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.    

Todos Leen

My little neighbor Bibi is eight years old, her sister, Ruistel, is ten.  Both are in the third grade, but neither can read the vowels or count to 100.  They are confused between “a” and “e,” and get tripped up after 30.  Both girls are perfectly normal Dominican kids.  I can see that they are both intelligent, both sweet.  They visit me and ask me to read them stories, then give me hugs and bring me gifts of bananas and lollipops as thanks.  I often have to kick them out of my house at night (along with other neighbors), or they’d probably try to sleep on my cement floor.   “Laura tiene muchos niños,” my muchacho neighbors say.  Laura has a lot of children.  They come to my house just like everyone else does, but they stay a lot longer, sitting on my floor and coloring or flipping through books they can’t read.  I let them stay as long as they don’t annoy me, and I read to them when I have nothing better to do.  For this they love me.  I “have a lot of children” because no one else ever read them a bedtime story before.  I mean, I also like kids most of the time.  They’re pretty funny, and bring me gifts, and can usually be counted on to help me sweep the leaves and trash in my yard.  Then again, they threw the trash there in the first place…  

So how did they reach the third grade without learning much at all?  Unfortunately, this is pretty typical here.  I wrote a little about the school system a long time ago, when I was still in training, but seeing the realities daily in Tabara is a different story.   The school day is about three hours long, but most of that time is spent disciplining, trying to get the students to stay in the classroom, and then having them copy something off the board.  Classroom management and varied instruction are not part of the program.  Students who have no help at home don’t stand a chance, and this applies to most students.  Bibi and Ruistel’s mother is a very sweet woman, who is also illiterate (she was originally a student of the adult literacy program, but gave up early on), so I would count them among the students who don’t have much of a chance.  Someone told me that Tabara has school about 90 days a year…for about 3 hours a day…which amounts to maybe 1 hour of work time a day.  If school is cancelled for something legitimate on a Wednesday, no one will go Thursday or Friday either.  Just because.

My new project involves invading the school and working with third graders.  Let’s call it “reading intervention.”  Last September, when I was still working on adult literacy in the evenings, I began visiting the school to see what kind of work I could do there with the teachers.  I quickly became discouraged by the craziness of the school, the frequency of strikes and cancellations, and the apparent apathy of most teachers.  When adult literacy (happily) ended in December, I revisited the idea of working in the school, and realized the best thing to do was to walk in and tell them what I was going to do.  The principal and teachers are pretty welcoming actually, but when I ask for their opinions we get nowhere.  They recognize that help is needed, at the very least, and they seem to like me.  

So I’ve enlisted the help of three of my adult literacy facilitators and friends, Awanda, Adalgiza and Toquia, to pull out small groups of third graders and work with them in forty-five minute sessions on reading.  Basically, an in-school tutoring program.  Between the four of us, we are working with over half of the third graders – forty-two kids who barely know their letters, and could be in danger of dropping out in a few years after repeating the same grade several times.  Originally I had planned to work with the second and third grades, but after evaluating them all and becoming overwhelmed by the number of students in need, we decided to concentrate just on third grade, as it seems more urgent. 

This program isn’t coming out of nowhere, and I’m not the only one doing it either.  A few weeks ago I collaborated with three of my fellow literacy volunteers to hold a joint training in San Juan with people from our communities to train them on teaching methods and games to use with kids (flashcards, bingo, stories, play dough, memory games, etc.).  The program is called Todos Leen (Everyone Reads), titled by my friend Keeton, who started a similar reading program last September.  We’re making this up as we go along… The kids love it, my facilitators are enthusiastic, the teachers appreciate it, and I feel like it is a completely worthwhile and potentially successful project.  So far so good!  Hopefully we will expand to work with more students, hold a summer reading program, and teacher training in the fall.  

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.