A week in the parrot's habitat

Climbing the Caribbean’s highest peak…hmmm…wasn’t easy. I think grueling is the word I would use to describe the hike; five days through forest on a trail that does not contour the mountains, but rather takes advantage of every peak and every valley – up, down, up, down, up, down – crossing every luxuriously potable river in Armando Bermudez National Park. In one day we hiked from low, swampy, bamboo forest to a savannah valley high in the mountains, arguably the most beautiful place in the Dominican Republic.

The scenery however, was rivaled by the most excellent company a woman could ask for; 3 other female volunteers from my training class, two Dominican guides from the remote village at the trailhead, and two mules. And although we could have just taken the ol’ helicopter to the base and waltzed up Duarte’s Peak we most definitely enjoyed spending every shoe destroying moment together for the entire 5 days. We took about 500 pictures. Since we couldn't get a good one of the flocks of wild parrots, boars, owls or sunrises, most of them are of me being ridiculous…here are some of the prettier ones.


Campfire - good for drying shoes and panties while cooking marshmellows!
Valle de Bao - Bao Valley at the base of Mt. Pelona
Rarely did we lose sight of the gorgeous Rio Bao
"This is the trail? What happened?" "Agua" the guide replied.
1st task of the day: 6am river crossing
Traditional Mule Saddles

Lunch with men in suits

Every once in a while some group of important people will pull Peace Corps volunteers out of their campo and set them at fancy table to eat with people in suits. No one ever tells us in advance what we´re really getting into, but I believe that it is solely for their own entertainment, ¨Oh, dahling, tell me again the story about how you had a rat in your bed! Oh ha ha, you are simply killing me.¨ This is a tale of one such event in my experience.

Friday I get a call from one of the assistants in the Peace Corps office. Apparently the chargé d´ Affaires (acting ambassador) of the United States is coming through the region on Tuesday and he would like some Peace Corps company at a luncheon. She tells me that my boss has recommended me (and many others, I assumed) for the role. The dress is formal. That is ALL the information I am given.

Monday I receive an invitation in my email that says only ¨AMCHAM Luncheon¨ and the name of the hotel in Santiago. ¨AMCHAM?¨ I ponder, then I Google it. ¨American Chamber of Commerce. Interesting… So where does the ambassador fit into all of this?¨ These are the puzzles I am paid to solve in order top complete my mission in the United States Peace Corps. This is apparently why I am going to be so sought after by employers come May, because I don´t need a lot of direction to figure things out…and in some cases, I don´t receive any.

So Tuesday I get my hair dried, (I have no electricity in my house, plus it costs only $4 for a wash and dry, man I am going to miss it here when I go!) put on the best clothes I can borrow and head to Santiago. One of my best friends here was also invited, so at least we can be clueless together. In the cab on the way to the hotel I fill her in on the details of the mission that I have picked up - Codewords AMCHAM, chargé d´ Affaires etc.

Arriving at the conference room in the super fancy Gran Almirante Hotel and Casino we are surrounded by old men in suits and find that we are the only two volunteers on the list, invited by the American Embassy. And yet again we think, ¨Well, this should certainly be interesting.¨ Not recognizing anyone I take a strawberry juice in champagne glass and we begin strategizing our seating. We don´t want to sit front and center but only the antisocial choose the back tables with so many seats available. We had just decided on a safe one in the middle with women at it when two men popped into our fields of view. ¨Are you from the Peace Corps?¨ they asked enthusiastically. ¨Come with us!¨ We were lead to the lead table, front and center to sit with the incredibly fun and interesting staff of the American Embassy and the ambassador´s very well traveled wife. What followed was interesting conversation, a deliciously luxurious lunch and in the middle of his speech (impressively delivered in Spanish) on the economy of the United States and the development of Commerce in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, the ambassador (former Peace Corps volunteer, Costa Rica) stopped to recognize the two of us and lead the room in a round of applause for our work. Another highlight was sitting next to the speechwriter and getting to read along and learn new vocabulary such as Producto Interno Bruto (Gross Domestic Product) and Inversionistas (Investors)!

You never know where you´ll end up when you join the Peace Corps! What fun!

Celebrating Diversity

Warning: Contains warm and fuzzy feelings!

Three days in August I spent with 50 Dominican youth and the 25 American volunteers who brought them all together to learn and share in a mountain retreat center. As you can deduce by the numbers, each volunteer could only bring two youth and with a group of 20 enthusiastic young men it was a decision I took very seriously, but ultimately was easy to make. Number one was the guy who is always driving the adults crazy, riding way too fast on his motorcycle, but who’s always showing up at my house asking when he should round up the boys for a meeting. This trip would be a just reward for his dependability. The other was my younger brother; a boy who stops by his house only to sleep, attends alternative high school and raises fighting cocks. I believe that people often become what others think and say about them, so I have always called him mi angelito – my little angel. He has an excellent demeanor, dependable and thoughtful, but he’s almost as racist and homophobic as they come. I thought a diversity conference would be an excellent place for him.

The week before the conference they were both beside themselves with excitement, according to their mothers. They needed to pack their best t-shirts and buy a new pair of jeans, of course… for the first time in a long time they would be seeing people they hadn’t known for their entire lives.

On Monday morning when we arrived in Santiago I navigated the city streets and negotiated taxi fare in my tough Dominican Spanish with the two young men, ages 16 and 19, standing behind me. I could feel their surprised looks through the back of my head. It quickly became clear to the three of us that I was the mama duck and they were my pichones – hatchlings. I was certain though, that when they found all the other youth, the females in particular, they would leave the nest and I would have to cling to other abandoned volunteers for comfort.

During the three days we attended workshops on diversity, Haitians, Muslims, Jews, Koreans, American, AIDS, clean water, Kung Fu and disabilities. We did activities about countries around the world, economic disparities and what they want to do in their own communities. And most importantly we played games and sung songs. During all of this my pichones never wandered far. I lead yoga at 7am, one did yoga, and one came to watch. We were 3 of the top 4 in limbo and my angelito and I took third place in a crazy partner game. They never ran up to me saying how awesome it was or how grateful they were to be there, but they were happy and they were totally into the workshops.

After the workshop about Haitians and Dominican immigration law the racist one came up to me and said, “You know that’s right because we want our children to be born in the States but when they (Haitians) have babies here we won’t even register them!” I just sipped my juice, smiling inside and nodding as he spouted more of what he’d learned in the workshop.

On a wall near the main classroom there were envelopes posted with all of our names on them and papers and markers to write positive notes to others during the 3 days. When I took my envelope down at the end of the conference only 2 of the 75 people there had written me… my 2 baby ducks. The two notes said something like this:

‘Daniela, I am writing to tell you how pretty you are. Your parents should feel so proud to have a daughter like you. From someone who loves you a lot.’
‘Daniela, Thank you for thinking of me for this trip. The truth is that I feel proud to be here with you.’

I nearly cried.

And so with 75 people on the big bus back to the city we had to sit three to a seat, but as we dropped people off and other seats opened none of the 3 of us moved into the empty ones. We stayed squashed together, dancing back and forth and joking about random things until we got home.

The morning after I wandered around my house not knowing what to do and wondering what my baby ducks were up to. I found my younger brother putting his new certificate proudly in an old frame and when I entered he asked me how we were going to improve our group and teach more people about all the stuff we learned.

…
I know that it filled quickly after I wrote about it but THANK YOU to any of you who donated, or tried to donate, to this conference fund after my last blog entry!

Without Water

The water tank behind our house

A couple years back I watched a documentary called “A world without water.” It’s a must see about places in the world where there are great water shortages, not caused by desertification or draught but rather the privatization of potable water in places where the people can’t afford to buy it. The documentary interviews many victims including a rural African farming family who had groundwater for generations before Coca-Cola moved a factory in next door and sucked it out from under them for free.

It’s a difficult issue because if you charge people for water they presumably value it more and waste less but what do you do when people can’t afford it?

Being from a middle class, great-lakes-state family, I could not even get close to relating to the people I saw in the documentary. The challenges facing these people were nothing I had ever imagined doing; walking miles and hauling water, not being able to eat because it doesn’t rain on the crops, etc. But this is not just a problem for rural people of color living on poor continents. Part of the documentary highlights some of the approximately 40,000 families living in Detroit homes without running water. What we think of as “third world” conditions within our own city.
Now I understand a little bit more... As I wrote about before, here in this tiny piece of the rural Dominican Republic we are fortunate to have an aqueduct that brings us safe, clean water from the protected national park to our sinks and showers. Last Sunday something only a little short of a tragedy occurred when one of the main pipes broke near the source. It took the man in charge of the aqueduct and all of the plumbers away from their families for the entire Sunday. I work with these men a lot and I know how hard they work every other day of the week so I felt bad already, but I felt even worse the next day when the water still hadn’t showed up. In my community we receive water two days a week, Monday and Friday. So on these days we do laundry (if there’s electricity), wash the floors and fill the tanks and barrels to last us the next four days until it shows up again. Although we have to ration the water a bit more, it’s not so bad if it doesn’t show up Monday as long as it comes Friday. Some communities only receive water one day a week or once every two weeks. These are the people that suffer when there’s no water on their day. Monday there was no water and Friday it didn’t come either. At this point there was no water for drinking, the floors were incredibly dirty and the only water left in the barrel (for bathing of course) was the bottom 10th that if you move too much you stir up the dirt and algae that have settled on the bottom.

“And when this is gone what happens?” I had to ask out loud because I had never considered the problem before in my life. (We live so privileged, so many of us, that we can’t tell you where a source of clean water is outside of our homes. We live so environmentally unconscious that for the majority of us there isn’t a source clean enough to drink anywhere near our homes.) My brother pointed in the direction of the small river that runs behind the adjacent properties. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “now I remember, the river that just 10 years ago they were bathing, washing and drinking out of.” It doesn’t make my top ten list of bodies of water out of which I’d like to drink but it certainly could be worse. It didn’t turn out to be necessary but the experience made me think.

Like this whole Peace Corps experience it is just making me even more flexible and grateful. I can just imagine the conversation with the landlord of my next apartment… “It has running water and I can turn the lights on whenever I want? You mean 24 hours a day the refrigerator will be working? Wow that’s great, I’ll take it.”


My "bathroom" after a windy evening.
The scene outside is the main road in front of my house.

Shanti's Sin

Here in the rural Dominican Republic there is one single sin that a dog can commit that will shun her from society forever. They have a name for the dogs that do it, a scarlet letter that will never be forgotten… “comepollo” - ”chicken eater,” and the minute a chicken, duck or hatchling comes up missing you’ll be the first one they turn to.

A couple weeks ago a duck came up missing in a neighbor’s yard and every night for a week the owner’s teenage son killed every dog that wandered near his property, by poison or hanging. There were at least 6. True story. Biting a person is typically forgiven, stealing their chicken or its eggs, life ending.

My dog Shanti has not eaten a chicken…not one that she killed herself, anyway. She has a knack for finding them rotted from days or weeks back and gnawing on them, and not just chickens. She has a nose for rotten eggs, too. As an American (who refrigerates eggs) I thought I knew the smell of a rotten egg…you know, like the sulfur pools at Yellowstone or something. Actually I had NEVER smelled a rotten egg before she got a hold of one and I wish I was never going to smell it again. The last time she ate one was a week or so back and her mouth still smells like the day she ate it. We couldn’t even get near her, like if a skunk sprayed sulfur at her face. If we were in the States I might brush her teeth, here they would think I was a lunatic if I did that.

Apparently the American volunteers who have been in this site (A woman named Alicia who was here in the 80s and myself), we have a history of having chicken eating dogs. (Let me take a moment to clarify again that I do not have a chicken eating dog. Shanti eats dead animals regardless of their species and she eats rotten eggs but the people here “know” that she will quickly learn to hunt and eat them fresh.) Alicia’s dog killed and ate someone’s chicken sometime in the 80s and people still talk about it. Apparently Alicia said to the chicken’s owner– and I completely agree – “Well YOU eat chicken, don’t you?” and then she had to pay the owner for the chicken. This is very serious.

I think that dogs should be loose and chickens should be confined, but here they think it’s the other way around.