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.