey and abandon the American lifestyle, American food and indoor plumbing for a couple months.

While I knew that mine was a baseball community, I did not realize just how deep the talent pool might go. Most every male aged 16-24 seems to be an above average pelotero and at any given moment, there are 8-10 youngsters hoping to be signed and swept away to the Land of Plenty. In a community of approximately 300, having even 1, let alone 10-15 players with big league potential is pretty amazing.

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.

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.