Holiday Festivities

Now that both discos in my village are closed, every day of the year seems so dull to a young North American; the women cook, the women clean, the men work in the field, the men drive motorcycles around, people have coffee together, everyone plays dominoes. Everyday appears the same. But those who live here know that they’re only saving their energies for December, when the fact that it’s Tuesday night doesn’t mean we have to call off the party and mass starts at 6am in the morning.

My hips woke me up at 5am on the 16th, jiving to the drum and guirra (traditional cheese grater-like instrument) music out in the street and people singing, thanking God for the new baby in our house. I followed them, with only my ears and hips, to the church behind our house and the next day I got up to meet them. In the cool morning air I was glad I had my dog and that there was electricity to at least light the street lamps that were functioning. We jogged the long dark shadows that the non-functioning ones left on the country dirt road between the lit areas. Soon we found ourselves among many friends, sauntering down the street, stopping in front of select houses to sing funny rhymes about the people sleeping inside them. Eventually we reached the small concrete church perched on a hillside looking over 25 kilometers more of green rolling hills and sleeping villages in the mountains. The mass was quiet and when it finished we all went back to our beds for two more hours!



As North Americans we often forget that each crop has a harvest time; we can find everything we have ever seen within five minutes of our homes any day of the year. Here in the rural DR however, food appears on the table during its corresponding season. Around May you begin to notice orange stains around the mouths of your neighbors and down the front of their shirts. When you offer them to come in for a meal or snack, they turn it down, claiming to be full. This is when you know the mangos are ripe. In December we have more avocados and oranges than we eat, though my ‘mom’ and I together can eat all the oranges off an entire tree.

Around Christmas they have a tradition called ginjibre - ginger. This year all of the young people gathered at our friend Davi’s house at around 9pm one night to share the season and play Dominoes. His wife made us very sweet ginger tea, but one glass was not sweetened. So goes the tradition that the person who pulls the unsweetened glass has the pleasure of hosting us all for ginger tea the next night. Eventually everyone in the group will host and the last person to do so not only hosts tea but a potlatch dinner as well. It’s a great way to get around the neighborhood and gives us something fun and inexpensive to do in the evenings.

My birthday was day two of three consecutive days of rain. I don’t mean tropical, rain-but-it’s-still-sunny-and-80 rain. I mean Michigan-grey sky and downpour-from-
the-time-you-wake-up-till-the-time-you-go-to-sleep-South-Pacific -monsoon rain. As a general rule, Dominicans don’t go outside when it’s raining. There is no motorcycling riding, which means that none are passing my house, which means that I am not going anywhere. Because we live in a subtropical climate the houses are relatively open and without heating systems they can get quite chilly after three days without sun. Also, I live in a single room and with the cat and dog wanting to be inside on rainy days, we all have to leave the house to relieve ourselves (my outhouse is outside). See then, the resulting equation: 1 room studio + (woman + cat + dog)(# of times has to pee/day) – a lawn = mud in house. This might all be quite tolerable if there was electricity more than a few hours a day, but when the laptop, cell phone, and light bulbs are all dead (I don’t even have a TV or frig) what do you after reading and writing for half the day in bad light?

Grudgingly, I left my dirty studio and hitched a motorcycle ride in the rain to to buy my own birthday cake. I don’t even like cake. My best friend, the best cook within many miles, planned to make me dinner but it was my job to buy the dessert. I would have made pudding but they may not have let me stay had I not shown up with cake. (Dominicans are quite particular about how they execute social gatherings.) The cake actually turned out to be more than worth it though, when a spontaneous frosting fight broke out between the six of us. And so I wrapped up 25 childish years with a kid’s dream birthday celebration!







On Christmas Eve - Noche Buena - we had a huge meal with the family. Roasted pig, two chickens, salads, rice, pigeon peas, cake, candies, punch, wine and merriment! The best things about the 24th and 25th of December here, hardly any presents and the electricity company doesn't take the electricity away!