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?