Marine love in Monte Cristi

I have learned a little more of what it must be like to be a mother. The feeling of your heart dropping into your shoes when a child is missing and nearly swelling out of your chest with pride is his intelligence and talent.
For the third time in my service I took two of my boys, hours from home, to enjoy a weekend of workshops, discussions, and games with other young men and women. But this time it also included camping and snorkeling in one of the most beautiful places in this country.
My boys had never seen the inside of goggles, the animal that lives in a conch shell or a lobster in it’s habitat. Before the conference they couldn’t tell you what sea grass is, why it’s important, or how the people living all the way up in the mountains affect it. They didn’t know that coral reefs make and protect sandy beaches. They had never slept in a tent, learned on a beach or wore their bathing suits to class. No one had ever told them not to throw their trash on the ground.

Eighteen Peace Corps Volunteers changed all of that.

We taught them about rivers, coral reefs, sea grass, plate tectonics, threats to the DR’s natural environment, and inter tidal pools. We also taught them that they are smart, there are cool people with Bachelor’s degrees and that real women don’t want to marry chauvinists.
As Peace Corps Volunteers we cannot escape working with youth. They are our first friends, the ones that invite us into the community, and teach us a new language. They are the future of whatever cultural change we are hoping to impact in our two years of service. We have a 24-hour job as mentors and as the only Americans most of them will ever know. Like everyone in the United States, we make a huge impact whether we’re trying to or not.
On the final night of the conference, we took the 26 youth and set them on driftwood logs two meters from the high tide. By firelight, and above the roar of the surf, we reviewed all we had taught them with a rousing game of marine ecosystem jeopardy. The salty mist was at their faces, but we were the ones blown away…
Time after time they stood up to give detailed answers to questions we had asked blank faces three days before. The older of the two boys I had brought to the conference has never done well in school, and as I watched him carry on about the intricate relationships between us, rivers and oceans, my heart felt as if it might leave my chest.
Later, in a quiet moment, he asked me how long I would be in the United States for during my vacation in May and when the color left his face at my answer it was all I could do not to cry.

He slept on my shoulder all the way home.

After the earthquake

In 2005, Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, DC. determined that the political and social unrest in Haiti was making it unsafe for the Peace Corps Volunteers then residing there. After spending two years under the mother-hen-like care of the PC Dominican Republic administration and medical care staff, I trust that headquarters will take its careful time in deciding when and if volunteers can assist Haiti again in the near future. For now, some of us are helping Haitians through organizations, communities and people on this side of the border.
In the two months following the earthquake, many of my colleagues who had learned some Creole went to translate and organize at a Dominican clinic overflowing with Haitian refugees. Their stories are powerful and hard to listen to. Nearly all of them describe walking through the crowds of people sitting on the ground outside the clinic, doctors and organizers looking out for the people who were most in need of care. Patients with compound fractures were taken first, and for fear of the infections that would inevitably take their lives, were ordered amputations without the luxury of further consideration.

As I typically don’t go a day without hearing a racist comment, I was surprised that my community’s initial reaction to the earthquake was a unanimous outreach to their Haitian ‘brothers and sisters.’ In the days following the quake I was instructed to go across the border and pick up some orphans for them to raise as their own. One woman had recently received a huge box of clothing from the United States to sell, but instead she decided to donate it to the Haitians and so I took it to Santiago for her.

Now, although they are sympathetic still, my family is tired of hearing news about Haiti and is wondering what they did with all of the aid that has been sent there. They didn’t understand the severity of the previous economic situation and cannot comprehend the resulting hardship the earthquake has caused. Facing increasing pressure from citizens, the Dominican government soon had to send all Haitians patients at the border clinic back into Haiti, healthy or not. And this from the country who, a couple weeks before, was boasting that it provided the first aid into Haiti…well I hope so, we do share an island!

Papa

With grandsons, waiting roadside to sell his peas.

Juan Rafael is in his eighties. When Trujillo was President, he marched 20 kilometers every morning before breakfast so he wouldn’t be executed. He remembers when the highway was just a mule trail and when plastic bags didn’t exist. He made it through the 3rd grade, never learning how to read, before he began working the field.

When he walks into the room he is given the respect that all elders here deserve, “Blessings, Papa.” In return he asks God to bless us and, like his wife, has prayed the rosary every single evening of his life. He is half blind now, without the money to operate on the cataracts that whitens his right eye, but that doesn’t stop him from beating me at dominoes every afternoon.

As I am sitting here typing, Papa is sitting at my side, looking out at the land he has worked his entire life. Every once in a while he glances in my direction, examining my shiny silver laptop and matching external hard drive.

P: What’s that light? The battery?
D: Yes.
P: So if you shut it, it turns off?
D: Yep. Like this. (demonstration)
P: How many batteries does that thing take?
D: Just one. It recharges with the light (the word commonly used for electricity).
P: Wow.

This Marines hat is his work hat. His dress cap is a Yankees one.