25

I have now been on the Earth for a quarter of a century.  I’ve been lucky enough to see some cool places and meet some amazing people and hopefully affect some lives in a positive way.   These days, well into year two of my Peace Corps service, I feel almost complete freedom where I used to feel trapped.  I am known; I am safe and loved in my community.  I can come and go as I please.  I have fun times all over this island with both American and Dominican friends.  I feel like my work is actually becoming effective (which is a question in the mind of every volunteer: “Is any of this helping anyone?”).  I am enjoying this life, and that really is the most important thing.  It flies by!

The month of September is full of festivities.  I celebrated my birthday with Peace Corps friends, dancing in the capital and then enjoying a day at the beach.   Now it’s patronales in Tabara Arriba – the 10-day festival for our patron saint.  All communities in the Dominican Republic (and most Spanish-influenced countries?) celebrate patronales.  So, from last Friday until next Sunday, we are in fiesta here.  There are rides in the park, a stage for concerts, lots of alcohol, dancing, and general merriment.  Last night I went on the Ferris wheel and immediately realized that it wasn’t a great idea… not exactly inspection-approved machinery, though clearly I survived to tell the tale.  The Merry-Go-Round has a plaque that says, “Made in Kansas, 1948.”  I assume the Ferris wheel has similar origins.  So if you ever wondered what happens to antique amusement park rides when America doesn’t want them anymore, now you know.  Apparently the last time they brought rides to patronales here was four years ago, and my friend Yara fell out of her Ferris wheel seat and was hanging on for dear life until someone saved her.  And another woman fell out of the flying swing ride.  Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence…

While all this is a definite distraction from the school, we started our reading program last week and so far it’s going really well.  I finally have the enthusiasm of teachers, students and facilitators to keep me motivated.  It took a while to make that happen, but that’s why we’re here for two years.  I’ve gotten more of my friends involved, and now have six Dominican facilitators working with me!  So we can give 45-minute sessions of small group attention to around 90 kids every day in the third and fourth grades.  Everyone is feeling good about our work so far, though school attendance will likely suffer during this week of festival…

Photo Update

Family visit:  Mom, Steve, and Dominican friends and family!

Camp GLOW with my chicas!

My house

The view from my front door when it rains...

Flow

Two years is a long time.  A lot changes over just one year – relationships develop, people move, projects begin and end.  And then again, it feels like no time has passed at all and the remainder will be gone in a second.  Despite the eternal summer of the Caribbean, life still moves in cycles here.  It’s finally raining again, and the whole rhythm of the day changes with rain.  It’s quieter, more relaxed, nice to just sit somewhere with a rainy breeze after the unbearable heat of June and July.  We’ve left mango season and entered avocado season (even better!), and the coming months will bring slightly cooler weather and lots of coffee.  People will disappear to their mountains for weeks at a time to harvest, and the streets will fill with a layer of drying coffee beans, the smell of their damp decay through the air.  

When we first arrive, everything feels fragile.  It takes time to build a support system and develop friendships, to get comfortable with how to live in a very different place.  But, like anything, this life becomes normal.  By the time I leave Tabara, I’ll have lived in this little blue cement house longer than I’ve lived anywhere but the house where I grew up in Pennsylvania.  That’s a weird thought – the home I’m used to now is a place where roosters wake me up at any hour of the day and I find a little blood on my orange tree from the neighbors’ cock fights; where people and animals wander into my house; where I wait for electricity and water to arrive when I need them, but am mostly prepared not to have them…  I recently got a fridge after being without for almost half of the last year.  Cold water is really nice, especially in July.  Leftovers are also nice. 

Anyway.  I’m ready for school to start again!  A few weeks ago I took some girls to Camp GLOW.  They loved it, as to be expected.  Right now I’m holding reading camp in the mornings for some of the kids who are really struggling to learn.  We supposedly start in the library at 8:30 AM, but they show up at my house to peek their little faces through the windows at 7:45 wondering why I’m taking so long… I can’t really get mad at their enthusiasm.  It’s kind of adorable, and we usually end up starting early. 

Lately, by the time I finish with the kids and come home, the sky opens up into a torrential downpour and everyone stays wherever they are for a while.  Good thing I’m not trying to do anything in the evenings like last year – those adult literacy classes were cancelled half of the time.  The kids run around mostly naked in the rain, stopping to drip in my doorway and hand me limoncillos, or whatever other fruit they’ve been out collecting.  They’re good little messengers, running through the flooded streets to pass me a cup of coffee from my neighbors, bringing them a piece of my banana bread.  Older boys race on motorcycles, lifting into wheelies on the slick streets… No one else seems concerned, but I still cringe a little, waiting for a wipeout.

Life continues!

Summer!

Well, my neighbors have gotten used to meeting new Americans at this point.  The first few were a novelty, but now they just ask me who’s coming next, where’s my dad, what about that other brother I’ve mentioned?  Is he single?  Can some muchacha mangar her visa?  In the last few months I’ve had 10 different visitors, between other Peace Corps volunteers and visitors from home!  Tabara loves them all.

They especially loved meeting my mom and brother, Steve.  Mom came once before, in October, and it’s interesting to see how my place in the community has evolved since then.   The difference between six months and a year is huge in terms of relationships and comfort.  We hiked to the loma with some of my Dominican family and friends, involving a mule for transport, live chickens (to be killed and cooked upon arrival), mangos falling off the trees and onto our heads in gusts of wind, and the long process of making a huge sancocho over a fire.  We spent some time sitting in the river, and the chicas were pretty excited to teach Steve to dance bachata and take a lot of pictures with him.  They were shocked to learn that he’s only 15:  “Pero Laura… él es un gigante!”  But Laura… he’s a giant!  They all fell in love.  (Pictures to come, at some point.)

  

Mom and Steve were pretty amused by the cast of characters around my house too… Lets just say that my family has now witnessed some of the weirdness of my life, including an enamorado soaping up half-naked in my doorway to go bathe in the rain, and another serenading them on my guitar (which he doesn’t know how to play) with a song he wrote himself… Awkward.  Really.  I think mom got it on video.  I also watched my mother show baby pictures of me to some muchacho I barely know just cause he came over and parked himself in my yard like everyone likes to do… Mostly I was just like, “What is going on here?”  It was an entertaining week.  And, as always, the children can be counted on.  I think mom and Steve each had their own fan clubs of small children.  Adorable.

A few friends came to visit from home too!  First came Liz, who everyone thought was my sister and said was so beautiful.  Then Natalie… who everyone thought was my sister and said was so beautiful (though we had already established that I have no sisters when Liz was here).  This merging of worlds has been pretty great actually.  It’s fun to be the ambassador between Americans and Dominicans, though interpreting is exhausting. 

Me and Natalie at the beach!

Besides acting as a guide to this crazy country for some of my loved ones, the month of June wasn’t all that productive in terms of work, since school’s out.  But I did manage to paint a huge mural of a world map in the school!  Some of my buddies helped me with the painting part, and we’re all quite proud of ourselves... It looks pretty cool. 

The world in our school!

The remainder of the summer will be dedicated to camps, inside and outside of my community.   It’s good to keep busy – with this crazy heat it’s a little too tempting to not move from my house between the hours of 10 AM and 4 PM.   Next week I’m taking two of my chicas to camp GLOW (a five-day overnight camp for girls).  Then it’s back to literacy.  I’m planning a reading camp for kids for the month of August, and after that school starts again! …Eventually… when both the teachers and the kids feel like going...

Mango Season

Rocks crash against the zinc roof, one after the other, followed by children’s shouts, and then an older voice, “Pero, deja eso!”  (But, leave that be!).   No matter how much we all yell at the kids, they won’t listen for long.   The rocks keep coming – an attempt to knock mangos out of the big tree in my yard.   It’s easier when a muchacho just climbs the tree and shakes the branches, or knocks at them with a stick – one, two, three shakes and small mangos rain down like candy from a piñata.  They all come running, looking for the ripe yellow ones, but settling for hard green mangos too.  Lacking such a muchacho, kids never seem to tire of throwing rocks, small sticks, other mangos they found rotting on the ground – all a weak attempt to walk away with arms full of fruit.  They leave my yard a mess of fallen leaves, branches, rocks, trash, mango carcasses…  I’ve learned to tolerate it and sweep up once a week. 

My price for this invasion is mangos.  I do none of the work – they deliver mangos to my kitchen table, ripe, green, doesn’t matter.  We eat the ripe ones like candy, ripping them open with our teeth and spitting out the peels, biting satisfying chunks of mango flesh from around the large seed.  The green ones we cut into slices and eat with salt and vinegar, passing the bowl around until everyone’s fingers are sour and delicious.  I’ve made mango bread, mango salsa, mango spritzers… the tree is still full of mangos, so I predict I’ve got about another month or two for more inventions. 

I lay in my purple hammock, strung between the mango tree and the sweet orange tree, and wince every time a random fruit falls, crashing through the leaves and against the roof.  I haven’t been hit in the head with a mango yet, but it’s likely only a matter of time.  And I’ve become shameless about asking for help.  My neighbor climbs the mango tree and next I want him to climb the impossibly tall coco tree too:  Hey, I’m pretty enough for you to risk your life so I can eat some coconut, aren’t I?   Yes.  He struggles up the branchless palm tree, clutching with arms and legs like a monkey, and throws down coconuts, which I will then ask him to break open with a machete.  It’s really a process to get to the meat of a coconut, but thankfully everyone’s a la orden.  (At your service!)  I’ll really miss that about this country.  That and the fruit.  My fridge it stocked.

Reflections

I’ve never really believed in magic – things like premonitions, the evil eye, reading tealeaves.  I guess I’ve always been unsure, but my neighbor recently “read my cards,” and the things that came up were shockingly true.  I can’t speak for what she predicted just yet, but the characters and the situations involved were all completely accurate... I’m reassessing my thoughts on tarot cards.  Actually, I’ve had her do it twice already.  I was feeling a little lost last week.  Now she tells me she’s going to read the dregs at the bottom of my coffee cup because that’s more accurate… we’ll see. 

Dad – among many other things, it was predicted that a man outside of this country wants to come see me, and that a boy is preparing papers and medical things to come see me now (Steve!).   So get on that!  Didn’t say anything about a woman, sorry mom, maybe you were implied.  I also apparently have money coming my way… not sure about that one, but it sounds nice.

In other news, I arrived in Tabara Arriba, Azua a year ago!  One year in this town – long enough for a lot of the community to become like family.  I’ve got Dominican “parents,” sisters, a niece (and another on the way!), cousins, friends, confidants, co-workers, students, neighbors… Despite the sometimes desperate need to get out of town, I am already sad at the prospect of leaving a year from now.  I know I’ll never really be able to come back – visiting isn’t the same thing.  You really can’t enter back into an old life once you leave it.  This is the hard part of throwing yourself entirely into whatever world you are living in – you make relationships and grow to really love people, but it isn’t your real world, and you could never stay (and you wouldn’t seriously want to).  Bittersweet.  Well, anyway, I’ve still got a year of frustrations and dramas and things to drive me crazy.  Maybe I’ll be saying “Hasta la vista!” with gusto as I ride out of town on a motorcycle a year from now… 

So, how have I changed over the last year?  It’s not that the changes are so drastic, or that I ever would have noticed them as they were happening.  I’ve just become sort of Dominican… I think I’m a little too integrated:

•       I send children to do things for me (ie. “Get me an egg from the colmado”; “Go knock some mangos out of the tree”; “Help me sweep my yard”; “Give so-and-so this message”).  It’s really quite convenient.
•       I automatically offer people some of whatever I’m eating or drinking, and have no problem sharing plates, utensils, glasses, etc.
•       I usually bathe twice a day… sometimes three times, if it’s hot enough.
•       My definition of “bathroom” is pretty flexible.
•       I am capable of sitting in a plastic chair by the side of the road for extended periods of time, as long as I’ve got company.  My definition of “company” is also pretty flexible.  (Four year-olds count.)
•       Instead going over to talk to someone, I might just yell to them down the street… or even better, call them over by making a snatching movement in the air with my hand. 
•       If it’s raining, I feel no obligation to leave my house.  No one else will.  (ie.  Hardly anyone goes to school when it’s raining, or drizzling, or just kind of looks cloudy… which makes for a super productive educational system during the rainy season.)
•       I am not surprised or alarmed when people enter my house uninvited.   I also enter other people’s homes a lot…
•       I know that if I wait around long enough, someone will bring me a gift of fruit.
•       I don’t really worry about too much, in terms of work at least.  If things work out, they do.  If they don’t, oh well, we tried.   This also means that I kind of expect everything to fail, which probably isn’t a good thing.
•       I am patient, and I expect everyone to be late.  Always.  (Despite this, I still can’t shake my American habit of being on time.)
•       I’ve probably become a little too accustomed to being worshipped…

Last week I had the very cool experience of meeting the last volunteer who lived in Tabara Arriba.  She lived here ten years ago, her name is also Laura, and she married someone from Tabara.  So, you can imagine that since my arrival I’ve been hearing, “Pero la otra Laura se casó aquí!  Tu tienes que casarte con un Dominicano!”  But the other Laura got married here!  You need to marry a Dominican!   You know… the usual.  But it was really interesting to talk to someone who has basically lived my life before me, who experienced Tabara Arriba in the same way, just ten years ago.  She said not much has really changed, except that we now have paved roads and a library, and a lot of the people she was close to have moved to the capital, or Spain, or have died…

So good to know, when I come back ten years from now, Tabara will still be here... probably not much different than it is now. 

Enamorados

Updates.  Work is pretty much what I described in my last post:  trying to help 8 to 13 year olds learn to read.  The school is horrendous, but people are generally very nice.  I could say that about a lot of things.  Politics make no sense and nothing functions, but people are unbelievably friendly.  So it goes.  I’m also working with girls groups on Saturdays – we just finished a few weeks of talking about sexual health and are moving on to nutrition this Saturday.  It’s actually fun – I’ve always liked working with youth.  And after spending the week playing games and repeating the letters and syllables with slow learners inside a barely functioning school, it’s refreshing to teach about something else for a few hours. 

Other than that, the story of my life is kind of going through a dramatic phase.  If you know me, you know that I hate drama.  Some people feed off of it, but it just stresses me out.  A friend once told me that if she had to describe me in only one word, it would be “pragmatic.”  I’m not sure I entirely agree with that either, but it’s definitely closer to the truth.  Just, you know, be real.

So, this drama.  It’s been coming for a while now, I guess.  I think Dominicans watch way too many telenovelas (when there’s electricity), and it contributes to their love of all things dramatic.  I am a 24 year-old American woman living alone in a rural town where girls usually get knocked up and shacked up with older men around age 16.  So… right off the bat, it’s kind of a weird position to be in.  Ask any female Peace Corps volunteer.  Add to that the fact that my house is across from one of the busiest colmados in town and my door is generally open if I’m inside (otherwise I’m sitting alone in a hot blue box), meaning I receive plenty of visitors, wanted and unwanted.  Meanwhile, lots of people sit across the street in plastic chairs for lack of anything better to do, and at this point it’s probably more entertaining to watch my house than it is to watch telenovelas anyway. 

What’s the Americana doing?!  Baking bread?  Playing with children?  Reading a book?  Playing guitar?  Receiving gentlemen callers?  Scintillating stuff.  But regarding that last one, there’s where the drama comes in, obviously.  Since day one, there have been some constants in my life here, a few things I can count on.  One is my host family and extended family, who just treat me like real family.  Another is the generally frustrating nature of work.  I do what I can.  But the overwhelming constant, the leaves-me-laughing-out-loud, can’t-believe-how-ridiculous-people-can-be, is-this-really-still-happening constant thing, is enamorados.  This level of persistence is just ridiculous.  I’ve lived in this house for eight months, and in Tabara Arriba for just about a year (!), and some of these men/boys are the same ones who have been bugging me since my arrival.  Seriously?  No, I don’t think I will marry you and bring you with me to my country.  Today, one of my ten-year old students passed me on a motorcycle as I walked home and blew me kisses, mouthing the words “I love you” in English.  Seriously.  One time a particularly persistent enamorado was attempting to chat me up on the side of the road and an old lady passed by, whacked him in the head with the back of her hand, and said, “No te enamores.”  Don’t fall in love.  Hilarious.  Every day there are at least a few encounters like these.  They aren’t men if they don’t try, apparently…

Well, all that is regarding the general crowd, most of whom I kick out the second they show up at my door.  Then there are the more specific few, the ones who slowly became real friends after months of visiting me, and these are the ones who are now turning my life into a drama.  Who will be sitting in Laura’s rocking chair tonight?  It’s anyone’s guess.  To me, we are sitting here and chatting.  Friends do that, and it beats sitting alone.  To them… well who knows.  I am being seriously courted, though they all have secret girlfriends anyway.  Call them on it and they’ll say, “No importa!  Puedo estar contigo también!” It doesn’t matter, I can be with you too!  Though one did offer to leave his pregnant 16 year-old girlfriend for me… Awesome.  Yeah, I’ll give that some serious consideration, thanks.  It’s really a shame – it’s nice to have company over the age of ten.  I like my “friends,” but I might have to start keeping my door closed and going elsewhere for my evening entertainment.