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?
Monday, June 23, 2008
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, June 16, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Saturday of Exploration
Yesterday was the first day I've spent here where I didn't spend the majority of the day in an office. I decided to take a stroll to the Colonial Zone, which is about a half hour walking distance from where I'm living. Santo Domingo was one of the earliest settlements in the New World, founded by Columbus's brother Bartolomé, and there are a lot of colonial firsts (though I have to admit, I am often bored by colonial history so I wasn't paying as much attention to that as I should have). Most of the colonial buildings are all along the water, so it's a pretty place to walk around. On that walk are located the first fortress in the New World, the house of Diego Columbus (Christopher's son), and a Cathedral, among other things.
Within a few minutes I had hired a fake tour guide named Pablo. He wasn't a professional, but he seemed like a nice guy and he was charging less than half as much as the official guides. He didn't really tell me much about the landmarks that I couldn't have easily read out of Lonely Planet, but I felt like I was essentially paying for someone to hang out with me for a few hours. It turned out to be worth it even though he was hitting on me, because afterwards he took me to a Peruvian restaurant for lunch. I ordered ají de gallina, and it wasn't that good, but I've been missing Peru so much since I got here that I didn't really care how it tasted. Afterwards I went with Pablo to a little bar where a bunch of guys were sitting around watching a DVD of a Mark Anthony concert. It cracked me up.
On the walk home I stopped to look at some used books from a little vendor. I was looking for "In the Time of the Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez (I thought before that I had read it, but considering I have no memory of it I've decided that I never actually did). He didn't have that, but I got a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The guy at the stand told me I spoke Spanish like a Dominican, which was probably a lie, but it made me happy because I've been trying really hard since I got here to mimic the Dominicans, speaking faster and never pronouncing an 's' or a 'd'.
Also on the walk back, I noticed a skinny, shriveled old woman (she might have been Haitian) who was walking along repeating the same two sentences to everyone she saw. I couldn't quite decipher her exact words, but she was saying something like, "I only ate a little bowl of soup today because I can't afford anything more. I just want everyone to realize that." She was walking behind me, and I'm pretty sure at one point she started talking about how well-fed I must be because I'm white, and how well-fed everyone is in the United States while people here starve. Guilty as charged.
On the way back I also looked at an photography exhibit that's displayed at an intersection of a couple of the main streets by the colonial zone. They were photos from the repressive Trujillo dictatorship, mostly pretty disturbing. One that stands out in my mind is a photo of one of Trujillo's opponents being put to death in the electric chair, his eyes wide open in pain from the electric shock. Even though the dictatorship ended decades ago, it still seems to be very much a part of the collective memory here, and certainly a traumatic one. People still talk about Trujillo all the time, even people who weren't alive while he was in power. After Trujillo's death, a leftist president was elected democratically, but was overthrown a few months later and a puppet dictator allied with Trujillo came into power. A year or so later in 1965, U.S. marines came in to "restore order", in other words to put down a revolt in support of the democratically elected president. This resulted in Trujillo's successor, Balaguer, remaining in power for another 12 years. There are some tanks and other military equipment displayed inside the Fortaleza, and my fake tour guide, Pablo, told me that some of them were U.S. tanks. It surprised me when he explained that the U.S. invaded because "they don't like dictatorships". "But Trujillo wasn't in power anymore by that time, was he?" I asked. "No," said Pablo, "but the United States still thought it was a dictatorship." OK, so maybe it was a complex situation and the historic details are still a little blurry in my mind, but it strikes me as ironic that U.S. involvement resulted in an "election" that put Trujillo's successor in power for another 12 years.
The hungry woman in the street has every right to feel bitter about my country.
Within a few minutes I had hired a fake tour guide named Pablo. He wasn't a professional, but he seemed like a nice guy and he was charging less than half as much as the official guides. He didn't really tell me much about the landmarks that I couldn't have easily read out of Lonely Planet, but I felt like I was essentially paying for someone to hang out with me for a few hours. It turned out to be worth it even though he was hitting on me, because afterwards he took me to a Peruvian restaurant for lunch. I ordered ají de gallina, and it wasn't that good, but I've been missing Peru so much since I got here that I didn't really care how it tasted. Afterwards I went with Pablo to a little bar where a bunch of guys were sitting around watching a DVD of a Mark Anthony concert. It cracked me up.
On the walk home I stopped to look at some used books from a little vendor. I was looking for "In the Time of the Butterflies" by Julia Alvarez (I thought before that I had read it, but considering I have no memory of it I've decided that I never actually did). He didn't have that, but I got a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The guy at the stand told me I spoke Spanish like a Dominican, which was probably a lie, but it made me happy because I've been trying really hard since I got here to mimic the Dominicans, speaking faster and never pronouncing an 's' or a 'd'.
Also on the walk back, I noticed a skinny, shriveled old woman (she might have been Haitian) who was walking along repeating the same two sentences to everyone she saw. I couldn't quite decipher her exact words, but she was saying something like, "I only ate a little bowl of soup today because I can't afford anything more. I just want everyone to realize that." She was walking behind me, and I'm pretty sure at one point she started talking about how well-fed I must be because I'm white, and how well-fed everyone is in the United States while people here starve. Guilty as charged.
On the way back I also looked at an photography exhibit that's displayed at an intersection of a couple of the main streets by the colonial zone. They were photos from the repressive Trujillo dictatorship, mostly pretty disturbing. One that stands out in my mind is a photo of one of Trujillo's opponents being put to death in the electric chair, his eyes wide open in pain from the electric shock. Even though the dictatorship ended decades ago, it still seems to be very much a part of the collective memory here, and certainly a traumatic one. People still talk about Trujillo all the time, even people who weren't alive while he was in power. After Trujillo's death, a leftist president was elected democratically, but was overthrown a few months later and a puppet dictator allied with Trujillo came into power. A year or so later in 1965, U.S. marines came in to "restore order", in other words to put down a revolt in support of the democratically elected president. This resulted in Trujillo's successor, Balaguer, remaining in power for another 12 years. There are some tanks and other military equipment displayed inside the Fortaleza, and my fake tour guide, Pablo, told me that some of them were U.S. tanks. It surprised me when he explained that the U.S. invaded because "they don't like dictatorships". "But Trujillo wasn't in power anymore by that time, was he?" I asked. "No," said Pablo, "but the United States still thought it was a dictatorship." OK, so maybe it was a complex situation and the historic details are still a little blurry in my mind, but it strikes me as ironic that U.S. involvement resulted in an "election" that put Trujillo's successor in power for another 12 years.
The hungry woman in the street has every right to feel bitter about my country.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Training
In this entry I will try to give everyone a basic idea of the work I'll be doing for the course of the summer, as much for myself (to get it all straight in my head) as to satiate everyone else's curiosity. Since Wednesday, the day after I arrived, Catherine has been trying to teach me all the little details that I need to know for the job. It's a lot, but I think I'm starting to get it all straight. Fortunately, compared to the clinic I worked at in NJ, the level of disorganization and quantity of useless forms that I have to deal with is minimal, and a lot of my time is spent actually interacting with patients, which is also good.
The Dominican Republic has the highest incidence of HIV in Latin America, mostly due to sex tourism. An estimated 2-3% of the population is infected with HIV, high compared with the United States, where the rate is something like 0.5-1%. Also, a lot of mothers here pass the disease on to their infants because they don't have access to the treatment available to prevent this from occurring. The disease is also so intensely stigmatized here that many people who have HIV keep it a secret, sometimes choosing to tell no one and sometimes sharing the diagnosis with only one or two people. Sometimes an employer will request an HIV test on a potential employee without the person's knowledge. If the test comes out positive, the person may not be told they have HIV, but won't get the job. It is difficult for people with HIV to get treatment, partly because of this stigma and partly because there are very few HIV treatment centers in the country.
The main purpose of the study I'm working for, called "Estudio SeR", is to find out to what extent HIV patients in the DR have or are developing resistance to first-line drugs. There are two forms of resistance. The most common, called "secondary resistance", is when a patient develops a resistance to a drug after taking it for a time, usually because the patient misses several doses or suddenly stops using it because he/she can't afford it anymore, moves, or some other extenuating circumstance. Primary resistance, which is found a lot in the United States but fortunately not so much here, is when someone contracts HIV from a person who has already developed a resistance to one or more drugs. In that case, the person who contracted it will also become resistant. The study aims to follow 500 HIV patients for 5 years, in order to find out if, how and why Dominicans are developing drug-resistant forms of HIV, and this knowledge in turn will hopefully lead to improved treatment in the country.
The treatment center where I'm working most of the time is called the Instituto Dermatologico y Cirugia de Piel (Instutute for Dermatology and Skin Surgery). If the name doesn't sound like an HIV clinic, that's because there indeed wasn't one until recently. Now, however, there is a big sign in front of the entrance announcing the existence of the HIV clinic, which may or may not be the best idea considering that most patients would rather not have the whole world know they have HIV. The Instituto is big and not the brightest or most inviting environment you could imagine, but the people I work with are nice and at least they're getting the job done. The other place where the study is conducted is called Profamilia, which as you might also guess from the name, is smaller, cleaner, brighter, and with a more welcoming atmosphere than the Dermatologico. I may start working more in Profamilia later in the summer, depending on circumstances I'll explain later.
So, every day I (and right now, Catherine) am picked up by Juan, the private taxi driver, who takes me to the Dermatologico. My two main jobs with the study are to lead new potential participants for the study through the Informed Consent process, which may seem simply but is actually the most difficult part of my job. The official Informed Consent document, for legal reasons, is a full four pages long, and considering that many Dominicans can't even read let alone tolerate four pages of technical language, having patients simply read the document on their own or reading the entire thing to them is generally a bad idea. Instead, I have to give them a summary of the Informed Consent in my own words, allow them to ask questions to make sure they understand it, then read the half-page statement they have to sign, then let them sign and make a copy for them to take home. The study reimburses the participants for transportation to and from the clinic, but other than that there are no direct benefits for the patient, so it's important that they have some idea that their participation is for the greater good.
The second part of my job is helping the participants fill out forms with some demographic questions each time they come in for a visit, which is every 3 months for the first year of treatment and every 6 months for the following 4 years. Other than basic things, there are questions about social support ("How many friends do you have?" is one of the more awkward ones), the patient's ability to read and/or fill out medical forms or lack thereof, whether or not the patient has traveled in the past 6 months (some people have relatives in the US and travel back and forth between the two countries, which could affect treatment as well as the spread of the disease), and a whole slew of questions about addresses and phone numbers of the patient and their close relatives, so that we have a million different ways to contact them in case their cell phone isn't working or they try to disappear off the face of the earth. Simple as the questions may look, some of them are tricky. Fortunately, I don't have to ask any medical questions or questions about sexual history. That job is left to the doctor.
So that's my job, aside from mundane office tasks like confirming appointments and entering data into the computer. As for the city of Santo Domingo, I haven't seen much of it yet. I do get the sense that it's very different from Peru, though the closest comparison I can make would be with Lima. I know that the gap between rich and poor is huge. Rich people tend to be so rich they can afford to own multiple Mercedes and Ferraris, while the poor can scarcely afford to feed themselves. You can definitely feel that, moreso than anywhere I've been in Peru I'd say. My apartment is in a nice part of the city, but I've been told not to walk around alone even during daylight hours in the poorer barrio where the Dermatologico is located, and also, never to take public transportation around the city because that's an almost surefire way to lose your wallet. The only two places I've seen in the city so far, besides the two clinics, are two supermarkets around my apartment. You can find pretty much any kind of food in the supermarkets here, so my fear that, like in Peru, I wouldn't be able to find Cheerios was unfounded. I can continue with my usual breakfast staple of Cheerios with soy milk. :)
Obviously, there are ups and downs to living in a big city with so much poverty, and ups and downs to sticking out like a sore thumb, but I think Santo Domingo will be an interesting place to live for three months. I will update later about my weekend adventures.
The Dominican Republic has the highest incidence of HIV in Latin America, mostly due to sex tourism. An estimated 2-3% of the population is infected with HIV, high compared with the United States, where the rate is something like 0.5-1%. Also, a lot of mothers here pass the disease on to their infants because they don't have access to the treatment available to prevent this from occurring. The disease is also so intensely stigmatized here that many people who have HIV keep it a secret, sometimes choosing to tell no one and sometimes sharing the diagnosis with only one or two people. Sometimes an employer will request an HIV test on a potential employee without the person's knowledge. If the test comes out positive, the person may not be told they have HIV, but won't get the job. It is difficult for people with HIV to get treatment, partly because of this stigma and partly because there are very few HIV treatment centers in the country.
The main purpose of the study I'm working for, called "Estudio SeR", is to find out to what extent HIV patients in the DR have or are developing resistance to first-line drugs. There are two forms of resistance. The most common, called "secondary resistance", is when a patient develops a resistance to a drug after taking it for a time, usually because the patient misses several doses or suddenly stops using it because he/she can't afford it anymore, moves, or some other extenuating circumstance. Primary resistance, which is found a lot in the United States but fortunately not so much here, is when someone contracts HIV from a person who has already developed a resistance to one or more drugs. In that case, the person who contracted it will also become resistant. The study aims to follow 500 HIV patients for 5 years, in order to find out if, how and why Dominicans are developing drug-resistant forms of HIV, and this knowledge in turn will hopefully lead to improved treatment in the country.
The treatment center where I'm working most of the time is called the Instituto Dermatologico y Cirugia de Piel (Instutute for Dermatology and Skin Surgery). If the name doesn't sound like an HIV clinic, that's because there indeed wasn't one until recently. Now, however, there is a big sign in front of the entrance announcing the existence of the HIV clinic, which may or may not be the best idea considering that most patients would rather not have the whole world know they have HIV. The Instituto is big and not the brightest or most inviting environment you could imagine, but the people I work with are nice and at least they're getting the job done. The other place where the study is conducted is called Profamilia, which as you might also guess from the name, is smaller, cleaner, brighter, and with a more welcoming atmosphere than the Dermatologico. I may start working more in Profamilia later in the summer, depending on circumstances I'll explain later.
So, every day I (and right now, Catherine) am picked up by Juan, the private taxi driver, who takes me to the Dermatologico. My two main jobs with the study are to lead new potential participants for the study through the Informed Consent process, which may seem simply but is actually the most difficult part of my job. The official Informed Consent document, for legal reasons, is a full four pages long, and considering that many Dominicans can't even read let alone tolerate four pages of technical language, having patients simply read the document on their own or reading the entire thing to them is generally a bad idea. Instead, I have to give them a summary of the Informed Consent in my own words, allow them to ask questions to make sure they understand it, then read the half-page statement they have to sign, then let them sign and make a copy for them to take home. The study reimburses the participants for transportation to and from the clinic, but other than that there are no direct benefits for the patient, so it's important that they have some idea that their participation is for the greater good.
The second part of my job is helping the participants fill out forms with some demographic questions each time they come in for a visit, which is every 3 months for the first year of treatment and every 6 months for the following 4 years. Other than basic things, there are questions about social support ("How many friends do you have?" is one of the more awkward ones), the patient's ability to read and/or fill out medical forms or lack thereof, whether or not the patient has traveled in the past 6 months (some people have relatives in the US and travel back and forth between the two countries, which could affect treatment as well as the spread of the disease), and a whole slew of questions about addresses and phone numbers of the patient and their close relatives, so that we have a million different ways to contact them in case their cell phone isn't working or they try to disappear off the face of the earth. Simple as the questions may look, some of them are tricky. Fortunately, I don't have to ask any medical questions or questions about sexual history. That job is left to the doctor.
So that's my job, aside from mundane office tasks like confirming appointments and entering data into the computer. As for the city of Santo Domingo, I haven't seen much of it yet. I do get the sense that it's very different from Peru, though the closest comparison I can make would be with Lima. I know that the gap between rich and poor is huge. Rich people tend to be so rich they can afford to own multiple Mercedes and Ferraris, while the poor can scarcely afford to feed themselves. You can definitely feel that, moreso than anywhere I've been in Peru I'd say. My apartment is in a nice part of the city, but I've been told not to walk around alone even during daylight hours in the poorer barrio where the Dermatologico is located, and also, never to take public transportation around the city because that's an almost surefire way to lose your wallet. The only two places I've seen in the city so far, besides the two clinics, are two supermarkets around my apartment. You can find pretty much any kind of food in the supermarkets here, so my fear that, like in Peru, I wouldn't be able to find Cheerios was unfounded. I can continue with my usual breakfast staple of Cheerios with soy milk. :)
Obviously, there are ups and downs to living in a big city with so much poverty, and ups and downs to sticking out like a sore thumb, but I think Santo Domingo will be an interesting place to live for three months. I will update later about my weekend adventures.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Arrival in the DR (and my ginormous apartment)
So I have arrived here in the warm little island country where I will be spending the next year. That's a hard concept to fathom. It's good to hear people speaking Spanish again, and yet this version of Spanish sounds like a different language to me, so far only about 50% comprehensible (better, for a start, than 0% I guess). As expected, Dominicans really do speak faster, more informally (the famous example is "Como tú ta?" whereas Peruvians would say "Como está usted?"), they never, ever pronounce the letter 's' at the end of a word, and even their inflections are infinitely different from the Peruvian or Mexican way of speaking. For some reason, the musicality of Dominican Spanish sounds more like Italian to me than Spanish. It turns out one of my next-door-neighbors in the apartment building where I'm living is actually Italian, which is bound to confuse me even more.
I met Catherine, a nurse who usually works down here from September to May, on my flight from Miami. She will be spending the first few days with me in the apartment, showing me around Santo Domingo and giving me as much job training as possible before she leaves next week. She is a middle-aged, spunky woman, one of those who wears her white hair well, and judging by the food she brought along with her to stock the fridge (whole grain bread, cheddar and swiss cheese, crunchy Trader Joe's natural peanut butter), it seems like we're going to get along. She did the peace corps as a nurse in the 80's, in Haiti before the political situation there became volatile, and then in the Dominican Republic, where she learned Spanish. Our private taxi driver, Juan, drove us to the apartment in Santo Domingo where I'll be living, for the most part alone, for the next three months.
Which brings me to the main point of this entry. The apartment. The apartment is, well, it can only be described as ginormous, yes, as both enormous and gigantic, all rolled into one. No joke, my entire family of five could live here, no problem. It has three bedrooms, including one room with two single beds and a crib ("in case you have a baby," said Catherine), three bathrooms (excluding an additional one made for the supposed house servant, which I will get to later), a living room, a dining room, a sizeable kitchen with a stove AND oven, a sizeable balcony, air conditioning, WiFi, cable TV, and a DVD player. I'm not paying for any of it, but still, I don't know if I can handle this. It's just not how I'm used to living in Latin America, or even at home, for that matter (my house only has two bathrooms!!). A little disturbingly, there is also a little annex made for a house servant. It is supposed to serve as a small bedroom and bathroom, although right now it is acting as a storage space for cleaning supplies (oh yeah, there is also a cleaning lady). The house servant's annex can only be locked from the outside, and the light can only be turned on and off from the outside, meaning that the head of the household can decide to lock his/her servant in and instruct him/her to go to bed at the time that Master deems fit. The thought frightens me.
This morning, in my characteristic way, I woke up at 4:30, evidently in anticipation of my first full day in Santo Domingo (why is my subconscious mind so impatient?). Which is why I've had time to write this entry. More to come about the clinic where I'll be working and job training.
I also found out this morning that Paul Farmer himself once slept in my bed!!! Evidently he hates the Dominican Republic, but staid here once when he couldn't get into Haiti because of political violence. But... my bed!!! I am never washing myself again (or at least not until tomorrow).
I met Catherine, a nurse who usually works down here from September to May, on my flight from Miami. She will be spending the first few days with me in the apartment, showing me around Santo Domingo and giving me as much job training as possible before she leaves next week. She is a middle-aged, spunky woman, one of those who wears her white hair well, and judging by the food she brought along with her to stock the fridge (whole grain bread, cheddar and swiss cheese, crunchy Trader Joe's natural peanut butter), it seems like we're going to get along. She did the peace corps as a nurse in the 80's, in Haiti before the political situation there became volatile, and then in the Dominican Republic, where she learned Spanish. Our private taxi driver, Juan, drove us to the apartment in Santo Domingo where I'll be living, for the most part alone, for the next three months.
Which brings me to the main point of this entry. The apartment. The apartment is, well, it can only be described as ginormous, yes, as both enormous and gigantic, all rolled into one. No joke, my entire family of five could live here, no problem. It has three bedrooms, including one room with two single beds and a crib ("in case you have a baby," said Catherine), three bathrooms (excluding an additional one made for the supposed house servant, which I will get to later), a living room, a dining room, a sizeable kitchen with a stove AND oven, a sizeable balcony, air conditioning, WiFi, cable TV, and a DVD player. I'm not paying for any of it, but still, I don't know if I can handle this. It's just not how I'm used to living in Latin America, or even at home, for that matter (my house only has two bathrooms!!). A little disturbingly, there is also a little annex made for a house servant. It is supposed to serve as a small bedroom and bathroom, although right now it is acting as a storage space for cleaning supplies (oh yeah, there is also a cleaning lady). The house servant's annex can only be locked from the outside, and the light can only be turned on and off from the outside, meaning that the head of the household can decide to lock his/her servant in and instruct him/her to go to bed at the time that Master deems fit. The thought frightens me.
This morning, in my characteristic way, I woke up at 4:30, evidently in anticipation of my first full day in Santo Domingo (why is my subconscious mind so impatient?). Which is why I've had time to write this entry. More to come about the clinic where I'll be working and job training.
I also found out this morning that Paul Farmer himself once slept in my bed!!! Evidently he hates the Dominican Republic, but staid here once when he couldn't get into Haiti because of political violence. But... my bed!!! I am never washing myself again (or at least not until tomorrow).
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