Campo Chronicles: Sweaty Sunny Days and Dark Sweaty Nights

Ah summer in the campo…Mothers bring their undisciplined children to stay with Grandma , children are finally liberated from their strenuous three and half hour school day, the sun kills any lingering ambition to motivate host country nationals to do something outside of their plastic chair, and the mosquitoes morph into giant specimens overnight, it truly is a special time of the year. The moments in my day where I turn around in circles in the oven that is my bungalow and struggle what to do with myself in the heat are increasing, those hours have turned into the hours between 10 AM and 6 PM. The heat makes me sluggish, irritable, and very very sweaty. It also makes me extremely sensitive to Dominicans very loud way of talking, aka yelling and screaming to each other from their respective porches.

One blaring difference I have noticed between the Dominican Republic and the States are the parenting styles. As Americans we prefer free-range poultry while here, my island friends and neighbors raise nothing but free-range children. Children as young as three wander the streets from sun-up until long after sun-down only stopping at home when hunger compels them to visit the rice pot. Some of the older children organize baseball games but for the most part, there is a lot of idleness, littering, and throwing rocks at chickens and dogs. Unfortunately, as one of the only adults in town that engages the children with eye contact and questions in a non-aggressive tone of voice, I have hordes of children at my house all day every day. There is one little terror in particular that I have had to bar from entering the house. Oliver is staying with grandma for the summer, he has a very prominent stutter and has not learned how to talk yet without yelling (which, judging by the society, he might never learn). He also continually asks me why I talk strange, look strange, and if my dog will bite him. I am almost positive I am the first gringa he has come into contact with in his four years of life. I now say that yes, my dog loves the taste of little boys named Oliver, but this has not deterred him from stamping out my flowers and throwing candy wrappers in my water tank. It is going to be a long summer for sure.

My last week was spent trying to get some Dominican friends excited about starting a youth group but everyone keeps saying it is far too hot to do anything but sip sugary-sweet coffee and talk about how hot it is. Therefore, I took advantage of the free time (of which I am never short on) to do some baking and plant a garden. The baking has been a big success as it gets me a little “street credit” with the doñas. So the Americana does know how to do some things they say. Banana bread and oatmeal raisin cookies have been big hits, although everyone is confused why the treats are not more sweet, think: so sugary that the granules cannot incorporate. I dovetail this complaint with the conjecture of why so many Dominicans have developed Type II diabetes: I believe that is what we call a teaching moment.

Since I started baking and because I walk my dog daily, I am seen as the epitome of good health here in Judea Nueva, a bit like the island version of Richard Simmons. Although I still get called fat each and every day I have to remind myself that that is a compliment in this society, sometimes. Hopefully my women’s group will enjoy a cooking/nutrition class this summer. Dominicans do take a lot of pride in their cuisine. To my outsider’s opinion, it is bland, overly salty, and overly greasy. That sounds harsh and that does not mean I have not had delicious Dominican food and I definitely crave my MSG filled beans and rice every day. However, a scary number of Dominicans are developing high blood pressure and diabetes and it is a direct result from their horrendous dietary habits. For me, the most tragic part of this whole scenario is the abundance of delicious fruits, vegetables, and tropical delights that thrive on this diverse island. The island supports strawberries, mangos, avocados, bananas, tamarind, papaya, pineapple, legumes, cocao, coffee, spinach, beets, peppers, tomatoes, coconuts…and the delicious list goes on. However, most of the national dishes do not revolve around fruits and vegetables; rather, the national dishes all seems to be descendents of slave food brought over from Africa. Lots of stews with starchy tubers, rice and beans, boiled platano with fried cheese, etc. The average Dominican is not friends with spice; rather, they prefer los amigos MSG, sugar, and soybean oil to flavor their food. Perhaps this diet worked fine fifty years ago; however, like we have seen in the states, the culture is increasingly sedentary and people can no longer get away with this horrible nutrition. Hardly anyone walks. If one is going five minutes away, they will take their motorcycle; walking is deemed below them. Haitians walk and Dominicans ride their motos…

In other news, my women’s group (who so endearingly named the club after me: Santa Clara) has signed up for a domestic sewing class. The course is provided free of charge by a Dominican technical institute; it is scheduled to take place over the course of three months and at the end of the course we will each know how to make a pair of pants, a dress, skirt, and blouse! Personally I was pretty excited for our group to take the baking and pastry class but the women wanted to take this course instead. That being said, so far, our first weekend of meetings was fraught with problems. The instructor, a short, white-haired man who lives in Montecristi and devoted much of his life to working in a sweat shop, will be teaching the course. Because our women’s group is banned from using the multi-purpose room at the grammar school because of certain unsavory outbursts that happened in the presence of the children and teachers at one of our raucous meetings a few months ago, we have been relegated to meeting in a very inadequate one room tin roofed pre-school. There are only about 15 seats and they are all seats with attached desks built for children under the age of 7. The class is supposed to take place from 2-6 every Saturday and Sunday. I will say it is nice not being the one in charge of running the meeting; rather, I get to sit back and watch the women not listen and be rude to someone other than me.

It is eye-opening to witness the lack of book education of many of these women even though all of them have at least an eighth grade education. We spent one hour of the first class having the women practice filling in on the attendance sheet their name in small boxes. The instructor explained that the important thing is to sign your name the same way every time. The box to sign is extremely small so it was recommended to everyone to just sign their first name. However, like most Latinos, Dominicans are very attached to all four of their names and it was painful to watch woman after woman fail at the simple task of picking just one name to sign; rather, they tried and failed to squeeze in at least 2 of their names. The funniest thing about all this is that most women do not even know the real names of people they have grown up next to for fifty-plus years. Almost every Dominican I know has an “apodo” or nickname that everyone knows them by: Coca, Blanca, Morena, Ola…to name a few. Combine the formality of having a multi-part name just right with the fact that no one actually knows each other’s real name, and you run into some big problems. For instance, the other day I was sitting out on the sidewalk with a neighbor “cogiendo fresco” (getting cool) beneath a shade tree, a popular way to spend the hot hours outside of the house so as to not slowly roast one’s self under a tin roof, when a man came by on a motorcycle with a letter. He was looking for the address of the recipient. The three neighbors I was sitting with began asking everyone within earshot who this person was, they all surmised that this might be the correct name of Pipa who lives on the corner, or perhaps it was Lula. Mind you, all these women have lived on the same street with the same neighbors for their entire lives, yet none of them had any clue who their good friend and neighbor was (or what her birth name is), nor did anyone know their actually house number. I was just happy to not be the man on the motorcycle looking for the woman as he was sent from house to house inquiring after a phantom. I ate the rest of my tamarind ice pop and smiled to myself at the funny problems created by this society: which is an amalgam of formal rules and informal realities.

Another example of this is the formality and informality of dress and comportment. For instance, men and women in their homes will often lift their shirts up after eating, walk around barefoot, and wear ridiculous clothes in the house but if they go into town they will suddenly pull out very nice clothes, make sure their hair is just so, and put on very nice shoes. I on the other hand live and work in clothing that can go from beach to meeting, always trying to look less sweaty than the person next to me. In the same vein, when you go to the beach most Dominicans will bathe with all of their clothes on, even though they are wearing a bathing suit; however, in the street they walk around with bare-assed booty shorts and extremely low-cut leaving-nothing-to –the-imagination shirts: and I’m the one who gets weird looks at the beach for swimming in a bikini. The frustrations are endless and hilarious.

I am happy to say that we are expanding the Bio-Sand water filter project to two neighboring communities as well as doing a second round in my community. With two new helpers that went to the training workshop I am trying to pass off a lot of the responsibility to my counterparts, a 17 year old and 21 year old Dominican men/boys. Unfortunately, I still find myself planning the meetings and at our first meeting yesterday we waited twenty minutes for the boys to show up and then one of them was too embarrassed to say anything. That being said, the 21 year old, Edward, is extremely dynamic (he proselytizes at the Evangelical Church in town) and doing a charla with him was fun. It is always helpful to use local counterparts to do the teaching and I think usually more successful. I tend to worry about “dumbing down” the information too much, but when a Dominican gives the charla they always state very obvious things that nonetheless need to be said. Not to mention, people tend to love meetings where they are not learning new information but simply confirming things they already know. For me, the success will be seen with the change of habit: every kid and adult in town can tell me when they should be washing their hands; however, spending lots of time at people’s homes has enlightened me to the reality of the extreme disconnect between knowledge and practice. I do acknowledge that change will not happen overnight, but is a long and tedious process.

We will be doing four lectures or charlas for each community. The charlas focus on improving hygiene and general health practices in the home, how to maintain and care for the filter, etc. Yesterday, my group of about 50 women and children in attendance had a great time with our educational game: spider web of contamination. We had signs with words like poop, fly, hands, water, mouth, etc. and we had volunteers come up and hold the signs and then attach strings to see the chain of events that lead to people becoming sick with GI issues; this knowledge is very important right now as the cholera outbreak is spreading on the island and we have also just entered el tiempo de moscas! (time of the flies)..

In other news, I am heading to the capital tomorrow for a doctor’s appointment, an English Teacher’s Conference and the annual Lowenbrau Half-Marathon! I am a little concerned about my level of fitness going into this physical challenge (especially because doing anything other than sipping a beer poolside in June Caribbean heat is next to impossible), but I think it will be a fun event and I am just hoping to finish and do not mind if I have to walk. I have needed a reason to start moving again. Training for the race this past month has involved getting up at 5 am (before the sun is too hot) and running out into the rice fields. It has been beautiful to watch the sunrise as I am greeted by countless Haitian men giving me the fist pump of encouragement as they meander to their work in the rice and banana fields.

I mentioned to one of my neighbors that I will be participating in the competition in the capital because people started questioning me as to the purpose of my early morning sweat routine. He was so excited about me entering in this race and was convinced that I would not only be on television but that I would win the race. He went on to tell me that he learned some fool-proof method for winning from a movie (I think it was one of the Rocky movies: big hits among Dominicans along with anything by Jackie Chan)…start out slow and then when all my competitors collapse to the ground I will burn by them…he acted this all out while about 10 people waited to buy things from him at his convenience store. I mentioned that I doubt all of the competitors will collapse from the race, but he is convinced I will be on television Sunday night and I am supposed to give a shout-out to all my friends in Judea Nueva. Besides, they say, How could an Americana lose?