"Yo no sé na'a"

My number one goal for the course of the year is to do away with the above phrase: “I don’t know anything.” I hear it over and over from kids in Los Dajaos school and the library, usually in response to asking them to do something other than copying what they see on the board: “Yo no sé hacer esa vaina” or “Yo no sé na’a”. It’s no mystery where they learn that from: adults in the community are always telling their children that they know nothing, or commenting to others that their child knows nothing. When the kids are old enough to go to school, their teachers tell them the same thing (implicitly or explicitly). And as adult campesinos, the rest of the world tells them that they know nothing. Some of the problems I’ve been observing in the community over the past month seem to be largely the result of a vicious cycle of inactivity, apathy, and a failed public education system.

Life in the campo moves at a much slower pace than that of the city; that much is not surprising. The difference between life here and the campesino life that I observed in the Peruvian Andes is the comparative lack of activity here. For instance, in Huilloq, Peru, where I lived for 3 weeks, many men had jobs in tourism that took them away from the community most of the time, while women stayed home raising the family and weaving items to sell in the tourist market. You would rarely see a woman anywhere without a handful of wool that she would spin into yarn as she walked. During the time I was there it was potato harvesting season, so in addition to weaving and domestic tasks, men, women, and children alike spent entire days digging up potatoes. Here, by contrast, a common daytime activity is sitting on one’s front porch and “chismeando” (gossiping). Some people have land, but some don’t, and some do but don’t cultivate it. There is very little subsistence agriculture even though there is plenty of potential for it. Some men work during the day, but many don’t. Women look after their young children and do household chores like cleaning and washing clothes, but these activities don’t come close to filling up the day. And considering that many parents are illiterate and some kids of schoolgoing age are kept at home with seldom a toy or book in sight, it’s no wonder the kids here are so starved for creative stimulation. It’s no wonder kids start screaming and running down the hill whenever they hear the word “biblioteca.” And, it’s no wonder women (girls) commonly start having kids at age 15. What other options do they have? Besides starting school (which usually turns out to be a letdown), having children is the one big event in their lives.

Last week my big challenge was to finally set down a regular schedule for the library, and getting the right kids to come at the right times. Grouping the kids into different classes was a challenge in itself, considering that I know kids as old as 13 who don’t know how to read, some kids don’t even go to school, and some go to school but are two grades behind and/or still don’t know how to read. After hand-picking the groups by a combination of age, reading level and maturity level, the next challenge was to get them to come to my classes. The process of going from house to house, getting to know the families, and spreading the word about the library schedule has taken up much more of my time than actually opening the library. About half of the families in Los Marranitos live in a cluster of houses along the same little stretch of dirt road that I do, but the other half are scattered about further up the hill, some as much as a 30-minute walk from the library. On top of that, it’s sometimes impossible to pass by someone’s house without stopping by for a 15-minute or half-hour visit. As you pass by a home, someone yells “Entra!”, in response to which you either have to stop and take a seat on their porch, and usually drink a cup of coffee with three times as much sugar as you would like, or come up with a very good excuse not to. No matter how long and until what hour you sit with someone on their front porch, and no matter what percentage of that time you sit in silence racking your brain for a conversation starter, inevitably when you get up to leave your host will object, “No te vayas! Es temprano!” (“Don’t go! It’s early!”). You either sit for another five minutes before announcing again that you have to go, or repeat your motive for leaving a couple more times before saying, “Nos vemos más tarde,” (“See you later”), and your hosts mechanically responding, “Si Dios quiere” (“God willing”).

It’s a long and drawn out process, but ultimately a rewarding one, through which I’ve drunk dozens of cups of coffee and ate plenty of fried guineos (bananas), and gotten a chance to observe the regular flow of life here, in both Haitian households and Dominican. I’ve had dozens of conversations with parents about what their kids should be learning in the library, and what they themselves would like to learn (most popular request: English). And most importantly, I feel like a little bit less of an outsider than I did before, even though I know I will never really “fit in” here.

So, here’s the weekly library schedule for the year, or at least for now:

Tuesday/Thursday
9:00—Clase Chichi (baby class)—for kids ages 2-4
10:00—Preschool for kids ages 5-9 who aren’t in school or don’t know how to read
Wednesday/Friday
9:00—Class for primary school kids age 8-12
10:00—English class for high school kids
3:00—Class for middle school kids
Saturday
10:00—Girls’ group for girls age 12-18 who don’t have children

In the preschool classes, I am mostly just reading books to the kids and then letting them draw, and for the slightly older ones, trying to teach them the alphabet and basic reading skills as well. With the primary school kids I’m trying to develop activities fostering creativity and critical thinking skills, and also improving their reading level since none of them can read well and a couple don’t seem to be reading yet at all. For the middle school kids, who mostly know how to read, I’m going to try to do a novel study of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by reading it out loud to them bit by bit and having guided activities and discussions related to the book. Lastly, the girls’ group is going to consist of mainly middle school and some high school girls. My objective with that is to foster conversation about deep stuff like values and life goals, and eventually to start talking about sex-related issues, which is going to be a challenge considering the amount of attitude these girls have and their generally very low maturity level. I’m both nervous about it and excited, because if it accomplishes anything at all I think it will be among the most important things I do here. I am also planning in teaching the girls in the group to knit. Thank God there is a Peace Corps couple living around here, the female half of which gave me lots of donated yarn and knitting needles and a couple of really helpful manuals for starting a girls’ group. We’ll see how it goes.

In addition to the library schedule, I’m also still going to the school in Los Dajaos on Thursday afternoons, to teach the 5th grade English class and read books to the other two classes. On Tuesday afternoon, I might teach a computer class in the computer lab in El Manguito. The rest of my time I’ll reserve for lesson planning and visits around town. I’m sure I will be plenty busy. In fact, I kind of already am.

Another thing I’ve been busying myself with these days has been learning Creole. There are a fair number of Haitians around Los Marranitos, many of which are male migrants, but some of which are semi-permanent workers on one of the coffee farms in the area. Two guys in particular, Pablo and Pitit, have been working on the Finca Alta Gracia for a number of years and are good friends. Petit is known for his amazing self-taught guitar skills, while Pablo has taken upon himself to teach me as much Creole as he can. Almost all of the Haitian guys seem somewhat musically inclined; one, Leonaldo, has a sizeable set speakers, and the other day in front of the office a handful of them hooked up amps to acoustic guitars and had a jam session, which also involved a drum set improvised from a wheelbarrow, a rake, and two screw drivers. As you can imagine, it was an unforgettable performance.

There are also a few Haitian families who live in Los Marranitos, and one of my favorite kids who comes to the library, Octra (also called Simé), comes from one of those families. Interestingly, I’ve encountered a lot less explicit anti-Haitian sentiment here than I did in Santo Domingo, and some of the Dominican boys with Haitian friends even know a fair amount of Creole (“Haitiano” as they call it). So far I’ve learned how to say a few essential things in Creole, such as “I am the teacher in the school” (“Mwen mem sayou madmwazel likol”) and “I like to eat rice and beans” (“Mwen renmen manje diri ak pwa”). Hopefully those phrases will come in handy some day.

Before I conclude this entry I thought I’d also mention one of the biggest challenges for a woman living in this community: the men. The machismo in this country, but especially in the campo, is like nothing I have seen before. I thought maybe it would help to tell people I have a boyfriend in Santo Domingo, but except when Fermín comes to visit, that hardly gets me anywhere. At least 5 times a day I have a conversation with some married man who tells me that I should dump Fermín and find a boyfriend here, because Santo Domingo is too far away and because he probably has another girlfriend there anyway. Of course you learn to ignore them and not take them seriously, but having the same conversation day after day with the same people gets tiring. Most of the time I just avoid talking to the men in the community altogether, which is kind of a shame. Also, now that Dylan and I are living in the same house, some of the girls have started making snarky comments about us sleeping in the same bed, even though the house clearly contains two rooms and two beds. In this country, people rarely ever actually get legally married, so “marrying” someone is essentially the same as sleeping with them, or as Dylan put it, “going into a room with someone and closing the door.” That said, I would have no problem with people thinking that Dylan and I were “married” if it weren’t for the fact that I already have a boyfriend. On the positive side, so far I’ve heard less chisme (gossip) about us than I expected, and most of the adults in the community seem to think that us living together is “mejor” (better) than living alone. But I sometimes wonder what people are saying about us when we’re not around. I just hope the fact of my supposedly having two boyfriends doesn’t affect how the younger girls in the community view me.

I'm going to make an effort to keep up with this blog more from now on, so check back soon.

Discovering the Dominican school system (or lack thereof)

I have now been living in the community of Los Marranitos for a full two weeks, and settling into my new role as “La Maestra” as well as “La Americana.” The community is tiny, with a population of less than 300, and most of the households scattered along one sloping stretch of the one dirt road. On the same road, right before arriving in the main stretch of the community, is the entrance to the Finca Alta Gracia, an organic fair trade coffee farm that also produces a variety of other food products. But contrary to the popular image of rural campesinos, the majority of community members do not own much land and do not grow food for themselves at all. A few of the men are hired by Alta Gracia and many work as day laborers on other farms, while the women mostly stay home and start having children at an early age.

The community is too small to have its own school. The children who do go to school have to walk 45 minutes each way to the neighboring community of Los Dajaos. Those who don’t attend school are only slightly less well off, considering that the Dominican Republic has statistically the worst school system in all of Latin America (and that is a feat). As a result, illiteracy is widespread. A little over a decade ago, Julia (Alvarez) and her husband Bill (the owners of the farm), with a group of volunteers, constructed a small library on the road leading up to the community. Since then, an American volunteer has come to serve as a teacher in the library almost every year, with the goal of increasing literacy skills and fostering a love of books. Last year, though, the community had no “maestra”, so unfortunately the library remained closed. The children’s excitement about my arrival and the reopening of the library has been very tangible and a little overwhelming. Along with Dylan, another Middlebury grad and volunteer here working on issues pertaining more to the farm, I am quite a celebrity. At this point I’m not sure what is more exciting to the kids, the books and activities that go on in the library or my mere presence. Pretty much every time I walk through the main stretch of the community a kid or three yells at me, “Americana! Vas a abrir la biblioteca ahora?” (“Are you going to open the library now?”) The parents, for their part, keep asking me, “When are you going to give classes?” This has been a difficult question since I have not figured out yet exactly what kind of “classes” I’m going to give, let alone come up with a regular schedule, so my answer has to be either “now” or a vague “later” (luckily these inexact measurements of time are all anyone really expects from you in the Dominican campo). Nevertheless, I consider it a success that probably about 70% of the kids in the community between the ages of 5 and 15 have come to the library and taken out books (I made up that statistic, but so what). And I have succeeded, on some occasions, in carrying out organized activities almost resembling classes, despite huge age and education ranges between kids who are in the library at once. The next step is training kids to call me by my actual name instead of just “La Americana.”

On three occasions now I have made the trip to Los Dajaos, where the children from Los Marranitos go to school (if they go at all). The first time I went was with Miguelina, a 16-year-old girl in the community who was a good friend of the last volunteer here, Caroline. The purpose of the trip was for Miguelina to show me around and introduce me to everyone, but I also took the opportunity to sit in on a couple classes. What I saw confirmed my suspicions about the Dominican school system: basically, it doesn’t work. Imagine a schoolhouse with three classrooms. In the afternoon, one classroom contains about thirty 1st and 2nd graders, the second another thirty 3rd and 4th graders, and the third twenty 5th graders. They attend school only from 2-5 PM, which includes a half hour for recess. Three hours in the morning are reserved for 6th-8th graders, with the same routine. The schoolhouse is not the worst I have seen; at least the classrooms are spacey and the kids have some elbow room. But the acoustics are terrible. You can hear every noise coming from every classroom in each of the other classrooms, and this problem is made worse by the fact that kids are constantly talking to their friends and/or wandering in and out of other classrooms. The classrooms are all set up with kids sitting around several circular tables, but since group activities don’t really seem to exist in the Dominican school system, this arrangement only serves as a further distraction. The teachers only half-heartedly feign control of their class; in reality the teacher usually only has the attention of about 20% of the room in any given moment. However, this may be irrelevant to them considering that a Dominican class consists of the teacher writing things on the board and the kids all mindlessly copying it down.

After observing a couple classes, I chatted with a friendly, surely well-meaning teacher called Profesora Miriam. She asked me if I could come to the school some afternoon the following week to read books to first and second graders. I agreed. The next Tuesday when I arrived, I was shown to one of the circular tables in the 1st and 2nd grade room, and instructed to read a book to the five kids there or do an activity with them or something. It was unclear what any of the kids were supposed to be doing at that moment. The teacher (not Miriam, a different one) was sitting in a corner looking odiously at her desk as if in attempt to shut out the rest of the world. A lot of the kids were ambling around the classroom or quarrelling among themselves, and the rest were distractedly writing in their notebooks. I knew one of the kids at my table, Johanni, from Los Marranitos. I noticed that he was drawing a row of the letter ‘B’, so I asked him what letter it was he was drawing. “That,” he said, pointing to the board. I said, “The letter B, right? And what sound does the letter ‘B’ make?” Johanni looked at me apprehensively and did not answer.

“So, who wants to hear a story?” I suggested. The kids around me perked up, eagerly nodding their heads and saying “me!”. By the time I was done reading the first book, every single kid in the room had gathered around the table I was sitting at to listen. Seeing that the situation was getting out of control and that the teacher was still sitting snugly in her corner and observing me amusedly, I stood up, extracted myself from the mob of 6-year-olds, and instructed the kids to sit on the floor in front of me. I then commenced reading “Juevos verdes com Jamón”, the Spanish version of “Green Eggs and Ham”. (I should mention that while some Dr. Seuss books just don’t seem to work in Spanish, Green Eggs and Ham is an exception, due in large part to the fact that “Sam I am” is translated to “Juan Ramón” in order to keep the rhyme with “jamón”.) Before I began reading, I asked the group who among them liked green eggs and ham. About half the children raised their hands. Roughly the same group of kids raised their hands when asked who among them didn’t like green eggs and ham, seemingly for the sheer excitement of raising their hands. Once I had finished the book, I asked, “OK, now, who wants to try green eggs and ham?” Nearly every child raised his or her hand, some even jumping up and down in excitement.

Two days later I returned to the school in Los Dajaos with the intention of reading to kids for 15 minutes, then teaching an hour-long English class to the 5th graders (Profesora Miriam is supposed to teach the class once a week, but she doesn’t know much English, and one of the kids told me she had only taught one English lesson so far that year because she had been waiting to see if an “Americana” would show up and offer to take over). When I arrived, though, the 1st and 2nd grade teacher was missing in action, and I was instructed to read books to the preschool class until she showed up. Profesora Miriam had decided to take an hour off as well since I was teaching the English class, so the girl she had sent as my assistant was put in charge of the 5th graders. Well, guess what—the 1st and 2nd grade teacher never showed up. I read to the kids for about 45 minutes, and then when there were no books left to read, started my own lesson about the alphabet in which I drew things on the board beginning with a certain letter and the kids had to guess what the word was that I was drawing. Finally after an hour and a half, Miriam arrived and told me to go teach English in her class for a half hour. I got through a lesson of “What’s your name?” and a review of the numbers, but only by screaming as loud as I could so that the kids could hear me. By the end of the two hours I had scarcely enough voice left to ask Miriam if I could leave. All things considered, though, the day was a success and definitely a learning experience.

An incomplete list of Dominicanisms

I decided to make this list its own blog entry. Keep checking back, as I will keep adding to it throughout the year. A special thanks to Fermín and José Fermín for making a concerted effort to get me to talk like a Dominicana.

Slang:

Aplatana'o= Dominicanized
Qué lo qué?= What's up?
Tranquilo= response to "qué lo qué"
To' manza= another possible response to "qué lo qué", with roughly the same meaning as "tranquilo" or "to' tranquilo"
Qué chulo= cool
Qué heavy= cool
Nítido= awesome
Apero= awesome
Montro= awesome (a version of "monstruo" that I also heard used in Peru in this context, but here they can't be bothered to pronounce all the letters)
Diantre!= an exclamation similar to "diablos!"
Un chin= a little bit
Quilla'o= pissed off
Tener pique= to be pissed off
Tiguere (apparently written this way and not "tigre", like I thought before)= clever or cunning or a ladies' man.
Pariguayo= idiot/loser (comes from the english phrase "party watcher")
Palomo= idiot/loser
Desgracia'o= a really mean/worthless person
Disparate= something foolish (I'm not sure if they use this word in other places, but I've at least heard it a lot more here.)
Todólogo= someone who knows about everything and/or is good at everything
Toyo= a foolish action or failed attempt at something
Toyólogo= someone who tries to do and/or know everything but fails miserably
No soy de na'a= I am neither a pariguayo nor tiguere, and I don't habitually commit disparates or toyos. I am just tranquilo.
Añoñear= to pamper, coddle
Estar en olla= to be broke (In the words of José Fermín: "Siempre estoy en olla, siempre tengo hambre, y siempre tengo una canción nueva.")
Pana= buddy
Sanky panky= a male prostitute
Vaina= thing (Fermín's advice: If you're ever at a loss for a word, just say "vaina".)
Fia'o= a system of buy now, pay later offered at some stores.
Bajar un frío= drink a beer
Dar una pela= give a beating
VELda?= right? ("verdad", but with the stress on the first syllable, an l sound instead of r, and no pronunciation of the final r)
Chepa= an uncharacteristic occurence or coincidence
Coño= exclamatory profanity, used also in other Spanish-speaking places but here used about every 5 seconds.
Cuero= whore
Mi negra= my girl (not necessarily a black person)
Sangrú= an anti-social person, party pooper
Agayú= someone who hogs everything for his or her self
Firmar= to take a day off from showering or bathing in any form
Ajuma'o= drunk
Jambre= hunger
Jarto= full
Jablador= liar or gossipy person
Pasa'o= crazy
Can= a small get together with friends
Cosa/coso= when you forget someone's name, you can call them a male or female thing.
Fulano= that guy who's name I forget/don't know
Grajo= B.O.
pajaro/pajarito= any kind of animal or small creature
sacar los pies= to stand someone up, or say you're going to do something and then not do it. Also, if you are good friends with someone but then stop hanging out with them or betray them in some way
dique= shortened version of "dice que"; in other words, "it's said that..." or "supposedly"

Things that they don't call by the normal Spanish name just to be stubborn:

Guineo= banana
Lechosa= papaya
China= orange
Zafacón= trashcan
Guachiman= watchman
Confle= cereal (you guessed it, the word is a bastardized version of "cornflake". My favorite example of a usage of this word is the text on the front of a bag of granola in the supermarket: "Cornflake natural".)
Guagua= bus
Chancletas= flip flops

Aplatanando

The title of this entry refers to the process of becoming Dominicanized. Since people here eat so many plantains, I guess becoming more and more Dominican is kind of the equivalent of turning into a plátano (you are what you eat). Hence the verb "aplatanar". No one is to make fun of me if my skin has a slightly more yellowish hue by the time I get back to the states.

I have been feeling the urge to write again in this blog but again, just don't know which of the many things going on right now to write about. I've decided to make this entry a tad less anthropological and more personal than usual, and introduce a couple of the main characters in my recent Dominican life. I've also decided to start a comprehensive list of Dominican slang I have learned first-hand and/or attempted to use, which I will keep adding to as the year goes on and I gradually become more "aplatana'a".

So, where to start. I have been hanging out lately with two brothers whose names are both Fermín. Well actually the younger one's name is José Fermín, but he goes by "Fermín" to everyone except his older brother, who calls him "José Fermín" (confused yet)? Fermín and José Fermín are two of 14 siblings, but not all by the same mother. (As both brothers have explained to me, their dad is a great guy but he kind of juggled a few different families. It happens a lot in this country, though it's less common in the younger generation.) So, Fermín and José Fermín are technically half brothers, but they are as close as any brothers I've ever seen. They were both born in Jamey, a town in the campo a couple hours ride from Santo Domingo. José Fermín now lives with Fermín's mom in San Cristobal, a bigger town about 45 minutes west from Santo Domingo and an hour south of Jamey. Fermín doesn't really live anywhere in particular, but stays with his mom and brother some of the time.

Fermín is a full-time abstract artist (painter, sculptor, and performance artist-- you can see his work at ferminceballos.blogspot.com and www.ocana.com) and a self-declared "vago" (wandering person/vagabond). He dresses in all white all the time and shaves his head, so lots of people mistake him for a hare krishna. But he's not. He just likes white, and happens to own only one outfit at the moment. Fermín and I have a lot in common, including that we are both chronically indecisive, introspective, and spacy, which makes for a kind of scary combination, but nevertheless entertaining for all who are there to witness it. Then there's Fermín's younger brother José Fermín, who is involved with Justicia Global. If Fermín can boast the artistic talent, José Fermín has a musical proficiency to rival it. Once he has a guitar in his hands you need a pair of pliers to get it away from him (and even that is not 100% guaranteed to work). He took me to find a cheap guitar in Santo Domingo, and has since been giving me informal guitar lessons (so far I've dabbed in merengue, samba, ranchero, and blues). He also allegedly plays a bit of accordian, piano, and some kind of eastern instrument that I don't remember the name of. Can you get any cooler than these guys? I don't think so.

This past weekend was a fun one spent with the Fermíns. We went to free concerts both Friday and Sunday. The one on Friday was fun, danceable Dominican rock/fusion type stuff, but I forget the names of both bands that were playing. The one on Saturday was even more memorable; the first band, who ther Fermíns both knew well, was called Batey. The word "batey" generally refers to a sugar plantation community usually inhabited almost exclusively by Haitians. So to call a band "Batey" implies that it has something to do with the more heavily Haitian/African-influenced counterculture. The music was mostly based on percussion, but also involved other instruments including flute and guitar. I found out that Fermín sure can sure dance, though maybe not to merengue and bachata. The next band was a Haitian band, that played even more African-sounding music, including one song that I think must have lasted 45 minutes. In the middle of it, I heard gasps and the crowd a few feet away from me suddenly parted. A woman in the center of the newly cleared space was kind of twitching and writhing as two men held on to her, trying to control her movements. Apparently she had gone into a dancing trance, in which she had been temporarily taken over by spirits--something Fermin told me happens a lot at these types of concerts.

On Saturday morning we went to San Cristobal (where José Fermín and Fermín's mom live) because I wanted to check out a literary group there that José Fermín and some of his friends participate in. The group meets every Saturday: sitting in a circle of plastic chairs in an unenclosed cement patio on the second floor of some kind of arts center. The age range of the members is between about eight and thirty-five. They get together to share thoughts about the writing process and read new things they´ve written out loud, over the din of car horns and motorcycle engines from the street. When Fermín and I arrived somewhat late for the meeting after the hour-long bus trip from Santo Domingo, two members of the group were leading a discussion about the responsibility that San Cristobal writers have of representing not just themselves but the emerging movement of writers from San Cristobal. They had a good point: There have probably not been many famous writers from San Cristobal, most coming from urban areas like Santo Domingo. It was interesting to think in those terms; being from the United States and speaking the language most associated with power and wealth, I've never thought so much about one's birthplace being an impediment to being creatively successful, but it is not so easy to have the time to be creative when you are worried about putting food on the table (and/or dividing it between your 14 siblings). Anyone from San Cristobal who is writing is really doing something unusual, and must set an example for other writers and San Cristobal-ians to come.

After that discussion, a few people read poems out loud. The first girl who read looked about 15 or 16, though she could have been slightly older. Her poem ended with the line: "Sigh...oh, how nice to have you in my bed." I was a bit taken aback, not so much because she had written the poem but because she had had the guts to read it out loud. And I couldn't help wondering what the 8-year-olds were thinking. Though the group is meant to be an informal workshop, no one dared to contribute any comments to that one until Fermin offered up, "There is always silence after an orgasm." Laughter ensued. But after a few more people read their new works, I realized that what the girl had read was not really in any way unusual. Just about everyone had written pretty explicitly about some romantic and/or sexual experience. Yes, I know that is a popular topic for poetry in general, but it made me think about how much more acceptable it is here for women AND men to be shamelessly corny, especially in popular art forms like music-- or maybe more than that, the intense pressure to always be thinking about that stuff in such a sexualized culture. Actually, maybe I'm just getting overly anthropological again. But I couldn't help but wonder, "But what if you're not getting any?? What do you write about then?" Well, I suppose you could make something up. That is the beauty of art, after all.

After the literary group meeting, Fermín took me to see one of the main attractions of San Cristobal: a guy who has turned his living space into a kind of walk-in museum, full of miscellaneous antiques. The place immediately catches your eye as you approach it, considering that there is a Volkswagon buggy on the roof with its two side wheels hanging off. Inside, you find a charming long-haired hippie man and everything from portraits of Trujillo to Taino artifacts to antique children's toys to license plates from New Jersey (he had the old blue one AND the new off-white one-- I was impressed). And we left with our hands full of some kind of tropical fruit growing from one of the guy's trees, a bitter fruit I had never tried and can't right now remember the name of. A fun-filled day, overall.

Fun with Profamilia

I thought I'd take a minute to put a word in for Profamilia, the second clinic that I just started working in last week, dividing my time between that and the Dermatologico. As expected, Profamilia is a completely different working experience. It is much smaller than the Dermatologico and serves far fewer patients, but the woman there who works for Estudio SeR, Eliza, is also a full-time nurse, meaning she has less time to do the job and there is often more for me to do. Profamilia, unlike the Dermatologico, is an independent non-profit research and medical institution. Sometimes that means the patients have to pay more for appointments than they would in a government clinic, but evidently through other means of funding, sometimes AIDS patients end up paying less than they do at the Dermatologico. Anyway, partly due to the size of Profamilia and partly the superior resources, the place seems like a very friendly, family-like environment compared to the Dermatologico. I have already become friendly with several of my co-workers, not really through the work itself, but mostly through a very important mid-day event: lunch.

So you thought a middle school cafeteria was loud? Try lunch at Profamilia. It takes place every day from 12:00-1:00 PM, which in Dominican time translates to about 12:15-1:15. It starts out realtively calm, with people meandering into the cafeteria and lining up to heat up the food they've brought in tupperwares. Then everyone sits down at one long rectangular table, and the scene quickly degenerates into a rowdy caucophony of people shoving their tupperwares at you and saying, "Here, try a little of this! It's good! Eat!" While other people are constantly leaning over the table to steal a bite of something off someone else's plate. There is a very Dominican verb for this, the practice of eating something off of everyone's plate: to 'lamber'. If you ask for some food off of someone else's plate, they will never ever under any circumstance deny you at least a bite, regardless of how much is left and what percentage of the dish has actually been eaten by the person that brought or bought it. (In one instance, someone brought in an avocado, then went to heat up the rest of their food. By the time that person got back only about one sixteenth of the avocado meat was left, but no fuss was made.) Furthermore, if you don't 'lamber', everyone tells you that you have to eat because you are going to be so hungry later in the day that you will get dizzy, or worse, in the long run, lose weight. One of the many things that strikes me as funny about the practice of 'lambiendo' is that everyone usually brings roughly the same dish: rice and beans, maybe with some meat. So it is really just a matter of having a little rice and beans with your rice and beans. But that's just me.

Because I do not generally (meaning never) bring a tupperware of rice and beans with me for lunch, it has been a little difficult for me to fully participate in this ritual. No one minds if I just sit there and eat a sandwich (though they might eye me curiously), but they refuse to believe that a sandwich could actually be filling, no matter how big it is or what it has in it. So I have to be careful not to fill myself up too much with the sandwich, or else I will regret it later when a huge pile of rice and beans is shoveled onto my plate and everyone at the table is vociferously insisting that I eat it. I have been slowly getting the hang of it, and now I participate a little more actively, often reaching across the table to grab a slice of someone's avocado or forcing the people around me to try a bite of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I always offer my food, but usually whatever lunch item I have is rejected by at least one person at the table. Today I brought in some pasta with a tomato sauce that I'd made-- just a simple mix of tomatoes, garlic and oregano. But Eliza tried one bite of it and said, "But how can you eat this without salt!?" Fortunately, some other people liked it better.

The enthusiastic eating habits and general lack of discretion of Dominicans is something that takes some getting used to, but can be pretty endearing once you let yourself enter that mindset. It could be seen as bad manners, or just as a kind of oppeness and generosity. For instance, you might be annoyed if someone that had known you for a total of 2 minutes asked you something like how your relationship with your husband was going, but they'd be perfectly willing to offer up the same information if you asked them. In the same way, someone might steal a bite or your sandwich or snatch a chunk of meat off your plate, but they would have no qualms about emptying half their tupperware of rice onto your plate. Yesterday, for example, a couple friends showed up at my apartment with a mango about the size of my head. One of them shoved the mango at me and said, "So, you got any more food?" So I cut up the mango while the two of them emptied out the scant items in my fridge, and there were no hard feelings.

Anyway, back to Profamilia-- there is one more essential part of the lunch hour, and that is coffee. There is always coffee readily available in Profamilia, and it's always mixed with so much sugar that you can hardly taste the coffee. Actually, come to think of it, I think the sugar content probably exceeds the coffee content. But again, that's just me. Coffee is never drinken along with lunch; it is more like a sweet dessert. And more importantly, if you have a little cup of coffee in front of you, no one else will pressure you to eat their food (unless of course, they judge that you haven't eaten enough). Quickly grabbing a cup of coffee once I can't handle any more food has proved a semi-effective strategy for me. Another fun perk of this is that you can tease people for eating too much by setting a cup of coffee in front of them, implying that they should be done. Cristian, the tech guy and resident male member of the Profamilia staff, is often the butt of this kind of joke.

Last but not least, and maybe even the most essential part of lunch at Profamilia: dirty jokes. A lunch never goes by without at least some kind of fart joke or sex joke. Today was particularly entertaining due to the presence of a bunch of mini-bananas that someone passed around. Cristian took it upon himself to personally feed a banana to each female left at the table. He started by holding one up to Eliza, who passionately licked the end of the banana before gently biting off the tip. There was applause and uproarious lafter. Then it was my turn. I was pretty mortified, so when he offered me the banana I just quickly took the biggest bite out of it I could. That was enough to make everyone hysterical again. But the best was the next up: a woman of about 60 who proved to be the most sensuous of all with her banana. She took little licks at the tip, then little sucks, then little bites and more licks. This performance was recorded for posterity on Cristian's cell phone.

But perhaps the most fun of all I've had with Profamilia was going to a Colmado after work one day to celebrate a co-worker's birthday. Colmados, as far as I know, are an exclusively Dominican (or maybe Carribbean) phenomenon, and are like little general stores where you can buy essential food items, but also stop in and sit down for a drink of Presidente (a dominican beer) or Brugal (rum) and dance to some music blaring from the juke box. We arrived at this particular Colmado at around 5:30, and found there a staggeringly drunk old man taking swags from a bottle of Brugal and nearly falling over. Everyone laughed at him. It gave the afternoon character. Another notable part of the night was when a beggar missing an arm came up to our table and stood there sadly holding out his hand. Most people at the table ignored him, but after a couple minutes I couldn't bear to look at him anymore and gave him some change I had in my pocket. Cristian later told me not to do that, because a lot of people here make a living and own big houses just from begging in the street, and some twisted people even rent out cripples like the man I saw so they can do the begging for them. I don't know how often that actually happens, but anything is possible in a country like this. I guess I probably won't be giving money to many more cripples.

I danced a bunch of merengue, bachata, and salsa with Cristian and another guy who came, and after a few glasses of Presidente felt like I was dancing much better. There are also some videos for posterity of my own dancing performance on Cristian's cell phone, but no, the videos have not yet been uplouded to youtube. And don't you dare ask again.

Random Encounters on the Street

I haven't written in awhile because too much has been going on. I don't know where to start. In the last couple weeks I've made new friends, visited Julia and a group from Notre Dame on the farm where I'll be working in September, started dividing my working time between two clinics (Profamilia in addition to the Dermatologico), ate a typical Dominican brew called "sancocho", danced merengue, bachata, and salsa in a Colmado (general store type thing, but much much more than that) with some co-workers from Profamilia, bought a guitar, and even subjected some of my Dominican friends to watching my possibly favorite movie of all time, the Bolivian "Quién Mató a la Llamita Blanca?" in my apartment. They liked it, for the record. The movie, I mean, though I'm sure they liked my apartment too. One friend told me that I should make a map of my apartment so he and others can find their way around it. Hardy har har. At least it was affectionate teasing.

Well, I could write about any of those things, but since I don't know where to start, I'll write about something completely different. The theme of today's entry: Random Encounters on the Street. I'll start with the most brief and move on to progressively longer and more disturbing.


Random Encounter #1: "Bella"
This one isn't even an encounter so much as an odd incident. I was walking down the street, and like any normal day, got some catcalls, this time from some men playing dominoes at an outdoor art gallery on the corner near my apartment (believe it or not, dominoes is quite popular here. And it's a man's game). "Bella!" ("Beautiful") they said. "Bella!" I just kept walking and ignored them, the usual. But then the unexpected happened. I heard a woman's voice from the same art gallery: "Bella!" she said, imitating the men. When I didn't respond, she immediately followed it up with "Bella no habla a nadie." ("Beautiful doesn't talk to anyone.") Whoa! Whose side are you on, woman? I thought we mujeres were supposed to stick up for each other! I guess gringas don't count.

Random Encounter #2: Evangelist Guy
One day I was walking down the street and a small guy with a cane, about 50-something, literally just walked up to me and introduced himself without any explanation as to why. He asked where I was from and if I preferred to speak in English or Spanish. I probably should have said neither, but not thinking, I said either would do. So he spoke in English because he said he needed practice. He walked alongside me for several blocks, garbling on and on about random things, like where he lived, how many kids he had, and what church he belonged to. He also asked me some questions about myself, most of which I responded to with a one word answer such as "yes" or "no" without looking at him, just wondering when he would stop talking. Then I started getting nervous and wondering what the best way would be to get rid of him if he tried to follow me all the way back to my apartment. But then he explained that he would walk with me one more block and turn at a certain corner so he could go back to his church and preach the gospel. That was when it all became clear. He asked me if I belonged to any church. "No," I said emphatically.

"Do you believe in God?"

"No. But I bet you're going to convince me I should, right?"

"No, no, because I respect your beliefs. It's always important to respect people's beliefs."

"I respect your beliefs too, but I'm not going to join your church."

He actually dropped the subject, just saying that that was fine, he respected me, and then told me to be careful in Santo Domingo, because I could get robbed or raped. Then, on the corner before he left, he kissed my hand. Kissed my freakin hand! Who does that?! I "respectfully" removed his other hand from my other arm, and he turned the corner, hopefully never to be seen by me again.


Random Encounter #3: Rich Bitch
As I was walking back home from the gym yesterday evening, a young-ish woman just started talking to me in much the same manner as the guy with the cane, except in Spanish. "It's hot isn't it?" Yeah, I said. "Shit, I just ran out of minutes on my cell phone." Oh, shoot. Apparently she thought those openers enough to break the ice. "So, my name in Marisol. Where are you from?" Naomi, from the United States. "Oh, I just fell in love with some guy from the United States. He was from Alaska. But he went back there. His name in John." Then almost in the same breath: "I'd like to be your friend. I just moved to this part of the city and I think it's better to get to know Americans and Europeans." Why is that? "Because, you know, I like intelligent people, creative people." And Dominicans aren't intelligent or creative? "Not usually."

I guess I should have seen the warning signs that this woman was a little crazy, but I was completely thrown off guard because she was female. Sure, if a man approached me in that manner, I would immediately sense danger, but since she was female I couldn't tell what her motives were or what precautions I should take. Yes, she seemed a little off, but when she asked if I wanted to walk around with her for a bit and talk, I figured she was just lonely, and it couldn't hurt to just go to dinner with her somewhere near my apartment.

So that's what we did. On the way to the restaurant, she said, as we passed some "morenos" on the street, "I don't like Haitians, do you?" As if as a casual conversation starter. I do like Haitians, I countered. I think they're very nice people. "Oh. Well, maybe some, but not all." She moved on to a new topic: "I am getting fat. My jeans are tight. And these jeans cost like a hundred dollars!" I have never had a pair of jeans that cost a hundred dollars, I told her. "Why not?" Because I can't afford it. "Why?" Because I can't. Well, for these three months I'm earning a fair amount, but I don't have any savings. "And what about your parents? Don't you have parents?" Yes, but they don't buy me expensive jeans either. That stumped her. So she changed the topic slightly: "Oh, by the way, I'm really sorry, but I don't have any cash on me right now. I accidentally spent all that I had today. So, you can just get something to eat, but I'm not going to." That made me feel sufficiently awkward. You don't have even a cent? "No. By the way, do you think you could buy me a cell phone card, and I'll pay you back on Sunday? I'm out of cell phone minutes." Well, that pissed me off. An ulterior motive for her becoming my "friend"? I said, actually, I'd rather not lend you money. "But why not?" Because I hardly know you, and I don't like lending people money. "But it's just for a cell phone card, and I already said I'd pay you back!" I'd rather not. "It doesn't have to be a lot, it could just be 50 pesos. Are you going to do me this favor or not?" Finally, I agreed to buy her a 50-peso cell phone card, only to prevent her from bitching me out, Dominican-style. I wasn't planning on getting in touch with her again to collect the money, but it was only a little over a dollar.

By the time we got to the restaurant the mood had changed a bit. I somehow convinced Marisol to go to an inexpensive place instead of the classy restaurant she wanted me to go to, and I just ordered a club sandwich and begrudgingly shared. There was not much conversation because most of the time she was playing around with one of her two cell phones. Then I noticed she was wearing a chain with a small gold Star of David around her neck. I figured it was unlikely she was Jewish, and more likely she had no idea what the star meant. I was right. Is that a Jewish Star? I asked. "This? It's just a star. Do Jews wear these?" Yes. "You mean like people from Spain?" No, Jews. It's a religion. It was around before Christianity. "Oh, I didn't know. I'm Catholic."

Then Marisol started up a conversation with the waiter about how much of a nuisance those Haitians are. I guess that's a popular ice-breaker around here. "This country is so screwed," she said. "There's no money here, so much crime. And all these Haitians just wreaking havoc all over the place." Suddenly I felt the obligation to stand up and defend the entire Haitian race. But I didn't know where to start. I just sat there in silence, hating this woman more and more by the minute. Finally, just to see what she'd say, I asked, So how do you tell a Haitian from a Dominican? Part of me was hoping she would take offense to that, provoking her to just get up and leave, but instead she kind of went on the defensive: "Oh, well there are some white Haitians, but mostly they're really black. But I don't know, I'm just busy these days, I don't have time to talk to them." Then how do you know you don't like them? "I just know. Trust me, they cause all kinds of trouble. They're bad for this country." But you don't even talk to them. "Well, do you like people who don't shower?" If they have a good soul, yes. I don't think having a clean soul has anything to do with how much you shower. "OK, whatever, but I still don't like them." Well, I said after a pause, I just don't like people who say they don't like people who they don't even know. "Listen," she said, "I'm a cool chica. I like doing nice things for people." Yeah, nice things for white people. "No, for black people too! I'm not racist. I'm black. My mom is really dark and my dad is white, like you. I just don't like Haitians. I'm allowed to say that without being racist. I know there are Buddhists or something who say that's not true." (Yeah, totally random comment about Buddhists.) Then she brought the waiter into the debate, just to outnumber me. The waiter was as dark-skinned as any Haitian and was obviously not upper class, but he whole-heartedly supported Marisol, saying that yes, Haitians are indeed a nuisance. And he wasn't just saying it to be polite to his customers, either. If there's anything you can get most Dominicans to agree on, it's that Haitians are the scum of the earth. Well, I was outnumbered, and there was simply no more arguing.

Marisol gave me her cell phone number, but fortunately did not ask for mine, and I can only hope I will not run into her in the street ever again. Let's just say it's a good thing that my Random Encounters on the Street are not the only things I have to judge Dominicans by. I'm sure I would be much less fond of this place if it weren't for my Justicia Global friends, who I guess you could say aren't typical Dominicans, but that's not even fair. They're Dominicans too, but in different ways.

The other day I told my friend Raldy about the crazy yoga class I took here where everyone was dressed all in white, and asked if he knew why that craziness was the custom. He said, because white is supposed to symbolize purity, and I said, well yeah, I suppose that makes sense. But then he countered, "No, it doesn't make sense! There's a common conception that white represents Good and black Evil, and that's just not true. Black is not evil." He's completely right, but it has been so ingrained in my mind all my life that white is the symbol of purity that I don't always make the connection with black being seen as evil, at least not in the context of yoga.

It might be "the Buddhists" who are so fond of those Haitian rascals, but racism here extends even as far as a yoga class.

Highs and Lows

Some of the patients in the HIV Unit are characters. There is one guy who I don't think is part of the study but I constantly see him hanging out in the Unidad. He has a hobby of selling pirated DVDs and his favorite phrase, the only one he appears to know in English, is "OH my GAD." He calls himself "Freddy Cougar", a fact he reminds me of every single time he sees me: "It's me, Freddy Cougar!" Even though I've had a number of conversations with him, he still seems to think I don't understand very much Spanish, and also evidently thinks I have a really bad memory.

There is another guy, this one in the study, who Emily just refers to as "your friend", because I led him through the informed consent and also the questionnaire for the first visit. "My friend" is quite the confrontational one though. The informed consent, which usually takes about 10 or 15 minutes, took at least a half hour with him. He has pretty bad arthritis, and the whole time he kept complaining to me that he didn't really want to start taking antiretrovirals, that arthritis is MUCH worse than HIV. He seemed to take personal offense when I told him I didn't know anything about arthritis. I tried to explain to him that I wasn't a doctor or a nurse and that really the only qualifications for my job are speaking Spanish and knowing the basics about HIV, but that didn't appear to be an acceptable answer. For a minute there I felt like I was going to break down and cry, but then I remembered that he was the one being ridiculous, that counseling patients about their arthritis has never been and never will be part of my job description.

He's another one that I see all the time in the Unidad, mostly in the mornings. As many times as I told him that he would have to come for his visit with us in the afternoon (since the doctor that does the Medical History part of the survey doesn't arrive until 2), every single time he reacted with surprise and acted as if it was a big injustice committed towards him, making him come in slightly later in the day. When he finally did come in for his visit with the study, my friend and I had another hour of stimulating conversation. Among other topics, he asked me where else I had been in the Dominican Republic, and I said Jarabacoa. He responded, "Oh, I KNEW you were going to say that. ALL the gringas go to Jarabacoa." Again I felt personally attacked, and couldn't help responding, "ACTUALLY, I'm going to be living there for 9 months." "Oh, you'll like it, all the gringas like it," he insisted.

Part of the reason the interview took so long was that he claimed to not understand one question I asked him the first time I said it, so I had to repeat everything two or three times. The other reason was that he started telling me things about his personal history that had nothing to do with the questions I was asking. I am usually happy when a patient gets talking, but this was a little different. He admitted that in the past he had consumed drugs including cocaine, and had been quite "promiscuo". It's pretty easy to figure out what that word means even if you don't know Spanish, but my friend was not convinced I understood, and made me give him the definition just to make sure. "I admit, I also enjoyed participating in orgías," he continued. Again, another word you don't need a translator for, but another one that I was required to explain to him just to confirm that we were on the same page. Ayayay. You've got to love honesty though.

On Friday I had the opportunity to attend a support group for patients in the study who have been found to have resistance to certain drugs. It was heart-wrenching and heart-warming at the same time. There were five patients who attended the meeting, and I was afraid that they wouldn't want to talk. The room we were in wasn't exactly the most comfortable or homey, plus it had terrible acoustics and no locks on the doors. When Dr. Lina began talking at the beginning of the meeting, explaining why everyone had been invited here today, I expected an awkward silence to follow. But to my surprise, everyone was more than willing to tell their story to the group. I don't know if this has more to do with the nature of Dominicans, or simply because they were glad to have a venue to let it all out. On top of that though, they all seemed whole-heartedly appreciative of the work of the people in the HIV Unit as well as Emily and my work with Estudio SeR. These patients, in particular, have reason to be thankful for the study: the resistance test that we do as part of it is something they wouldn't normally get in standard HIV care; it's a really expensive test and the blood has to be sent to the United States to be analyzed. Normally, if a patient is on medication but their white blood cell count is dropping nevertheless, the doctors will take that as a sign that the patient is resistant to one or more of the drugs he or she is on, and change them. But the resistance test saves the patient a lot of time and illness, and in some cases can prevent the patient's developing resistance to additional drugs they are taking (the antiretroviral regimen involves three different drugs at a time, so it is possible for someone to be resistant to one or two but not all).

Anyway, it was nice to hear the stories of all of the patients, most of which had relatively happy endings because the patients are feeling better and happy with their new drug scheme. But a special case was the one patient present at the meeting who we found to have primary resistance (meaning that he contracted an already resistant form of HIV, rather than developing it after missing a few doses of his meds). Every time I see this guy in the Unidad I want to just go up and hug him because he looks so morose and kept to himself. And also, because I've heard his back story: he's in one of the high risk groups for primary resistance, men who have sex with men. And when he first came to the Unidad he had told absolutely no one about his diagnosis. He was completely miserable. But the doctor presented him with an ultimatum: he had to tell at least one person about his diagnosis before he could start antiretroviral treatment (the reason being, the treatment is a lot more likely to fail for a patient with no one to remind them to take their pills every day). Reluctantly, he told his sister, and apparently he's been much, much happier ever since then. But of course, on top of it all, he just found out from us recently that he has primary resistance.

Anyway, I was getting nervous for him when it was getting close to his turn to speak at the meeting, because he has the same nervous habit as me of shaking his legs like a fiend. He also had his hands in between his knees and was shaking them too. But when his turn arrived, to my surprise words just began to poor out of him, and you could see that saying these things out loud was a huge relief. I was on the verge of tears again when he started talking about having been suicidal, and how he is so thankful to the Unidad and Estudio SeR for basically saving his life.

After all the patients had taken their turns, Lina again stressed the importance of adhering to the drug regimen they are on now, especially for patients with resistance whose options are running out. But it seemed she hardly needed to say that, because all the patients were clearly ready to be in it for the long haul, to do whatever they could to keep themselves alive. Then Lina asked me if I wanted to say a few words, so put on the spot I just said that we in Estudio SeR are glad to have been of some help, that we hope everyone will keep taking all their meds so that they stay healthy, but that we are hear to help whenever they need it. Immediately everyone chimed in with an emphatic "Thank you", which I hadn't even been expecting.

At the end of the meeting, everyone hugged each other, and it was just one of those indescribable moments. To realize that these people I hardly know, only a couple of which I've ever had a conversation with, were so grateful to me was pretty strange and reminded me of why I'm here to begin with.

Fun Birthday Dominican-ness

Last Saturday was Emily's birthday. I made her a loaf of banana bread. Yeah, I know, you guys are like, "What? I must have the wrong person's blog." But like Catherine said, I am becoming domestic. The other day I also made hummus, and then the other day I made "pad thai", which I'll leave in quotations because it did not turn out too hot (correction: it was hot, but not delicious). I also put way too much lime juice in the hummus and Emily thinks I am a weirdo for eating it at work, but I guess you live, you learn.

Anyway. This entry was not supposed to be about my cooking but about Emily's birthday party, which incidentally taught me a lot about Dominican-ness. First of all, I committed the gringo error of arriving way too early. Earlier in the day Emily had told me that she was planning on having people come to her house around 5 PM, but she didn't call to give me the address of her house until around 6:30. I was envisioning there being a full house by the time I arrived there from halfway across the city, but when I got there it was just Emily's husband, mom and sisters, and Emily was still "changing." I sat down on the terrace and tried to make conversation with her family, and I started thinking about how unusual it would be in the states for the first people at your adult birthday party to be your mom and sisters. Not necessarily because they don't want to come, but more likely because they live a bzillion miles away from the city to which you moved off to when you got married. I really think that Americans have forgotten about how valuable it is to have family, and maybe even to stay in the community you grew up in. I did learn, though, that Emily also has two brothers, one of which married a Mexican woman and now lives in Guadalajara. But Emily's mom seemed to see that as new phenomenon; "Kids these days, they're always moving around!" she said, or something like that.

Also when I arrived at the party, the electricity was out, not just at Emily's house but in the whole surrounding area, and they said it had been out since 9 AM. I am lucky enough to live in an apartment building with a generator, and the electricity has only gone out once for about 5 seconds. But "apagón"s, as they call them here, are a really common phenomenon. As far as I understand, the frequent outages have to do with the high price of gas; sometimes the electric companies just can't afford to keep things running anymore, so they just temporarily shut down the electricity in certain areas. I'm gotten used to the electricity going out from time to time in the office where I work, then usually going right back on because the clinic also has a generator. Emily's husband, Gilberto, said that an apagón lasting all day was unusual, but of course it happened on the day of Emily's birthday. I joked to Emily that we were going to have to put a lot of candles on her birthday cake and not let her blow them out. Perhaps partly due to the apagón, none of Emily's friends (besides me) arrived at the party until around 9 PM. Right around that time, luckily, the electricity went back on and we were able to start up the music.

I had fun dancing a little to merengue and bachata, and attempting conversation with some of Emily's friends, which was challenging because of the music in the background and also because I still have a hard time understanding anything people say here when they're speaking fast. But it was probably the largest group of Dominicans I've ever been amongst, so it was fun. However, I did start to notice as more and more people arrived that I was significantly underdressed. Usually the rule of thumb for going out here is that Dominicans will always be better dressed than you. But I thought that maybe since the party was at Emily's house, it wouldn't be as formal. Being underdressed wouldn't have bothered me that much considering I stick out like a sore thumb anyway, but at one point in the party one guy brought it to my attention: "Are you Christian?" he asked me. At first I was confused and thought maybe it was some kind of test of my moral valor, but then I remembered that in Latin America they refer to non-Catholics as "Christians". And here, since Protestantism is a relatively new phenomenon, being Protestant usually means being more devout and more strict. Most non-Catholics are Evangelicals, Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, since those are the missionaries that come most often.

"No, I'm not Christian," I said finally. "Why?"

"Well then, why aren't you wearing make-up or earrings?"

I was a bit taken aback. Ironically, earrings are the only kind of jewelry I usually wear, but I guess I just hadn't thought of it before I walked out the door. As for make-up, I don't have anything against it, but I really can't be bothered to use it myself. Is there really no other reason not to be wearing make-up and earrings in this country other than being a conservative Christian? That would be a sad thought. But the comment wasn't completely surprising having observed how people dress here. Whenever people leave the house, it seems, even with friends, they tend to dress more formally than the American standard. Guys usually wear collared shirts and leather or faux leather shoes with squared toes that I'm guessing most of my male friends in the states wouldn't be caught dead in. The women like wearing trendy, spandexy clothes and almost always wear heals. I am actually pretty impressed by the way Dominican women manage to traverse the city in 3-inch heals that would probably make my arches ache and give me blisters and in 5 seconds. And when I went to visit Los Marranitos, I couldn't help notice that Miguelina, the 15-or 16-year-old girl from the village that I met, was also wearing a pair of strappy white high-heeled shoes when she walked with us up a dirt path in the mountainous terrain. I didn't even bring a pair of heals with me here, and I decided rather than spending money that I don't have on a pair, that's just going to have to be one of my little rebellions. I was hoping to find a pair of Tevas here, or something similar, that I can bring with me to the campo, but I just don't think that's going to happen. There is simply no demand from Dominican women for sports' sandals. My only hope is to find an ex-patriate selling Teva contraband.

Later I sat for awhile and chatted with Emily's father-in-law. He was really nice and an intelligent person to have a conversation with. He was glad to hear I was interested in anthropology and started telling me all about the history of merengue and bachata. Interestingly, according to him at least, merengue used to be a very lower class dance, but was popularized in the Trujillo era because Trujillo quite liked dancing merengue. He said the dance used to be a lot slower, but it has since sped up with influence from North American music ("like the music of John Travolta", he said, and I'm assuming he was referring to the kind of dancing you see in Saturday Night Fever). I pointed out that North American music is heavily influenced by African music, AND Latin music... considering that Dominicans have African roots, it's interesting how things come full circle. It got be pondering whether there is really anything that can be called "traditional" music.

Then we got to talking about politics, and after my habitual spiel about why I disapprove of Dubya--just to prove that I am not on the dark side--he asked me which candidate I supported. Assuming it was between McCain and Obama, I immediately went with Obama. Emily's father-in-law (too bad I can't remember his name) said he liked Hillary. It's always of interest to me which of the democratic candidates people support here. Of the people I've asked so far, it has seemed pretty split between Obama and Hillary. The people who support Obama always mention the fact that he is black. But this guy had an equally telling reason for liking Hillary. I guess only the big headline news stories tend to arrive here from the US, so you could probably guess what he brought up regarding Hillary: the Monica Lewinsky scandal. He said that the fact that she stayed with Bill after all that showed that she is a decided, tenacious woman who finishes what she starts. I'm not sure if I agree with that or not, but in such a machista culture I guess it's not surprising that people would support Hillary for that reason. I'm not saying that Emily's father-in-law is a die-hard machista, nor am I saying that that mode of thinking is completely unheard-of in the United States, but it's so ingrained in the way people think here that I'm sure that viewpoint is perfectly accepted. I guess they haven't received the Republican image of Hillary as a firey, venom-spitting man-hater.

Male machismo, female materialism... it is all intertwined if you think about it.

At around midnight, to everyone's dismay the electricity went out again, and there were candles on Emily's birthday cake but unfortunately she blew them all out. And so ended a fun and eventful Santo Domingo night.

Two snapshots of Dominican nightlife

One of the things I've decided I really like about the DR is that dancing is really a huge part of the culture here. The two most popular dances are merengue and bachata, with salsa coming in third probably along with reggaeton. Whenever I'm in the car with him to and from work, Juan always makes a big deal of pointing out whenever a merengue or bachata tune comes on the radio, so I've gotten pretty good at distinguishing between the genres. It isn't actually hard at all once you know what to listen for. It's also easier if when you hear the music, you imagine what kind of dancing people would be doing to it. Merengue is always up-tempo with a steady, driving beat, while bachata is a bit slower and sadder and sounds a little like country music. If you picture people style-lessly shaking their asses and humping each other on the dance floor, that's probably reggaeton. And salsa, well, it's the one that doesn't fall into any other category. It's just salsa.

In Cuzco, if I remember correctly, most people could fake their way through a salsa or merengue or bachata, but when it came down to it they much preferred getting their groove on to reggaeton, Madonna or Justin Timberlake. And then there's the hybrid of Peruvian traditional and popular music, chicha, which as far as I can tell from music videos, involves male back-up singers doing simple and repetetive steps in a line while a woman in a woven skirt does some spinny moves in front of them. Other than that, no one is really sure how to dance to it. Here, on the other hand, while it would be an exaggeration to say that EVERYONE knows how to dance, it seems that a pretty large percentage of the population does. While reggaeton is undeniably popular, most people seem to prefer the more formal dances, and recognize them as a part of the cultural heritage.

Lately I've been hanging out and doing some touristy things with Landon, a friend of Tim's who just finished the Peace Corps in St. Lucia and came directly here to visit and take a Spanish class. It turns out that the Spanish class he's taking is in a place called "The Center For German Language and Culture" (unbeknownst to him before arriving here), so a bunch of the people in his class are Germans. So the other night I joined him and a handful of Germans and Americans for a night out on the town. We went to some place I forget the name of, but it was allegedly the oldest bar/ dance floor in the city. The place had a nice feel, and was mostly outdoors except for the wooden dance floor in the center, that was covered but open air. At around 10:00 a live band started playing, and that was when the party really got kicked up a notch. I think "watching people dance" would definitely make it on my Top 20 list of favorite things to do, right behind actually dancing myself. And on this particular night I was absolutely mesmerized. I felt wholly insuperior to everyone on the dance floor, sitting there in my group of rhythmless Americans and Germans.

There was one detail that kind of put a damper on the pure entertainment value of the night, though. One of the first things Landon said to me when we sat down was "Doesn't that girl look much, much younger than that guy she's dancing with?" At first I didn't see what he was referring to. It's not uncommon for relatively young woman to date much older men here, and there were one or two other couples that could have fit that description. Then, all at once, something caught my eye: a white-haired, light-skinned balding man, looking a bit slouched and creaky from arthritis, liberally shaking his bony hips as he danced a merengue number with a "morena" (dark-skinned) girl who looked about 18. My first reaction was to laugh at the awkwardness of the man's movements, but as I continued to observe the couple, I became increasingly disturbed by the fact that the girl's pelvis seemed glued to the old man's leg. They danced a solid merengue without breaking apart even for a moment, and for the remainder of the night they reappeared on the floor for every merengue tune, dancing in the same suggestive and glued-together manner. I couldn't seem to get my mind off it, even afterwards. I kept trying to think up explanations. Maybe it was a nice old grandpa taking his grand-daughter out for a night on the town? No, no, that's just wrong. Maybe she's really in love with him? That was the only other scenario I could think of that didn't involved pedophilia and/or a monetary transaction, so I decided to try to stop pondering it.

At one point in the night when Landon said, "There's that couple again," it took me a minute to realize he wasn't talking about the pedophile couple, but a salsa-dancing couple that could have been professional. They really were fantastic. Actually, they were more like a trio: two lanky, fedora-wearing young guys that kept switching off with the same girl, seamlessly in the middle of a song. That was when it occurred to me that I've been learning the wrong dance for four years. Why oh why did I ever choose swing instead of salsa? Fortunately, learning lindy hop has given me the skill of following a male lead, so that I can half-decently fake my way through most dances, but when it comes to salsa, forget it. All I could do was stare in awe as the couple did turn after turn, trick after trick, without visibly missing a step or losing the groove.

Eventually I got up the guts to dance, first with Landon (the only two gringos on the dance floor--yes!) and later with a Dominican woman, a friend of the guy who works at the German Cultural Center, who had so much bubbly energy I was actually frightened. At one point while I was dancing bachata with her I guess I wasn't living up to her expectations, so she stopped, put her hands on my shoulders/neck as if to strangle me, and shook me in frustration. My last dancing attempt was a bachata with a Dominican guy at the next table, who probably made me look mildly ridiculous since he was a billion times a better dancer than me, but was also a lot easier to follow along with being that he was so skilled. Perhaps the highlight of the night was when a middle-aged German woman got up and attempted a salsa, but apparently not knowing even the basic salsa step and completely and utterly lacking rhythm. For a moment, I felt genuinely sad about the rhythm-less state of my gringo "race".

The very next night Landon and I experienced a completely different music scene. Our friends in Justicia Global made us aware of a reggae concert in the Zona Colonial, which attracted probably every single person in the Santo Domingo rasta community (not an incredibly large one, it seems) along with some ex-pats and Dominican oddballs. The concert took place in a not-so-well-lit but fenced off park. Before the show started, a friendly Dominican couple struck up a conversation with us, telling us we had a "good vibe". Their names, if I understood correctly, were Marcel and Marciel. Marcel, the female component, spoke almost perfect English, which she claimed she had learned purely from watching TV.

We arrived at around 10:00, but the show didn't start until midnight. It was worth the wait, though. There was one Haitian band and one Dominican band, though I have to admit I never figured out which was which. The first band kept saying something about the "Fundacion Negra", and I kept wondering what kind of revolutionary "Black Foundation" he was referring to until I realized that was the name of the band. Enhancing the mood of the show was a portrait of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie that took center stage, and a projector that projected continuous images onto a random building behind the park.

One other thing I've noticed about this country that I have to mention is its relative lack of smoking habits. At a concert like the aforementioned, you'd expect to be practically suffocating in the smell of pot, but I surprisingly didn't even get a whiff of it until an hour or so into the show. The percentage of people smoking cigarettes was also pretty low, all things considered. The first time I went out dancing, with Emily and her friends, I was pleasantly surprised upon arriving home and realizing that my shirt miraculously did not smell like cigarette smoke, but cologne. In the DR it is illegal to smoke in public places, but I wonder if that can even begin to account for the difference I've noticed between here and Peru.

All in all, the concert was well worth the 200-peso entry fee-- and was also a reminder of the complexity of this culture that I sometimes forget, being so used to hearing people talk about how much they would love to go to the United States. Yes, American culture has saturated this place and influenced its people in some not-so-positive ways, but if you pay attention, you are reminded again and again that the culture of this country is just as much African as it is Latino or American. There are many unique and valuable elements to be held onto.

Getting to know you...

In the last couple weeks I have been gradually learning how to do more and more things at my job. For better or for worse, I now know how to enter the data we collect from the survey into the database. A lot of that is just mindless and repetitive work, but parts of it are actually pretty interesting. The questions that Emily and I ask patients are only part of the survey-- each time a patient comes for a visit to us, they also spend some time talking with the doctor, whose name is Rita. Rita fills out a few more pages of forms having to do with more intimate social issues, illnesses and symptoms. At the end of the visit, Rita and Emily (and sometimes me) collaborate to write down a few general observations about the patient, their adherence to the antiretroviral regimen if they're already on meds, and other social and medical issues. So by entering this along with the medical-related data into the computer, I develop a bit more of a profile of the person and feel like I get to know them a little better (albeit a strange way of getting to know a person).

One thing that appears to be no different here than in the U.S. is the universally bad handwriting of doctors. One of the hardest things about the data entry is interpreting Rita's handwriting, and this is obviously more difficult for someone with little knowledge of HIV-related afflictions in English let alone in Spanish. But I'm learning bit by bit. What is most striking is not so much the symptoms people have in and of themselves (and I will spare the details), but the sheer quantity of things these people have to deal with all at once. In the United States, HIV patients generally start antiretroviral treatment when their CD4 count (# of a certain kind of white blood cells) hits 350. Here, because of lack of resources, they don't start the patients on the meds until their CD4 is 250, and usually even lower. Needless to say, the fewer white blood cells you have, generally the sicker you are. It's horrifying to me to think about what that would be like-- knowing that your body's defenses are growing steadily weaker, observing the onset of more and more symptoms, including illnesses virtually no one gets who doesn't have AIDS, and knowing that if you don't start receiving treatment at some point, you will most certainly die. I think it is mainly for that reason that so many people are so willing to participate in the study. Even though we are not providing people with additional treatment, the patients are happy to have people paying attention to them, people to talk to, people working to improve the lives of HIV patients in general. Not to mention how relieved these patients are when they finally start their treatment. It is like being on the verge of drowning, and having someone throw you a life preserver. To continue with that analogy, I guess Estudio SeR might be like getting a big hug from a stranger after you've just been saved from drowning. It may not seem like we're doing much for the patients individually, but they do appreciate it, and most understand that our ultimate goal is to improve treatment for patients with HIV in general.

Yesterday I went through a whole questionnaire with a patient by myself for the first time. Emily was downstairs attending to a different patient, so I was left in the office, one-on-one with another guy. It was a little scary, but a welcome challenge. Fortunately, I could understand the majority of what he was saying, which is more than I could say about some Dominicans. And fortunately, he was much more talkative and open than many of the other patients. Speaking of which, it's also fascinating to see how different patients cope with their situation. Of all the patients who have set foot in the office in the last few weeks, I honestly don't think I could group any two in a certain "type" category. They are male and female, older and younger, straight or gay, outspoken or shy, dejected or animated. Some (more often men) have had countless sexual partners in their lives, while others report to having just one, and sadly, some people even contract HIV from blood transfusions. With some people it's hard to get a word out of them other than just blunt and/or reluctant answers to the survey questions, and with others, even a simple question like "What is your birth date?" will set them off on a long tangent.

So anyway, this guy was not one of those that we'd call a "talker", but for whatever reason, he did open up to me a little. He expressed a significant amount of regret about his carelessness in having contracted HIV, and kept saying that if only he had been more aware of the risks of unprotected sex when he was younger, he would never have behaved the way he did. He was married (many of the patients are) and also expressed a lot of guilt about having spread the infection to his wife. His wife is also the only person who knows he has HIV, besides us, and he seemed worried about how other people would treat him if they knew. At one point he said that he couldn't complain about his suffering because of the disease, but he only hoped that God would forgive him for it.

At this point I was a little at a loss for the right thing to say. In the first place, what exactly did he hope to be forgiven for? Promiscuity? Ignorance? Passing the disease to another person? Or just merely the fact of being contaminated with HIV? And in the second place, being a non-religious person, I simply have no idea how to talk about religion. I could and maybe should have said, "I'm sure God will forgive you," but on the other hand, how would I know? And should I pretend to agree that he even needs God's forgiveness? My utter secular-ness makes it hard for me to even imagine how a religious person thinks, and I'm always afraid that anything I say implying any degree of religious devotion would give me away as a fraud. So instead of saying anything I just sat there nodding sympathetically.

When I came to the question about whether or not the patient had traveled, he replied that no, he regrettably had never been out of the country, but that he hoped to travel someday. He hoped that his illness wouldn't prevent him from getting a visa, to go to the United States for example. His dream, he said, was to see at least one of the seven wonders of the world, like the statue of liberty for example. I was surprised and asked incredulously, "Is the statue of liberty one of the wonders of the world?" The patient seemed pretty sure that it was, so I didn't argue. Later I asked Juan, the taxi driver, if he thought that the statue of liberty was one of the 7 wonders of the world. He agreed that it was. "And another one of the 7 wonders of the world is the Dominican Republic," he said. (Note: Upon performing a Wikipedia fact check, I have found that neither the statue of liberty or the Dominican Republic is listed as one of the 7 wonders of the world, either ancient or modern.)

The patient, despite his regrets, also had a great sense of humor. When I asked him if he had a nickname, he told me it-- something simple, the equivalent of "Joe" or "Rob". He followed that up with, "That's what they call me by day."

I smiled. "And what do they call you by night, then?"

"That I can't tell you." And he laughed, as if he'd been waiting all day to tell me that joke.

Visit to Jarabacoa and Los Marranitos

On Friday I took a day of of work to visit the place I will be living for over 9 months starting September, the small community of Los Marranitos. To get there I took a two-hour bus from Santo Domingo to Jarabacoa, and in Jarabacoa met up with the DREAM project coordinator, Kim.

I had a couple hours to explore Jarabacoa, which will be my home base for supplies and things while I'm in Los Marranitos, so I'll start by talking about that. I have to say, getting off the bus in Jarabacoa after spending my first 10 days or so in Santo Domingo was a huge culture shock. I felt like I was in another world, and it took a few minutes to even just get my bearings and feel like I was in an actual concrete place on the globe instead of just standing somewhere amidst a whirlwind of new stimuli. I have never seen so much color and movement in such a small place.

The first thing I noticed was the difference in air quality. Santo Domingo is highly polluted and probably for that reason, is also incredibly humid. In Jarabacoa there is more of a dry heat, and it felt good to be breathing at least comparatively clean air. The landscape is also different, Jarabacoa being in the mountains in the interior of the country while Santo Domingo is right on the southern coast. Jarabacoa is also becoming more of a tourist destination than Santo Domingo, even though it is much smaller, more remote, and probably poorer.

The next thing you notice is all the motorcycles. I had been told before coming to the Dominican Republic that the motorcycle is a very popular form of transportation, but when people talked about "motorcycle taxis" I assumed they meant the little covered moto-taxis you find all over Peru and elsewhere in Latin America. No, in Jarabacoa you can actually pay to jump on the back of someone's motorcycle. Which to me is just scary, especially considering the lack of enforced traffic laws here. In Santo Domingo though, there are many more cars than motorcycles. In Jarabacoa, the opposite is true. You sometimes have to wait several minutes for all the motorcycles to pass before even walking across the street.

The place has got character. I don't know yet how to describe the character, but it's got character, much more so than Santo Domingo. I walked a couple loops around the city and observed people bustling through the streets, vendors at small vegetable stands, mini-markets, a surprising number of furniture stores... I walked into a clothing store and chuckled at t-shirts displayed on the wall with random odd English phrases, my favorite of which was "Rehab is the new black" (say WHAT?? Racism anyone?). I suddenly realized I was really hungry, so I walked into the first "comedor" I saw and asked what was on the menu. The one thing on the menu was a ham and cheese sandwich, so I ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and tried to temporarily push aside all my gringa-esque food paranoias. At least the place seemed clean and the sandwich tasted fine, not to mention it cost less than a dollar.

I've decided during my travels that the fastest way to get to know a place is by visiting two important locales: the market and the cemetery. I didn't find any central market in Jarabacoa, but I did stumble into the cemetery. It contained mausoleums similar to the style I've seen in other places in Latin America, but was noticeably less well-kept than other cemeteries I've been in. In one of the mausoleums, I noticed an insect crawling around a dark splotch of what appeared to be some kind of sticky substance on the wall, and assumed the insect must have been a cockroach, like those I've seen roaming around in my apartment all too frequently. Then I looked into another mausoleum and realized that it was swarming with those same insects. Upon closer examination I made out that the dark splotches on the walls were honeycomb, and the insects were not cockroaches but wasps. The mausoleum was absolutely swarming with wasps. So living things, rather than dead ones, were what scared me out of the cemetery. I don't know what else to say about the wasps, but that is definitely an image that will stick in my mind for awhile.

After exploring for a couple hours I met up with Kim back at the bus station, and her taxi driver drove us up to the community of Los Marranitos for lunch and an informal tour of my future home. It's even harder to describe Los Marranitos than Jarabacoa, I think because anything I say about how beautiful it is will sound like a cliché. It is not so different than how I imagined it: a green tropical mountain paradise. This is not to say that all is perfect in the community; its inhabitants are very poor and many illiterate, which is one of the reasons I'll be there. But that can easily be overlooked in a day-long visit. There is plenty of lushness and picturesque scenery to distract you. The village is very small and right next to an organic, fair trade coffee farm owned by Julia Alvarez, which many of the village members work on.

Kim and I had a tasty lunch in the farm office with Carmen, who lives there and works on management of the farm. She seemed really sweet. Afterwards she gave me a tour of all the places I will need to know: my "casita", a little snack stand right near it, the tourist center, and the farm itself. Kim introduced me to a 15- or 16-year-old girl named Miguelina, who she said was one of the most motivated students in the community, and everyone I met there was very friendly and welcoming. The visit made me more excited about going there, even though it's impossible to imagine myself living there for 9 months. It will definitely be very different from my life in Santo Domingo, that's for sure.

On the bus back to Santo Domingo, a 9-year-old girl sat down next to me. After nervously sneaking stares at me for several minutes, she asked shyly, "Are you from New York?" I think the popular conception of the United States here is that it is one giant New York. I laughed and said, "No, I'm from New Jersey. It's close to New York." Meanwhile the girl's friend across the isle whispered to her, "Pssst! She's Americana! Am-er-i-ca-na!!" The girl sitting next to me seemed embarassed. But a few minutes later she spoke up again and told me that she wanted to go to the United States to work. "Someday, with God's help, I will go to New York," she said, "but not without a visa." It's amazing how things like that get ingrained in a child's mind. The MTV image of New York and Los Angeles becomes the perception of the entire United States, and a child's main aspiration in life is to obtain a visa. How could I begin to dissuade her?

My job, Dominican yoga, and "resting"

My job continues to go well. On Monday, the girl who I was sent here to replace came back to work. Her name is Emily. She has been experiencing a difficult pregnancy and has been on sick leave for awhile, but she switched doctors in order to find one that would let her come to work. I hope she feels well enough to stick around for awhile, but it's especially convenient that she came back this week because it allows me to ease into my job and observe someone who really knows what she's doing. From watching her interact with the patients, I've come to realize that there are some things that as a foreigner, I will never do as well as she does. No matter how good I get at Spanish, there are some things that people just feel more comfortable expressing to someone from their own culture. And, for instance, I could not call a patient on the phone to remind them or their appointment, and then call them "mi corazón" ("my love", roughly), even though Dominicans use that term liberally. But knowing my own limitations helps a lot in this job too.

Emily and I have been getting along well, although we have very different personalities. I think our temperaments compliment each other well. She is very cool, laid back, and professional, whereas my strength is--how shall I put it?--being somewhat awkward, but dedicated. Whereas I tend to stress out when a patient has to wait around for more than 15 minutes, she sees nothing wrong with letting the patient "rest" for as much time as is necessary. On that note, it's clear that patients in this country, in general, are used to waiting around in doctor's offices for a lot longer than we are. The waiting room at the Dermatológico reminds me of an airport terminal. Sometimes patients have to wait for three or four hours before they're even called in to be seen. But I still feel guilty when someone miraculously shows up for the study on time instead of on Dominican time, and then for one reason or another, he or she is made to wait for another half hour to an hour. I guess it's something I just have to accept.

On Monday I also went to a Dominican hatha yoga class. I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I was hoping the teacher would at least be decent so that I could take the class three times a week after work (at least there is human interaction involved in my office job, but the sitting all day part really gets to me). The class is located in a building that is also a vegetarian restaurant, so I was hoping maybe it would attract a little bit of a hippie or pseudo-hippie crowd. Well, as with many things in Latin America, the yoga class wasn't quite what I had hoped for, but it was an interesting cultural experience all the same.

After debating with myself whether to bring the yoga mat that we have in the apartment to the class, I decided to just go all-out gringa and do it. This was evidently a mistake. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was that instead of (normal/American) yoga mats, everyone in the room was using one of those thick blue mats that you often see in gymnasiums, and some of them had even adorned their blue mat with a towel and/or small pillow. I have to admit that I rejected the blue mat and opted for my own thinner one even though a blue mat was available to me. That probably makes me a yoga snob.

The second thing I began to notice, to my horror, as more people ambled in, was that there was evidently a dress code I didn't know about. Everyone was dressed in white. Everyone, I mean EVERYONE, had on some form of white t-shirt, and most people were also wearing weird white pants that I can't imagine what catalogue you'd order them from. I certainly wouldn't order them at all, not even with a gun pointed at my head (the woman in front of me was wearing white underwear with little red hearts on it, which I also wouldn't order). I thanked my lucky stars that just by chance, I happened to be wearing an off-white shirt, but I still felt sorely out of place with my blue yoga pants and thin, purple mat. To make things worse, almost everyone in the class was a middle-aged, upper class Dominican woman. The teacher herself could also be placed comfortably within that bracket. She was pretty chunky and you didn't have to look at her too hard to figure that she was no Rodney Yee (a famous hot Asian yogi, for those of you out of the yoga loop).

Once the class started, things got even worse. We began with a 10-minute period of lying-down meditation which wasn't even called meditation, but "resting." Then we did a little 30-second exercise that involved raising our arms up and down with our knees bent. After the 30 seconds were up, the teacher said, "Good work, everyone. Now rest for a bit." So we stood there and "rested". The remainder of the class continued like this, with the poses getting gradually more challenging but not by much, and the rest periods in between growing longer and longer. Whenever we were lying down, people would be on their mats, but every time there was a standing posture, everyone just stepped to the side of their mats. That absolutely dumbfounded me. What's the point of having a yoga mat?? Why not just use a bed??? I stubbornly resisted this senseless trend and silently protested by remaining on my mat the whole time.

In all, the class reminded me of an aerobics class for senior citizens with limited mobility. Yes, I actually witnessed one of these classes once, and it was pretty similar to my yoga class except without the wheelchairs or the peppy Billy Joel music.

I decided not to attend any more yoga classes.

I later told my Peruvian friend Carlos about my experience, and he informed me that everyone wears all white in Peruvian yoga classes as well. He signed off-line before I could ask him why, or where I could order one of those pairs of white pants.

Encuentro con Justicia Global

A few blocks away from where I'm living there is an office/ community hang-out center of a social justice organization called Justicia Global. The way I found out about this group is a funny story, not the first time I must credit my friend Greg Woods and his mad connections in random countries around the world. Basically, Greg has a friend from Earlham College, Tim, who has been working for this group for several years, and living in the community house. Greg introduced us through email, and shortly after I arrived here I got an email invitation from him inviting me to this "Encuentro" ("meeting", for lack of a better translation). Tim explained that his girlfriend, Alicia, is a professor at Ithaca College, and she was taking a group of students from one of her classes down to the Dominican Republic for a few weeks. The students were to have a day-long "Encuentro" with the (mostly Dominican) members of Justicia Global, with the theme of "juventud", or youth. Tim invoted me to attend. "It will be a good opportunity to get to know some cool people right off the bat," Tim said.

At this point I should probably say something more about this organization and what they do. The group's focus is working toward social justice through creating community awareness, through youth organizing and community education. It is not a government-funded group or NGO, but rather it is self-sustained through contributions from volunteers, most of whom work other 9-5 jobs. People in the group can choose their own contributions based on their own skills and interests. Some people, for example, are part of a theater troupe that does street performances and also performs at schools and in rural communities. Others write poetry, or articles for the independent newsletter, or, like Tim, organize encuentros or workshops. The main goal of the group is to empower people to think for themselves and to organize for change with other members of their community, instead of accepting a corrupt system.

The activities of the day really got me thinking about the nature of working in groups. I tend to get frustrated group activities, and avoid them at all costs. In social situations, I usually prefer to focus on talking to one person at a time and feel overwhelmed hanging out in groups of more than 4 or 5 people. I can also, as most of you know, be pretty sarcastic at times. So when Justicia Global started up an icebreaker game with all the Ithaca students, my first instinct was resistance. My initial thoughts were something along the lines of, "This is sooooo summer camp in 5th grade" and "I'm never actually going to get to know anyone this way, why don't we just stop wasting time?" The next activity was a conversation (translated by Tim from English to Spanish and Spanish to English) about "What it means to be a young person", and again in my head I was saying, "Oh, come on, we are all adults here." Slowly but surely though, people started bringing up really interesting issues and before I knew it the whole group of about 40 people was involved in a substantive conversation about the advantages and disadvantages of being young, and how best to take advantage of youth to create change. It was an amazing thing to see so many people participating.

Next was a discussion on being a young person specifically in the DR, which turned into mainly a discussion of the education system. The most shocking thing about the Dominican educational system is that while private school kids attend school for an entire day, public school kids only go for half the day. The immense divide that this system must create is difficult to fathom. Another issue brought up was Santo Domingo's recently constructed subway system. Of course, it's great that the city now has a subway system, but what about all those hundreds of thousands of dollars that could have gone to education? Many people feel that the subway system was an attempt by the government to create the appearance of modernization while not actually helping the general population in any meaningful way. And, if you consider that the management of the city hasn't gotten its act together enough to prevent daily large-scale power outages, those people probably have a point.

After that discussion came lunch (the food was delicious) and I got a chance to chat a bit more with some of the Dominican Justicia Global members. I am still having a little trouble understanding people here (there are some I understand perfectly, and some I have to ask to repeat every other sentence) but I was happy to make a couple connections and write down a couple people's email addresses. I also talked to a few of the Ithaca students, and even met a girl from Vermont who used to be babysat by Professor Losano at Middlebury. It's a small world.

The next activity of the Encuentro was another group-building game in which each person received a match, and we were instructed to create some kind of pattern or structure in the center of the floor, each putting down our own match and not moving anyone else's. But just to make things harder, we were all supposed to come to an agreement on what we were going to make. Once again frustrated by the large group activity, I consciously removed myself from the decision-making process, just observing from the sidelines, mostly to repress my other extreme, which is to become a complete control freak. Eventually the group decided to make a mandala, and someone drew the general idea on the board. Then after a lot of arguing about how to go about it, everyone came and placed their match on the floor individually. We ended up with not quite enough matches to make the envisioned image, but the unfinished one was the best we could do before our time was up.

The activity wasn't all that new, but the conversation that followed was what made it worthwhile. One Ithaca student raised his hand and objected to the method that had been used to construct the mandala: "Why did we focus on the concept instead of the creative process?" In other words, why couldn't we all have just put our matches where we wanted to instead of doing it according to one person's drawing on the board? Thereby followed a discussion about the difficulties of group organizing. If there are group leaders and/or and overall vision, there is always the risk of excluding some people who may not agree with the goals of the rest of the group. But if there is no collective vision and no collaborative strategy, everyone is on their own, and the final product of our match-construction would have been nothing but a mess. How can we create a middle ground, a situation in which everyone sacrifices a little of their individual interest to arrive at a supposed common good? Again and again, I was floored by the intelligent contributions of both the Ithaca students and the Dominican activists. In moments that I thought would have led even a class of Middlebury students to an awkward silence, someone always had something original and insightful to add. And almost everyone participated--even me, for God's sake, and God knows how I hate speaking in front of people. I then realized, somewhat cornily, that the group of Dominican and American youth, light and dark-skinned people, from all different walks of life, some of whom could be considered bi-cultural and some of whom didn't even have a language in common, had all connected in a way that was truly unusual. It sounds cliché, but it was one of those cliché moments that gets to you. And I also realized that I was amidst perhaps the most intelligent and intellectually diverse group of people I had ever been with. Everyone cared and everyone had something to add to the discussion. It takes a lot to derail my sarcasm, but this Encuentro did it.

The whole thing made me think about individualism. I think in the United States individualism is practically a universal religion-- it is almost taken for granted that we all have the right, as humans, to say what we want, do what we want, and, let's face it, get what we want, whenever we want-- as long as we work hard enough for it. In other cultures, though, including latino culture, self-sacrifice (often for family) is a given, and people tend to be a lot more fatalistic. I myself wouldn't hesitate to identify as an individualist; it's an idea that's been deeply ingrained in me since birth, and on top of that I think it's part of my nature to want to do things my own way. On the other hand, my politics border on socialist. That's not to say that I think socialism and individualism are mutually exclusive, but they are two ideals based on pretty different assumptions, right? I like the idea of socialism, and I recognize the importance of collaborative group work to accomplish things, but when it comes down to it, I'm not good at working in groups, or acting according to anyone else's idea of how I should act. I'm not good at it and I don't like it. It's something I need to work on, and something Americans in general need to work on, I think. To try and break out of the mindset of die-hard individualism, in which individual goals and desires are valued often without concern for the well-being of the community. We don't live in a just world, so we cannot assume that everyone will prosper by living according to a rigidly individualistic philosophy. What I'm saying, I suppose, is that individualism is a privilege.

Anyway, the discussion went on for a good three hours. Then the day was summed up by a couple short theatrical productions put on by Justicia Global, and everyone shook hands and thanked each other for a day well spent. The best thing is that I already feel like I have a solid group of friends waiting for me, and I've only been here a couple days.