Chicas Brillantes

I always loved going to overnight camp as a kid.  For a few summers, my friend Christina and I went to Camp Matollionequay in New Jersey.  We played sports and did activities, swam, sang lots of songs, were really silly… the normal camp thing.  It was only a week, which we spent in a rickety wooden cabin with six other girls and a counselor, communal bunk living, but that week was enough to make us a little more independent, a little freer.  And it was a lot of fun. 

Last weekend I took two of my thirteen year-old friends with me to the Chicas Brillantes regional southern conference.  It was camp, pretty much.  We spent three days at a beautiful retreat center about two hours away from where I live, with a few cabins, a pool, and sixty other girls and Peace Corps volunteers.  My girls wanted to stay forever.  The purpose of the conference, and Chicas Brillantes (basically “Glowing Girls”) in general, is to empower teenage girls through activities concerning self-esteem, gender and sexuality, health, sports, games, community work, and whatever else we volunteers can think of.  And, of course, lots of singing and being silly too. 

By the end of day two, our forty girls had turned into some sort of sorority, chanting the words to Chuli Chuli, a song they particularly liked, and calling themselves the Chuli Chulis.  Not only was this funny (although I never want to sing Chuli Chuli again), but it was also kind of great to watch them making friends with girls from different communities, of different ages and varying backgrounds.  I know that my girls do not have a single friend of Haitian descent here in Tabara, so for them to become friends with girls from the bateyes is a really big thing.  It was awesome to be able to give them the opportunity to get out of Tabara for a weekend and do something so cool.  Not a common occurrence for your average Dominican.  I think they learned a lot.

And best of all, I get to take some girls to Peace Corps’ Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) this summer, which will be a lot like this conference except for a week instead of just the weekend.  Who ever thought I would be an overnight camp counselor for Dominican girls?  Hilarious.   

In some ways, living in my town is a lot like camping.  I wash with buckets; I live with my doors and windows open… basically I live outside.  I don’t cook over an open fire, but plenty of other people do.  I can identify every voice passing outside my door – half of the time I feel like my neighbors live in my house with me.  Last night my girls came over, calling out “Chuli” to identify themselves in the dark at my door (there was no electricity) and asked when we can go back to camp.  We can’t go back to camp any time soon, but we are forming a Chicas Brillantes group so that they can share what they learned with some of their peers here in Tabara.  I remember coming home from Camp Matollionequay and singing camp songs for weeks afterwards.  I’m sure their first order of business will be to teach their friends Chuli Chuli…

A day in the life…

Some days are just kind of crazy.  I think this one is worth recounting:

I woke up around 7:30 AM, with absolutely no plans for the day.  It was a holiday for some unknown reason (any excuse for a party really), so there was no school or work, and I’m between projects.  My greatest achievements probably would have included trying to use the Internet (if I could find it working anywhere, which is unlikely), cooking something, and hanging out with my neighbors.

But around 8:30 AM, the priest called me.  I couldn’t understand a word he said, maybe because my phone is awful, or maybe because he talks like a crazy person when he’s excited.  He only lives around the corner, so I told him I’d come to his house and we could talk there.  Upon arrival, I was given the expected sugarcoffee, and then was unexpectedly kidnapped and taken on a joyride to three neighboring communities, the purpose of which was unclear.  I was glad that I had brushed my teeth before leaving my house for what I thought would be a two-minute conversation and turned into a four-hour adventure, though I wished that I had put on sunscreen and changed out of the tank-top I slept in last night. 

We arrived to the first community, stopping the truck every few feet to greet someone, the priest either asking why they weren’t in church last week or calling them terms of endearment and blowing them kisses.  We picked up a muchacho who apparently works with the church, and went searching for some key.  It was a very slow ride – we couldn’t make it fifty feet without stopping to chat with someone.  We never achieved whatever it was we were trying to do, but left the community with three extra people in the back of the truck.

Then we drove out to the highway, went a ways down the road, and turned onto a rough dirt road between a bunch of dirt mounds with absolutely nothing else around.  Not a community.  Just dirt.  We waited a minute.  A man appeared from behind a dirt pile.  (Well-dressed, not dirty.)  He got in the truck and we left the dirt mound area, went back to the highway, drove a little further, entered another community, and promptly stopped for empanadas.  I wasn’t hungry, but the five men I was with each ate two.  After their snack, we drove to someone’s house, paused while one of the guys went searching for someone and talked for a while about building materials, costs, construction, whathaveyou.  He came back with grape sodas for everyone and we left that community and drove back to the dirt piles.  When we got there, the man took out a manila envelope and filled it with dirt from one of the piles, gave it to the priest, and we left him there amongst his piles and drove back towards Tabara. 

Sidenote:  This whole time, the truck is blasting merengue and salsa music, and everyone is joking around and yelling random things at each other and at people on the street outside.  Not bad things, just… campo.  Example: “Mi amor, guardame un chin de habichuela!”  My love, save me some beans!  Also, the priest is tailgating and passing cars and motorcycles so close that I’m pressing my right foot hard into an imaginary break and clenching my fists.

As it turns out, the purpose of the entire morning was to fill an envelope with dirt and write a letter to an American priest in Wisconsin asking for two generator batteries for the parish.  (That’s what we did when we got back to Tabara.)  I’m still not sure why I was necessary for the trip, except that the priest really seems to enjoy my company.  All in all, it was a good morning actually – I was extremely amused the whole time, and we ate some yummy spaghetti when we got back. 

Later, I went up to my host family’s house to hang out with my sister.  What started with the two of us casually chatting on the couch quickly became soap opera material, with a revolving cast of characters in ridiculous situations.  Between one cousin whining about money and make-up, another cousin making us laugh so hard we almost fell off the couch as she talked about men, cabañas, and dirty Dominican expressions, the relatively rich grandmother in-law yelling about how she’s been denied water filters from the church (the filters were given to families who can’t afford the big jugs of water sold at colmados), and the three year old tiguera being a tiguera, it was a full house.  A neighbor also told us of her current troubles with an unwanted guest: an older Spanish man that she met in the capital came to visit her and never left.  Um…what?  He was never invited, and she doesn’t want him there, but he has now been living in her house for four months.  Also, he kicked her daughter.  My response: “WHAT, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?  Throw him out for God’s sake!”  That story is unresolved for now.

Finally, there was some big baseball game on at night, and all my neighbors sat outside one guy’s house watching it through the windows, perched on a truck bed or in plastic chairs on the street.  I sat in the truck with them for a while before I decided that I’ve never cared about baseball, and just because I’m in baseball land doesn’t mean I have to start now.  My little neighbors came over for story time instead, with the background of men directly outside my door screaming at a little TV through a window across the street, some of them peering in every so often to hear the story. 

Quite a day. 

New Year, New Projects

Each morning a little light seeping through the wooden slats of the windows, the rustling of people outside my doors, such a slight separation between my space and the rest of the world.  Bare feet on the cracked cement floor, already a light layer of dust since yesterday’s sweeping, I stand in the middle of the front room for a moment before opening my house, letting in the light and the day.  What I want is the air, the reality of life outside, but this is also an invitation to enter – an open door means men pausing in the doorway, children coming in uninvited, people passing by and yelling out my name, often gone before I can even see who called.

I am glad for the visits when I know and like my visitors; I am glad to be a part of the community.  Some just gaze at my pictures on the fridge and ask about my life, curious about my friends and family.  Some are too bold, looking through my things on the table, asking to borrow or keep things: peanut butter, lip-gloss, my camera…  I tell them they’re being rude:  “Pero tu entras en casa ajena y pidas cosas asi?!”  But you just come into someone else’s house and ask for things like that?!   They laugh, sometimes bashful, often not.  I like that I’ve reached a point of comfort here to tell it like it is, without worrying about offending someone.  They aren’t offended.  It’s all about delivery.  And the best way to keep my sanity with all the crazy situations I end up in is to be as bold as everyone else…

At night, men sit outside Neno’s colmado across the street from my house, slow Mexican music falling and rising from a truck’s speakers.  If I leave the door open, I have more visitors.  The activity multiplies, motorcycles roaring past, kids running and yelling, the men raising their voices over a card game or dominos.  They used to really annoy me out there, talking about politics, women, the tobacco crop, whatever, and watching when I leave my house, when I come back, when someone else visits me.  Sometimes it still drives me a little crazy, the feeling of being watched, but now that I’m friendly with everyone and they’ve become familiar neighbors, it usually just makes me feel safe.  All that activity on my street, people always sitting there, a light bulb always on (whether or not we have electricity, because the colmado has a generator)… It’s like having my own personal watchmen.  Things work out well. 

Returning to Tabara after three weeks away was actually quite nice.  I was greeted like a long lost relative: hug attacks from friends, everyone on the street telling me how they’d missed me, asking how my family is doing in the United States, updating me on the gossip… I got right back into the swing of things, and now that the adult literacy program has ended, I’m free to start other projects.  So far I’ve started a girl’s empowerment youth group and am getting things organized to begin a reading program for elementary school kids outside of school.  I’m still working with some of the adults too, just not running all over the community like a crazy person trying to get 100 people to learn to read.  Also, Tabara Arriba got a new priest in November who is ready to get to work on development projects, and is supportive of my education work.  The last priest was supposed to be my project partner… that didn’t work out, as he didn’t seem to care to do any work or support me at all.  So this is an exciting new development.  I have no religious agenda, but if the church is the only community organization doing anything for the community, more power to them!

I’m feeling good about 2012. 

FESTIVITIES: Weddings, Funerals, Going-Away Parties, and Bachata Concerts!

First of all, I am writing this from THE UNITED STATES: a glorious place full of family, friends, working bathrooms (and lots of other things that work as they are supposed to), coldness, cars, and a lot of excess food and things in general.  I’m home for Christmas and New Years! 

Obviously it's really wonderful to see my American friends and family (and plan their visits to the Dominican Republic...), but it's gone by very quickly. I'll be back to my community soon!  

The last weeks before I came home were pleasantly busy, between finishing out the literacy program and going to a lot of shindigs…  December in the DR is not really a productive time for work.  Weekends become more festive; relatives who live and work in the capital or in the eastern tourist towns come home; people put lights on their houses and break out the rum early in the day… I wouldn’t say it feels like Christmas (at least not to me), but the air is cooler and people are in good spirits.

Some events:

*  My friend got married, which is almost unheard of in the campo.  Weddings cost money, and people just generally don’t have them.  When it comes time for communion in church, most of the takers are children.  The wedding was sweet, and the party was really fun.  Lots of dancing, food, the usual.  

*  There were a lot of funerals too… I don’t know what it is about December.  Funerals here are nine days long, involve tons of people, coffee, and sitting around and playing dominos and hanging out, while inside the house of the deceased the closest family members receive well-wishers and mourn their loved one.  At this point, the only major life event that I haven’t participated in is a birth.  Though I did meet my friend’s newborn baby a week after she was born…

*  My yoga/pilates class (yes, I teach a yoga/pilates class... they love it) planned a going-away spaghetti party for one of our members, who’s leaving Tabara to join the rest of her family in Spain and find work.  (And also for me, because right now I am here instead of there!)  So we made a giant thing of cheesy spaghetti and then sat on the street and ate our spaghetti… Good times.

 

*  A famous Dominican bachatero, Zacarias Ferreira, came to my town to give a concert.  Apparently he’s friends with some people here, and has come before… I guess it’s not that crazy, considering how small the Dominican Republic is, that one of the most famous singers in the country would come here to my campo to sing.  So that was even more dancing… if there’s one thing that Tabareros are united in, it’s their love of a party.  Can we raise money for schoolbooks? Do kids even receive class in school? Negative.  But we can raise thousands (millions?) of pesos for a party.  Priorities. 

Nikki and I at the concert...

So what comes next?  More literacy and youth programs!  I'll keep you posted...

Literacy

Every step of the way has been a struggle so far.  Seven months spent working with so many students, so many facilitators, who lose motivation, lack resources and knowledge.   Seven months spent working with people at an unbelievably disorganized foundation, who consistently show up three hours late, if at all; who would rather gather a random group of people together to take a photo of a “literacy class” than admit that the class has fallen apart and no longer exists.  To be honest, I haven’t written much about my work in the last several months because it’s generally been quite frustrating.  So, disclaimer: much of what follows might sound kind of negative, but I’ve had a lot of good moments too, and, ultimately, the successes and failures probably even out.  (And by that I mean, if one person actually learned to read for every five people who gave up and left class, it was worth it.)

I arrived here in May somehow already feeling responsible for this work.  I was introduced to my community as “the Americana in charge of the literacy program” – a program that began in March (two months before I even knew that I would be living and working in Tabara Arriba for two years) with approximately 300 students in 26 classes between 5 communities.  My role was actually never made clear.  In fact, I was generally the one initiating communication with the foundation that solicited for me.  Somehow I’ve always felt that it should have been the other way around…

So I ended up defining my own role, amidst much misunderstanding and self-doubt, many roadblocks and pauses.  While they would have been happy using me for administrative tasks (which is explicitly against Peace Corps goals for volunteers), I stated my case pretty strongly – that there was no way I could work effectively with all of the classes, that they needed to help me with transportation money to travel between communities, and that I am not here to be an administrative employee.  Instead, I would focus on motivation, learning tools, team-teaching with the facilitators… ie. Quality control.   Which was sorely needed, as they continue to be more concerned with quantity than quality, some of the facilitators are barely able to read themselves, and only one or two have any teaching skills whatsoever.   

But I was not here when this program was planned, when facilitators were seemingly chosen without any sort of screening process.  And I was not here for the exciting beginning stages either, when everything was new and possible.  I arrived just in time for the program’s many problems to come to light and become serious issues.  Adult literacy is probably the most difficult area of education to tackle.  Learning to read is no easy task, add to that the fact that you are beginning from square one with a group of people who are older (ranging in age from 13 to 75), maybe have never entered a classroom of any kind before, and have many real life issues that keep them from coming to class…

Though a few classes took place in actual classrooms, most were held in the facilitators’ homes.  Most of my evenings up until now have involved working with one or two classes in rotation, finding anywhere from two to twelve students present on any given day, sitting in a circle of plastic chairs in the facilitator’s yard, a chalkboard hung on the wall of the house, notebooks in their laps and pencils in hand.  The daily work of teaching literacy is usually not exciting.  It’s repetitive, frustrating, and requires extreme patience.  Some of the most dedicated students just couldn’t seem to remember what they learned from one day to the next.  Others weren’t all that dedicated.

During the rainy season, days went by without class, as the sky always seemed to open up just in time to keep people in their houses.  When it started getting dark earlier, class became dependent on whether or not we had electricity on any given night.  When it came time to pick coffee, half of the students disappeared to the mountains to work.  Mothers missed class because they had to cook dinner; teenagers missed class because they would rather hang out on the corner with a beer.  But classes persisted.  The students who completely lost motivation just stopped coming.  New students showed up who hadn’t started the program with everyone else.   Facilitators became frustrated, teaching to different levels with few materials or skills to work with.  Some facilitators quit before their students did!  I’m sad to admit, my standards lowered drastically. 

I would have done a lot of things differently, but it’s nearly impossible to change things that were put in place long before I got here.  I tried.  But I am just one person, and it took me until somewhere around October to calm down, accept the many things that I could not change, and be happy with the small successes.  Of which there are many!  When I was feeling most frustrated with the big picture of the program as a whole, I always felt better after working with a class.  Women who used to sign their names by writing “XXX” in the blank could now write their full names, and the names of their family members.  Teenage boys, who in the beginning literally needed someone to hold their hand to help them shape their first letters, could now write a simple sentence about daily life.  Despite all the struggle, I like to think that I was able to hold at least some of the classes together, help some of the facilitators do a better job, keep some of the students encouraged and supported.

Tabara Arriba’s literacy program ended last week with evaluations for the students who were still standing.   26 classes became 20, 300 active students became 189.   Of those, only 98 participated in the final evaluation (most of the rest were up in those mountains, working).  48 passed, and 50 failed.  And these numbers are probably a little bit generous.  There was a pretty huge learning curve coming into this.  It’s a good thing I already had a high Spanish level, because if language had made things any more confusing than they already were I might have just given up.  I recently said something to another volunteer about how I wish my work would eventually just settle into a routine so I can stop pushing my way forward and just relax a little.   He responded that that probably only happens if I stop caring… Gave me something to think about.

But 48 people learned enough to pass a test!  That’s something.  Especially considering that some of them had never held a pencil before last March. 

M'Pale Kreyol

The further south you go in this country, the drier it gets and the poorer it feels.   When people talk about the southern Dominican Republic, they mean the southwest, between the Haitian border and cities approaching the capital.  San Juan and Azua are considered the south, and my town is located between the two – so if you’re thinking of a tropical paradise with constant rains and lush green, you’re not thinking of where I live.

Tabara doesn’t quite feel like a desert yet.  It rained plenty during the rainy season, but that ended in October and it hasn’t rained since, so it’s probably only a matter of time before the fields turn brown and dust takes over.  But I am lucky to have even this much rain, this much greenery.  I’ve traveled further south on two occasions, both to visit the bateyes around Tamayo, and just an hour in a guagua brings me to a world that is drier, dustier, and even hotter than my community.  In the summer there is no relief from the heat, not even at night, but thankfully December brings a cool night breeze.

I spent last week learning Haitian Creole in Batey 9.   It was kind of like summer camp – five days spent eating, sleeping, learning, and playing games with seven other volunteers and our teacher Getro, a capitaleño Haitian who speaks four or five languages.   Our host was the evangelical pastor, who told us a little bit of Batey 9’s history – of slave labor and killings, of distrust between Haitians and Dominicans.  Problems between the two groups reach back to before the border existed between their countries, and these fears persist today.

Bateyes, by definition, are communities based around sugar cane production.  They have primarily Haitian or Haitian-Dominican populations, and are some of the poorest places in the country.  There are clusters of bateyes in the south and also in the east (not so far from Punta Cana).  In the south, many don’t even have names, but are just numbered Batey 1 through Batey 9.  Until recent decades, these could almost be considered slave communities.  Haitians were brought across the border and dumped into the cane to work, receiving little or no pay and fearing the Dominicans they might encounter if they tried to leave.  Today, many men still work endlessly in the cane, seven days a week from dawn until dusk, but the bateyes themselves have developed as communities.  Resources arrive through NGOs, The Church, Peace Corps Volunteers… bateyes aren’t the easiest places to live, but volunteers generally have a lot of success working in them. 

I frequently find myself defending Haitians to my Dominican friends and neighbors.  A good friend of mine, a police officer, recently said:  “Yo no quiero nada que hacer con ellos.  Te matan!  Crecen como animales, y creen en brujeria!”   I don’t want anything to do with them.  They’ll kill you!  They’re raised like animals, and they believe in witchcraft!   These words came from a person I really like.  And I still like him, despite his small-minded perspective of the world.  I haven’t found many friends who aren’t bigoted, though I think I am changing a few perspectives – at least those of the people I am around a lot, those who are willing to change.  It’s a constant conversation, and I mostly hear the Dominican side.  My community doesn’t have a large Haitian population – the Haitians here literally just walked over the mountains to come work in the fields.  They are straight from Haiti, maybe speak some Spanish, probably have no education, and are at the lowest end of the social ladder.  If Haiti were the richer country, it would probably be the exact same situation in reverse.

But anyway, I learned some Creole.  Now I’m searching for a Haitian buddy to practice with. 

Kids...

The batey's "play" (baseball field).

To the Loma!

Over the last two months, some of my neighbors and a lot of literacy students (mostly male) have disappeared.   I’m told that they are en la loma, “in the mountain.”  It’s coffee picking season, and those who have land or just work it for somebody else move up into the mountains for months at a time.   Coffee grows up where it’s a little cooler, which could be anywhere from an hour to three hours away from Tabara (meaning an hour or two on a motorcycle, followed by a long, vertical hike… or going a different route on a donkey.)  So instead of an impossible daily commute, whole families just stay up there for a while, living in clearings in the middle of their coffee trees. 

My neighbors have been talking about taking me up to see their coffee ever since I arrived in Tabara six months ago.  Last week we finally got ourselves together and caravanned up to the mountain on motos (and then on foot), where I found a bunch of my missing friends!   They had already finished picking for the day, and were now sitting around, playing cards, waiting for lunch to cook and taking turns spinning the crank on the machine they use to shell the coffee beans.  After more than a month without leaving the mountain, fifteen people sharing two rooms in a shack house with bedrolls and hammocks, they seemed pretty settled in.  My arrival was a big surprise!  

Home sweet home!

Laura visits the mountian!

Cooking lunch for everyone.

Coffee ready for picking.

Shelling the beans.

Beans drying in the sun.