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.