A Man Called Nano

There are a handful of people from Los Marranitos who made a lasting impression on me for one reason or another. One of these people was Nano, the only male single parent in the community, and an anomaly in the Dominican Republic in general.

Nano was an interesting guy. He was highly self-educated and sensitive, one of the very few people in the community I felt like I could sit down and have a real conversation with. The first time I talked to him, we discussed, among other things, the problem of the HIV epidemic and the importance of HIV education. We talked about the community and he commented on how he considered everyone in the community his family, even the Haitians, "because they are such nice people." It is rare to hear such an openly positive statement about Haitians from a Dominican. I wondered how someone who grew up in the same limiting environment as everyone else in the community could have developed such different ideas.

So there was that. And then there was the hush-hush talk of how Nano's wife had left him years ago because he used to beat her. And talk of him being bipolar. And the slight stutter he had that became worse when he got angry. And there was the fact that he was a single Dominican man, and all single Dominican men have one thing on the back of their minds when they meet an American woman: a visa.

I usually visited Nano's house not primarily to talk with him, but to help his 10-year-old son, Alex, learn to read. Nano would sometimes ask me to stay for lunch afterwards. So began a meaningful yet somewhat strained and uncomfortable friendship between us. Nano would always ask me about my boyfriend, Fermín, and comment that he wanted to be invited to the wedding if it was held in the DR. One day he even suggested we have the church wedding in the DR, and the legal wedding in the US. I thanked him but said we were planning on getting married in Nueva York. To suggest that marriage plans were not underway was out of the question; for him it would have implied that my relationship was not that serious and that I was up for grabs.

Nano lived with two sons that his wife had left with him when she moved to Jarabacoa because she couldn't take care of all five kids herself. He owned a modest plot of land where he grew beans, bananas, plantains, root vegetables, and sugar cane. That land was the only resource he had to sustain he and his sons. Unlike most people in the community who had (successfully or not) integrated into the wage labor economy, Nano was a full-time farmer. He also did "women's" work, cooking and washing clothes for himself and his sons. Earlier that year one of his sons (one who lived with his mother) had gotten into a horrible motorcycle accident that left him crippled. So in addition to working his own land, Nano was working for someone else to pay off debts from the boy's hospital bills. Although Nano placed high value on education, his sons rarely had time to come to the library for class, because they were needed to help keep up the land or watch over the house while Nano was gone.

When I unveiled my plans to take a group of older kids from the community on a trip to the ocean (many of the kids had never seen it), the talk of the town was that Nano would never let his 13-year-old son, Javé, go. But I knew that Nano could be reasoned with, so I went to talk to him. Whether it had to do with his real reservations or not, he said that his only concern was that his son might drown in the ocean. When I told him the kids wouldn't be allowed to swim, he reluctantly agreed to let Javé go. But on the day of the trip, Javé didn't show up to board the bus. I figured Nano had changed his mind at the last minute and put Javé to work in the fields. It was only days later that I ran into Nano and he told me why Javé hadn't been able to go on the trip: One of his dress shoes was broken, and he couldn't leave the community without nice shoes. That broke my heart. The broken shoe might have only been the straw that broke the camel's back, but it was a symbol of Nano's poverty and pride, and a classic example of the materialism pervasive in Dominican society. No parent would let their kid go out in public with a broken shoe, even for a trip to the beach where shoes were hardly necessary.

One day shortly after that, Nano invited me to his house for lunch. When I arrived, he was reading some kind of booklet he'd acquired on the theme of human rights. Most older community members, if they could read at all, would nine times out of ten be reading the Bible. Nano sat around reading about human rights. He began talking to me about what he'd been reading, listing some basic human rights: the right to be free, the right to live, the right to work. And somehow we got to the topic of international human rights. He asked me how many countries I had traveled to in my life. Since I have a bad habit of being honest in situations where maybe I shouldn't, I told the truth: "Maybe eight or ten."

Nano scoffed. "For you, it's so easy!" he said almost accusingly. "For us it's not so easy. I would love to travel like you. But I have never left this island in my life. But you know what? It's easy for you to make it easy for us."

I felt a lump in my throat. I knew where he was going with that argument. He wanted me to write him an invitation letter so he'd have a better chance of getting a visa to go to the US. A few years before I came, a Peace Corps couple lived in the community for a year. They ended up writing a letter for one of the local women who dreamed of bigger and better things. The woman, Carmen, got the visa, went to the United States, and the rest is history. Years have passed. Her husband and four kids are still awaiting her return, but rumor has it she's found another man.

"You can do it for a friend," said Nano. "Have I not been a friend to you?"

I made every argument I could think of to convince him that me writing him a letter would not do him much good. "Things are bad in the United States right now," I told him. "You'd be worse off than you are here. Besides, even if I wrote you a letter, it would be hard for you to get a visa. Peace Corps volunteers can recommend anyone, but I'm not in the Peace Corps." I didn't voice my major reservations: I wouldn't feel comfortable choosing Nano above everyone else in the community who wanted a visa. I wouldn't feel comfortable inviting him to stay in my house in the US. And I wouldn't feel comfortable writing an invitation letter for someone I knew very well would overstay his visa.

Nano wasn't convinced by my arguments. "If I enter the country legally, I'll have more rights than someone who came illegally. You would be helping me to have more rights."

"But Nano," I said, "Once you stay longer than the visa allows, you'll be illegal too. Then you'll be in the same boat as everyone else. You won't have any rights at all. You'll have to stay under the radar."

He wouldn't believe that what I was saying was true, insisting that if he arrived legally he'd always have an advantage over people who arrived illegally. We began to argue, and we were both becoming visibly upset. I felt betrayed and unjustly attacked. Here I was teaching his son how to read, and he was accusing me of being selfish because I wouldn't get him a visa. He was clearly jealous of Fermín, who he assumed would get a green card out of our future marriage.

"Nano," I said, "I am sorry the world is the way it is. I didn't choose to be born in the United States any more than you chose to be born here. But it's not my fault the world is that way. And me writing you a letter won't solve anything."

"You could do it, it's just that you don't want to," he insisted. "For you it would be so simple. I work so hard every day and nothing comes of it. All I do is work. And you could help so easily. You don't think you can do a favor for a friend?"

I got up to leave. I felt extremely uncomfortable and didn't want to keep being attacked. "I don't do favors for people who beg," I said, and walked away.

After that, I didn't want to ever go to Nano's house again. I was angry and hurt that he had treated me that way. But on the other hand, I felt almost guilty that I couldn't help him. I sympathized with his feeling of being trapped, but couldn't foresee a way he could escape, short of marrying an American woman. It wasn't that Nano was significantly worse off than everyone else, but unlike others, he knew that the world had a lot more to offer. He wanted much more than he had.

The other day a friend of mine used the term "compassion fatigue" to describe a situation where you feel tired of giving, where you feel you're not capable of giving another person what they need. One of the most difficult things about development work is learning to set your boundaries and accept your limitations. I was not there to solve all the community's problems. I was only there to teach the kids to read.

Nano's son, Alex, had basically learned to read by the end of the year. It happened unexpectedly, not as a result of anything I can directly take credit for, but more just the effect of the constant time he spent at home looking at books from the library. I can only hope that Alex will one day pick up a booklet about human rights, and that his skills and intelligence will help him gain access to opportunities his father never had.