The True Value of a Milkshake and a Heavy Table

My fellow volunteer and good friend Ryan and I have a Monday routine, a ritual that has become part of our beings here in the DR. Every week we meet at the organization we both work with in the pueblo and try to get work done together while meeting the social requirement of greeting every person in the office, asking them how they and their families are – though the answers are always the same, “Bien, Gracias a Dios”- “Good, thanks to God.” Then we open our laptops and stare at the documents we’re supposed to be working on while we catch up on each others lives and talk about all the hard issues of the world. At noon whether we’ve done any actual work or not we head for El Rancho for the best papaya milkshakes in the Dominican Republic, the rice and beans is just a side dish.
This week, we quickly ran through our greetings and found a back room away from the hustle and bustle of the Monday morning office, purposely hiding ourselves from the people and at the same time staying out of their ways. The room we found had nothing but the basic requirement, chairs. But laptops, as their name suggests do not require a desk or table of any kind. After a half hour or so or chatting, and sometimes venting our frustrations with Dominican culture, we were spotted. The tiny old woman who works in the kitchen entered the room with two big cups of oatmeal lime-aid and two packages of crackers apologizing, as is customary, for the plastic cups and some fictitious lack of lime that the juice possessed. We, as is customary, insisted that she was wrong, the juice was the best we’d ever tasted and it was much too generous of her to have brought it in the first place (both true). Less than one half hour later the younger of the kitchen women appeared with a tablecloth, followed by two men struggling to fit a very large table through the door. I hadn’t picked up on it because the place was generally under construction and they hadn’t even said anything that would have elicited a thank you, but Ryan knew that they had brought the table in just for us and when they left he suggested that I try and lift the table to appreciate just what had been done for me. I could barely lift the one end, there was no way that I could have carried it, and so I reflected on the amazing generosity of Dominicans. I work very hard not to generalize this culture, positively or negatively, but the majority of people here that I have come to know, poor people who live in the country, give constantly without expectation of anything in return. (I also had to reflect on the small daily benefits afforded to me for being either white, rich, young, educated, or pretty… and many times in this country the last four characteristics are assumed as a result of the first...But thats another blog!)
So, whether we complete any tasks on Monday morning is irrelevant, because I value Ryan's insights on our lives here and his friendship a great deal and I think we both end up leaving these mornings feeling better and more productive… And so I say “Gracias a Dios” for our friendship and the time we’ve already spent in this country.