Earthquake in Haiti

It was the first time I had ever felt an earthquake. It was felt as far East as Nagua, Dominican Republic. But we are safe and there was no damage here.

I have friends visiting and we were inside a large market plaza in Santiago. I was looking at a wall of souvenirs and it moved away from me, but I didn’t realize what was happening until I heard the men outside the store yelling, “The earth is trembling, the earth is trembling!” I still can't believe what some Haitian communities were going through at that same moment. I was in the middle of a giant old building. I certainly would have been trapped inside had the earthquake hit Santiago instead.

If you want to help I would recommend the Red Cross but if you prefer to send your money with a certain motive I will deliver it personally to Port au Prince in May when I am no longer serving in the Peace Corps.

Welcome 2010!

Happy New Year! As I will complete my Peace Corps service in May, the last few months of my life have been sacrificed to graduate school applications and the struggle that goes along with trying to research, communicate, complete, and send important documents without reliable Internet, phone or transportation. While I will bring that struggle into 2010, I will approach it with more tenacity! I am excited to spend time reflecting on this experience and also to begin something new. I am already though, feeling the painful loss that my move will bring to me and my friends here.

I was incredibly fortunate to have welcomed so many friends and couchsurfers into my home in 2009, to learn about Dominican culture and to teach me about being a hostess - mainly how incredibly rewarding and exhausting of an experience it is. This is also an awesome challenge I will bring into this year!

This new year has brought nothing but rain and cold to my corner of the Dominican Republic. Our dirt road is nearly impassable, but with a new baby to snuggle who could attest to a day spent indoors? And the entire day must be spent indoors because according to traditional Dominican wisdom no one that has been in the rain or cold can touch the baby. To stop his hiccups they pull a string off of his clothes and spit-paste it to his forehead!

My new 'nephew' Hendryk

The Moons’ Dominican Adventure

Thanksgiving Week 2009 - Before Danielle left for the PeaceCorps we promised that we would come to visit her while she was gone. Shortly after she left I became pregnant with our first child. This would have made some people cancel, but not us. We are adventurous people, we like to travel and see the world. We like to experience life directly rather than sit on the sidelines watching it go by. Having a child doesn’t have to change that right? We don’t think so…

As we slept in our cabana the sound of the roosters began at about 3:30am, calling out the approaching morning. Brian has a habit of waking up with the sun and making coffee. As he goes outside to explore our gorgeous surroundings, Carter and I like to have breakfast and take things slow. Suddenly Brian yells excitedly from the garden below. He has rescued a tarantula from the swimming pool and wanted to show off his prize. I was not nearly as excited about the find.

In the mid morning Rafael (Danielle’s Papi) came to pick us up to take us all to his family’s Sunday lunch. We stopped at Danielle’s casita, to see her modest accommodations and then took the very steep, very bumpy walk down the hill to the family’s house. We walked past Rafael and Teresa’s house on down to her parent’s place where all of the family was gathering. It was filled with people. The grandparents were sitting our front porch enjoying a game of dominoes, the teens were all huddled on the couch watching TV while they had electricity and the women were all busy in the kitchen. When we arrived we were warmly greeting by everyone and Carter was immediately swept away. She went bouncing along from one person to the next, loving every minute of it.We had an amazing lunch with fresh green salad, rice, beans, bananas, avocados and just killed in our honor; guinea fowl.

Around 1pm Carter is used to going to down for an afternoon nap. She is a very happy and laid back baby, but when she gets over tired, things get ugly quickly. Right around lunch time she began to get fussy. Danielle set up a stroller in a bedroom and I went to lay her down. All of the women of the house did not understand how I could do such a thing. “She’s awake, I’ll hold her” they would say. I tried to explain that she does much better if she is allowed to sleep on her own but they disagreed. For the next hour, there was a parade of people going to check on my fussy baby. She was too distracted and entertained to think about sleep, too tired to maintain her happy disposition any longer. We needed to escape somehow.

Danielle had planned on taking us on a hike to the local swimming hole after lunch so we decided, now was the time. I knew that once Carter was in the baby carrier and away from all this activity she would sleep so we had to go. We set off into the woods; two Dominicans, 4 Americans and a sleepy Carter. All of the women at the house thought we were crazy…”don’t take the baby into the forest, leave her with us.”

Just as I predicted, Carter fell asleep in the carrier on my chest almost immediately. Which posed quite a challenge when we came across our first of 7 barbed wire fences that we would cross on our hike. With everyone’s help, I was able to safely scamper over and under each of the fences and Carter never stirred. We climbed up and down the riverbank, walking on rocks and ducking under branches. We’re not crazy, just adventurous.


After about 45 minutes, we had arrived. Joel immediately stripped down to his swimming trunks, climbed up a tree and prepared to jump off of a branch. Everyone else entered the water from a more logical location, jumping off a large rock. Carter was still asleep so we sat down to watch. I kept her covered with a shirt because Danielle mentioned that there were biting magis. I learned later that I should have been more worried about myself. I ended up with more than 50 bites on my lower legs and upper arms and Carter had 2. Luckily I squeezed each of them as I was instructed to get the poison out and they never bothered me, only in appearance. Carter did wake up and I was able to swim too, before we started our hike back.


Since we had already had the adventure through the woods, we decided to take a slightly longer route home that was out on the road. There was just enough cloud cover that it wasn’t too hot. The road was pretty quiet, just an occasional motorcycle to kick up some dust. As we were walking along, Brian noticed a large bull that was on our side of the barbed wire fence. Unfortunately, Lucy didn’t see it and got close enough to startle the bull. Lucky for us we had Shanti, Danielle’s dog with us to chase the bull away before we could get into too much trouble.

As we got closer to town, the traffic picked up and we began to see more and more people along the side if the road; socializing, sitting in front of little stores and just relaxing on a Sunday afternoon. Then up ahead we heard a lot of commotion and saw that there was a group a Haitians fighting and armed with sticks. We stopped at a safe distance and waited for the situation to disperse before we moved on to our destination.
When we finally arrived at Danielle’s Casita we visited with her housemates and waited for Rafael. We returned to our little cabana to make dinner and relax, looking out over the mountains with the beautiful blue sky and a yard full of flowers in full bloom. And that was just day one.

We had an absolutely amazing time. At 10 months old, with her big blue eyes, blonde hair and fair skin, Carter was adored everywhere we went. She didn’t mind all of the attention one bit. She started crawling for the first time in the cabana. Her first real word was established while we were there also. She said “Hi!” to every new person we encountered, often 4-5 times in a row. When we were leaving she squeaked out “Hasta Luego!” Well..…….Maybe we just imagined that part.

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!

To Michigan and beyond!

Duquesne University in Pittsburgh

As usual, I made plans to visit Michigan with the fantasy that I would be sitting in front of a fire having relaxed tea and talks with my parents and brother, and doing nothing more. The reality was, and no one's fault but my own, that I spent more time in the car than anything else. In sixteen days I managed to squeeze in trips to Miami (the airport anyway), Chicago, Kalamazoo, Detroit, and Pittsburgh! My mother and I spent days in the Salvation Army doing our very own toys for (Dominican) tots program, many family and friends came by to chat and I took the Graduate Records Examination after months of studying! It's always wonderful to see the people I love, but I look forward to it being more commonplace and less rush! In June for sure, but right now send me back to my warm little tropical island!


Baby love from GEO! (Cousin's baby - cousin once removed? I think I deserve aunt status!)

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.