Ratones

Last night we encountered one of the small beady-eyed friends that has been nibbling my batatas – sweet potatoes - and peanut bars. These are not mean, Nueva York, trash eating street rats. These are wholesome corn fed country rats, gray and quite fluffy. Nonetheless they carry diseases and eat my stuff, I suppose, regardless of cuteness. These rats are a difficult thing for me to deal with. I do not like to kill things, or see things die generally, and especially not mammals in a cruel manner. My brother and best friend, generally feels similar (the only one in my community who doesn’t kill insects on sight) except when you’re talking about rats and praying mantises, I have no idea what anyone could have against a praying mantis, but whatever. So he was on a mission to kill this rat. I was thinking to myself, “Really? This rat is running around in the rafters and he’s going to chase it around the house? What a waste of time, you don’t catch rats. You have to set traps. Never in a million years could I catch a rat running after it.” I told him I didn’t want any part of the rat hunt, both because I didn’t want to kill it and because I didn’t think there was any way it was going to work. He proceeded by telling me that if I was really serious about not killing it than he would leave it, but did I think that this rat was a pet? Had I heard of Leptospirosis? Did I know that with Leptospirosis we were talking about a month in the hospital? “Do you want to get sick? Huh?” I reply in a small squeaky voice, trying to get out of rat killing duty, “…no…” “Okay,” he said, “Grab that mop.” So I tapped the side of the oven a couple times before my allergy to god-knows-what that I’ve been battling with lately flared up. The rat popped out of the oven and I ran for the pantry. He tells the story as between fits of broom handle swinging he looks back, expecting his fearless partner standing strong and angry with mop handle… seeing nobody he pauses to hear uncontrollable sneezing coming from inside the pantry. From the pantry, in between my fits of uncontrollable sneezing I heard broom handle swinging and dishes flying. The chase continued up a wall. And this is where I poked my beady eyes out of the pantry to see what was going on. The cement walls in my house don’t touch the tin roof so he proceeded to scale one and perch himself atop it. Out of nowhere the campo warrior in the war on disease grabbed a piece of loose concrete and drew it back behind his shoulder. Two seconds later the rat appeared atop another wall across the house and he threw the concrete, connecting with amazing accuracy, and falling the rat into an adjacent bedroom. “It’s still alive!” he said, “But not that alive! Call the cats!” he yelled to me. I took a couple steps to the back door and called, instead of kitty kitty kitty, “Meeshee, meeshee, meeshee.” One of the three resident mini panthers comes, a little skeptical about all the racket so late in the evening, is perfectly elated by the juicy find! And in the wake of the tragic death of this relatively small mammal, I couldn’t help but reflect on the impressive hunting skills of this young man, crouched atop a concrete wall with a broom handle in one hand and a chunk of concrete in the other. Mission impossible accomplished. We’ll leave the other rat to my roommate.

November 23, 2008 12am

It’s raining again…

The carretera (road) is too muddy to cross in some parts. Some of the muchachos gather on the grassy knoll next to a big hill on our road to watch suvs and motorcycles attempt to climb and descend. It makes me think of Rio’s favorite sport.

Maybe the rain will realize that tomorrows Monday, the beginning of a new week.

November 22, 2008 10am

Today is Sunday. It has been raining since noon on Wednesday. I washed my clothes Tuesday late afternoon and they weren’t dry so I left them out on Wednesday morning while I went to the office. So they got wet again and they will remain wet until the sun comes out as I have yet to see an electric dryer in this country. Let me take a moment to say that they definitely exist, as a few weeks ago I met some young women my age who were so privileged as to never have done their own laundry…these types of young women and their families do not live in the campo…but that’s a whole ‘nother entry. It has actually stopped raining but the sun still has not made its appearance. I didn’t think it was possible for it to rain three and a half days straight or that wool sweaters were really an appropriate thing to pack for two years on a Caribbean island…Turns out that both are the case.

Brigada Verde

Back in April I attended a regional conference of Brigada Verde, our environmental youth organization, and I was taken aback to see what the topic of conversation was. What an unusual sight to see a room full of 11 – 16 year olds spending their weekend learning about ecotourism and the meanings of biodiversity, endemic species and Dominican tourism (endemic = fancy science word for a species that occurs no where else in the world). The mix of American volunteers and Dominican youth has become commonplace in my work here, groups of young people aiming to contribute to the conservation of the natural environment and the development of their communities. But what struck me as an urgent realization was that they were all gathered for an extracurricular activity that has the power to lift their communities to a higher quality of life. Money from international tourism comprises the largest income to this country, aside from remittances from family members who have become residents of the States. By obtaining information on the natural environment, what tourists seek from their country and how to start a community based tourism project they, at 15 years old have the power to change the course of their community’s future. In the States its not as crucial to teach a rural Nebraska 12 year old how to show a French couple around the savannah but the reality here is, as one Dominican boy said when asked to define the word, “Tourism is when the Gringo comes.” Their present, and more importantly, their future economy depends on tourism from France, Germany and The United States of America.
The photo above is from the conference that my great friend Ryan and I were in charge of planning. We had about 40 youth from the central region of the country come for the weekend to learn all about ecosystems, trash, water, trees, themselves and each other. At the end we had a little ceremony where we handed out certificates which are now hanging up in most of their homes. It was a stressful but very rewarding weekend. That was the weekend on November 7th and my kids are still asking me when we're going to do it again.

October 20 2008

Hallelujah I wore a jacket today! What a thrill to wake up a little chilly, to be reminded again that I am alive. The days have passed here (almost 240 of them!) some days are rainier some are hotter but relatively all the same, and it adds a great deal of monotonous convenience…being able to always go outside, farm etc…which I guess is a fair trade off for having a life in which you have to go out to the latrine to pee. Can you imagine going outside in Michigan winter every time you had to use the restroom?!?! Anyway, the morning air is gorgeous when it’s cool like this. Especially the mornings after a good rain when I open the back door and I can see the mountains so clearly in the distance as to see the shapes of trees where a uniform green mat lays every other day. This place is really beautiful.

I had an amazing day today – I went to the city to meet a friend who had received my absentee ballot from the capital and with a belly full of nutritious vegetarian food from the Adventist church restaurant, I voted from Santiago, Republica Dominicana! Although I wanted to be in the States for the campaign season it has been a really amazing experience being here in the DR with all the other expats!

October 17, 2008

The hardest working people in miles, working 5 days a week 8-4pm in the office, and who knows how many hours outside of it, but they are never in the office without smiles on their faces. The morning starts with a smile, handshake or hug for everyone, and around the circle again every time a new face enters the room. For an hour or so we catch up on the week’s events, drinking tea and coffee as everyone arrives. I’m not in the office everyday and so I share my thrilling stories of my adventures in the outside world as we joke and laugh. They love to hear what’s going on in the Capital whenever I have work to do there, committee meetings etc, and without fail we talk about how much hotter and uncomfortable it is there as opposed to the climate here in the foothills.

Today is unusual, as there is a serious, political corruption conversation going on. Although it’s difficult to be super productive and efficient in the beginning of your Peace Corps service without being fluent in the language, my inability to understand their conversations and communicate my personal opinions from day one here has kept me out of the political and chisme (gossip) circles. They know now that they can ask my opinion on topics, but that I’m not going to sit around and share the silly office gossip. When I share my opinion it's because they've asked me personally and they all fall silent waiting to hear my response. My response is usually laced with a female inspiring message that leaves all the women in the office like "Hell yes I should be allowed to leave the house whenever I want!" Which is unfortunately a big problem with some of couples here.

Not knowing the language right away has also given me the opportunity to get to know the people and the culture before sharing my opinions on things, which are typically quite different from what they are used to hearing. It is really beautiful coming from the world’s melting pot, to become part of a country with such a strong culture (though theirs too has roots on three or four continents). The food, music, dancing, speech and customs are their own and they have great pride in it all. My experience here over the last 8 months is that sometimes the tradeoff for having a strong national culture is tolerance and an open mind. For example, of the approximately 9.8 million people in this country 95% of them declare themselves Catholic. Although I am involved in and supportive of the church here, I believe that it a major cause of abstinence only promotion and homophobia, which I am not supportive of.

Water

Ten years ago the people in my community were washing their clothes in the river. They have memories of the first time that their water came from the aqueduct pipe. I have many colleagues working in communities that are still planning and constructing systems to bring water to their houses a couple days a week. Running water changes the culture of a place, completely changes the way of life and the health of the people and the environment. Knowing these people as they are now, it is mind boggling for me to think of them moving their water completely by hand, washing and bathing in the rivers which we use now only for recreation and for the extraction of sand and river crab.

So if we don’t get our water from the river here where does it come from? Many residents of the US answer either ‘the city’ or ‘the well,’ as the people here in the Dominican campo say ‘the aqueduct.’ What magical places then, these cities, wells and aqueducts – constantly producing an infinite amount of drinkably, bathably, washably clean water, just turn on the faucet! But really, where does it come from? Is it possible to use it all up? Especially on a relatively small island surrounded entirely by salt water…

So I started an investigation, like an explorer searching for a lost city, or more appropriately a fountain of youth…a fountain of life, if you will.

I began with the aqueduct. I happen to work with the organization that manages it and, showing interest, one of the guys agreed to plan a day trip with me to where it all begins. Or so I thought. The day came, we packed lunch and headed South into the mountains. The road is unpaved and the closer we got to our destination the smaller and bumpier the beaten path became. The view from my house is a gorgeous but it gets even better as the mountains get higher and the road drops of hundreds of feet to the full flowing, blue Rio Bao. More than an hour later we reached the national park building where Maximo, a chubby elf of a man has the job of park guard. His main duty appears to entail eating and playing dominoes with himself. Hey, at least park guards are written into the budget.

The hike from here to ‘la obra de toma’ – the building of take is an hour. This is a small dam where they extract the water from the river which is bound for my house. En route of the semi strenuous hike in the mid day sun my collegeue shares with me that a fungus destroyed part of his nervous system in his head, he’s had three operations and he has asthma. I think to myself, ‘perhaps I should have come more prepared to this day hike…Lets see, in my backpack right now I have enough bananas, casave bread, water and pistachios (thanks mom and dad!) to sustain us for days, I have a long sleeved Patagonia baselayer – versatile enough for many emergency situations, a camera – should we need to document our final days, and a cell phone with no signal – should we find use to for the alarm, calculator or Pong-like game, Brick Attack.

I was extremely excited to reach the obra thinking, “Wow, to see where the water we use for everything really comes from!” I climbed on top of the giant cement box that filters out the sand to get a better look up at the river flowing into the iron grate bound for the pipes. From here I could see upstream to a series of small waterfalls flowing out of the forest…but wait…this isn’t the beginning…this is only where the aqueduct starts, not the water! Where does the water come from? “The aqueduct,” say the people who use the faucet. “The river,” say the people who run the aqueduct. But here the trail ends, what do the people who run the river say? I plan to find out.

the view from my house

HALLOWEEN!

I had been feeling a little disappointed about the lack of change in the seasons living here in a subtropical climate. As I am a lover of thick wool sweaters and anything made out of apples, autumn is my favorite season, especially in Michigan, and when I was informed by their Facebook profiles that a group of my friends was busy making delicious apple butter I became truly jealous. But it is getting cooler here in the mountains.

A few weeks ago, I woke up a little chilly and started using light blanket in addition to a top sheet on my bed. Also, initiating my environmental youth group, Brigada Verde, and planning the regional conference has kept me too busy to even notice what month it is.


Our Brigada Verde group had its first meeting a few weeks before Halloween and my muchachos were already ready to start planning the design of our new “poloches” – from the English words polo shirts, a term they use to describe polo and t shirts. The problem arose when they realized that we are brand new group and have no money to buy poloches. I suggested a fiesta to raise money - a Halloween fiesta – and they freaked out. Where I live everyone has family living in Nueva Yol – New York – and so they are familiar with the holiday but have never celebrated it. They were ecstatic about the idea. So we spent the next few weeks selling tickets and preparing.

There is an extremely few number of days of the year in this country where the sun does not shine in full force. But on the 30th of October in my campo it rained all night. We woke up on October 31st to a grey sky and a foggy mist in the valleys – perfect for Halloween! It was fairly cool the entire day, but the true miracles were that the sky never cleared up and at 8pm people from surrounding communities were lined up outside the door waiting to get in to our fiesta.

It was a great night, complete with a choreographed thriller routine and live tarantula. We had covered the venue completely with Spanish moss and it didn’t really matter if the electricity went out or not – which it always does – because only candle light led the partygoers from the bar to their tables to watch the spooky presentations.


My muchachos are phenomenal - they went out and caught a live tarantula before the party! We hung it where the people went to buy their drinks. The ghoul and I let it go at the end of the night.

Some of my ghouls waiting in their coffin for the people to walk in the door.

My mom sewed me a sleaved jacket out of material I found and I tied the remnants around my waist.

My brother had the winning costume with a wicked stake through his head, complete with strawberry flavored blood. I'd be a vampire too if it always tasted that good!

Don't ask me how they climb trees without branches... One of my muchachos in the pine tree throwing moss down for us to decorate.

The itsy bitsy spider

This is my smallest cousin here, we call her chi chi (chee chee). One day a while back she was upset and so I started singing the itsy bitsy spider, complete with hand motions. She totally loved it and from then on every time I see her she starts imitating the itsy bitsy spider crawling up the water spout with her little hands smashed into a bundle. I'm certain that by the time I leave she'll be singing it in English. I am a serious animal lover but this picture is so funny, and its the little things that keep you entertained and positive when you live in the campo.