After our first day of work, I felt an instant connection with everyone in el Rifle, when the sun went down we headed down the mountain on foot to the local bar which was just open for us. A slab of concrete chairs some small tables a roof and a small room filled with beer and snacks was apparently our local pub. We danced, drank and chatted with everyone there, and after an hour or so Dan came up with the brilliant idea of starting a make shift improvisational game of beer pong. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_pong) It was without a doubt the best team building exercise I have ever encountered and when we started our second with Dominicans vs Canadians I made sure to immerse myself in the culture and be on the Dominican Team, where I immediately used my newly acquired Spanish skills to become the team cheerleader and lead chants against team Canada. Stating mostly that we were men and they were little goats.
Pressure is on Mike
Team Dominican
Hombres
Dance DanceI came looking for poverty and found none.
The days so far had a huge impact on my thinking, already I felt I had experienced so much, after beer pong people were dancing and chatting again and I found myself with our team leaders Jenna and Liz, engaged in discussion about what we had seen. I remember telling them that nothing is what I expected it to be. I expected to come to the country and see poverty and suffering and sadness. I recall being told that it is a huge shock for some people and some are too sensitive to handle the whole experience. My feelings were the complete opposite. This is not a third world country; this is what a first world country should be. The sense of community is unparalleled, people are as far as I can tell very happy. Instead of worrying about things like what swimsuit they should get this summer, and when the newest version of such and such a video game is coming out, they focus on their family and friends. They derive pleasure from simple things, and I really don’t sense there is much missing from their lives. All the things we have convinced ourselves to be important in the so called first world just vaporize as soon as you get there. And, I have also become aware that I am certainly missing the rich range of interactions and relationships that exist only as a result of a much simpler way of life. A simple example I can think of is if you are sitting having coffee or a beer on a patio, or eating a sandwich in the student center at school, or even just out for a walk. If you see someone you know, in Canada how simple it is for them to say “I can’t stop to talk, I have to be at such and such a place” and it is not in anyway rude it just is what it is. Whereas in Dominican the complete opposite happens if you see someone you have not seen in a while, and they see you, you must stop sit down and spend some time with them either with coffee or a meal or whatever it is. John (a retired teacher who spends 4 months a year in the country helping to organize groups like our own) told me going anywhere becomes a huge ordeal. He is constantly late for everything because no matter how early he sets out to go anywhere he sees people he knows on the way and has to stop to have coffee or a meal, or come in to meet so and so's grandmother and 15 minute walks end up taking an hour. Another example that is probably easier to grasp is if you want to contact someone in Canada you call them, or email them, or msn them, or facebook them, or txt them. In Dominican if you want someone for something, you go and find them, or do without them, and just the simple act of having to invest the time and energy to physically be with someone to tell them something makes a huge difference from being able to just quickly communicate electronically. Getting to know people instead of digital people leaves you with a sense of something that I can barely even get my head around because growing up in an age of phones and internet I never realized there was a difference before I realized there were people who communicated without electronics. I can say honestly, I did not miss phones, internet, or any electronic communications one bit, and feel the only reason I use them is because everyone else I know uses them. It is much more of a forced convenience than it is anything else. This has turned into a long ramble as it did in my conversation with Jenna and Liz, but the point im getting at is even though we are supposed to have so much more from all this technological improvement to our lives, we have certainly lost something important along the way.
Our house, in the middle of our street
Once the trenches were dug, we had to create the foundation. We created a ladder like structure out of something called rebar which was just pieces of metal about as thick as your thumb lashed together with pieces of metal resembling thin coat hangers. Once that was made and laid down came the concrete mixed by hand. The first experience we had making concrete was interesting. We had a pile of rocks and dirt which we would pick up in shovels and throw at a screen. Whatever went through we would then mix by hand with a back of cement and water to make the concrete for laying bricks on a house we did not spend a lot of time working on. The rest of concrete making was easier, we had a truck bring the gravel and all we had to do was mix cement and water and then throw it into buckets pass it down a line of people around the house and pour it in the trenches. During the mixing I had a linguistic experience I am very proud of. I was mixing the concrete and one of the workers said to me in Spanish something that I could never reproduce. I instantly understood that he wanted me to let the water pool longer before I started mixing, and when Alberto (Alberto is Colombian and speaks Spanish fluently if I have not mentioned this already) asked me if I knew what he said I told him and he said I had understood perfectly. It was incredibly rewarding to comprehend my first Spanish sentence that was not “hello”, “what is your name”, or “the bathroom is over there”. Once we had laid the concrete we simply had to unload blocks from a truck spread them out and proceed to lay them down. The foreman did all the brick laying and we would just help by filling caps in with cement and, well, making more cement. That is as far as we got, and although it was a lot of work we probably could have gotten it all done in about 2 full days. However, things in the Dominican run on their own time, one day it was raining to hard to get the trucks up the mountain and so the building was delayed, materials that were supposed to show up Monday were not there until Wednesday and we really just had to make do. It was strange to do something extremely rewarding only to want more and be left feeling extremely frustrated, but C'est la vie.
Jenna put it best: "High tech sorting device"
Dan on a pile of soon to be concrete
Mixed Concrete Going Down the Line
unloading bricks
the last of the concrete being mixed
A layer of bricks goes down
my shoes after mixing... jennas were worse i think she threw them out where as i still wear mine to ramshead.
it might not seem like much but scroll back up to what it was when we started.
Dirty but still smiling after a hard days workThe Haitian and the Axe
Alberto told me a story today about a Haitian, before I tell it I should say something about Haitians in Dominican. Due to the abject poverty of Haiti its people are fleeing their country illegally to seek work and better lives in the Dominican. The general opinion towards them, in the Dominican, is that they are second class citizens. They live in smaller houses, make less money, and are often not allowed to come into bars. Haitians never sit in the front of a truck with Dominicans, they sit in the bed with whatever else is there, even if there is an open seat.
Inside a Haitian House
A Haitian house shared by 8 people, they have this bed and one other small room with nothing in it.Alberto was talking to a man with an axe and the man was showing Alberto a chip in the blade. The story goes that a Haitian was working with the axe that belonged to another Dominican man, and as he was working he put a chip in the axe which made its owner very angry. The man who owned the axe wanted to kill the Haitian over this. The man Alberto was talking to was there and said he would trade the other man his chipped axe for a new one and in exchanged the Haitian would be left alive. The man agreed and the Haitian was allowed to live.
Where is Heavy?
The children here have nothing to play with and being children are perfectly content with that. No matter how little a child has they will always find someway to make a game of it. Every toy we brought they went crazy over. Sparklers, cards, stickers, glow sticks, pogs, and especially anything to do with baseball. The boys are baseball fanatics and more than talented at the game, I am quite sure that any group of children in Dominican could beat any group of my friends 10 years older than them at baseball. It was very sobering to see children really appreciate what little they have, in juxtaposition to so many children here and their attitudes towards things.
"Who are these gringos watching us?"
A baseball game in San Jose De Ocoa, the children have only a few gloves and bats but they share everything.
Elian the chicken catcher
Baby Gordita
Sticker fight?
I explained pog to the kids and tried telling them that the metal slammer was best because it was heavy. They thought that it was called heavy and everytime they slammed it down and it went flying there would be a frantic cry "Donde es Heavy". I gave up trying to explain that it was heavy not called Heavy and just helped them look for Heavy instead. Also I brought pogs over with pictures of disney characters on them, such as lion king and hunchback, but they have no idea what any of the pictures on the pogs were, even if they were wearing clothes with the same characters on them. It surprised me at first but made perfect sense once I thought about it. The materialistic value of the pogs have no meaning to them, they are just toys, and might as well be decorated with anything, or perhaps not at all.
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