Wednesday, September 26, 2007
'Cuz I'm not so hot at all the computer stuff
I know the post below is formatted all kinds of badly, and my apologies. I just don't really know how to manage the blog stuff very well yet, and since I'm still restricted to using an internet cafe, it's hard to find the time to figure it all out. I'm hoping I'll get it all figured out soon. Until then, please bear with me. Sorry all!
Where I went this weekend and why you are crazy if you are considering not visiting me.
Monday was Dia de la Mercedes, one of the many holidays dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and in order to aprovechar the long weekend (as my colleagues kept encouraging me to do – one thing I love about Latin America is how much support I find for engaging enjoyment), I went to the northern coast with my roommate, Andres, and a few other kids from his study abroad program. We went to Rio San Juan, a little fishing village which has grown substantially with the growth in tourism, and which one day will probably host an all-inclusive resort. Luckily for us, it is still somewhat off the beaten path, and therefore doesn’t feel all Disney-fied as of yet. In fact, at the beach we went to on Sunday we were the only gringos in sight.
We stayed in a hotel located at the end of the “beach” in town – a tiny little strip of sand that goes under water at high tide, but which is full of swimmers and sunbathers during the day. The hotel is white-washed, and perches on a rocky cliff of sorts, hanging out over the Atlantic Ocean. The wall separating the cliff from the ground floor shows rusty strips in the places where the ocean has worn away the paint. The hotel faces almost due west, so from our third floor balcony we could sit in worn deck chairs and watch the sun go down. 
We spent a good part of the weekend sitting in those chairs, in the early morning, during the sunset, and at night under stars, just sitting and talking. It felt deeply relaxing to spend so many hours in front of the ocean, just sitting and following a meandering conversation.
We took a boat tour through a mangrove swamp completely full with tropical
birds and wooden houses hidden among the spindly trees.
The tour also went out into the open ocean and toured a small cave and several beaches, but one of the most interesting things we saw were these white heads – they looked like the mannequin heads used by wig makers – wearing crowns of something that look like silver coral reef. We were sharing our boat with a German family and a Dominican family but no one really seemed to have much information about the heads – the most I could gather from the tour guide was that they were sites of Indian worship.
We spent one whole day at the beach, and it was pretty much perfection – the truth is that I keep thinking of it as a representation of “beach” instead of an actual beach – white sand, crystal clear, turquoise water out for yards before it becomes deep enough that you have to swim, gentle waves that picked up enough at the edges of the bay to provide light surfing, all ringed by a crescent of palm trees. We got there early and so had our pick of spots and a quiet morning alone, swimming and lying in the sun, but by 12 cars started pulling up to the edges of the palms trees, opening all their doors and blasting music. Each car had a slightly different idea of what it wanted to listen to however, so if you walked down the sand you would go in and out of bachata, Latin pop, and reggaeton. By 4 when we started packing up there was a serious party happening to our left with a huge group of 20-somethings grilling and drinking beer, and several families were unpacking coolers to our right.
Now I'm back to the city - my main project this week is sealing the deal on my apartment - keep your fingers crossed for me!
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Grace
So last week was pretty bad.
I had expected this time to feel differently – I have lived abroad before, and when I was in high school and lived in Argentina the experience was somewhat comparable because I was alone – when I lived in Guatemala I was with my family, and when I lived in Uganda I was living with two very good friends, the incomparable Amity and Nienke, and with Nienke’s wonderful family (say hi to them for me Nienkie!), and in Prague I was involved in a program with about twenty other American students my age so – none of those experiences required me to be alone in any real way. In Argentina however, I lived in a tiny little town with a host family I didn’t really integrate well into, and although there was another exchange student living there who I still count as a friend, I was much more left to my own devices. I didn’t have an immediate community that understood me and which I could find refugee in and I found that incredibly difficult. That experience was definitely trial by fire and if it had not been for the support of my community across the world cheering me on, and for Ruth from Australia, and for my pure stubbornness not to have given up, I think I would have packed my bags and headed home after the first month. The feeling of those six months was pretty searing and I can still remember it in that phantom way that lingers well after the original sensation has passed.
I was pretty terrified in the weeks leading up to my departure for Santo Domingo, and I think that feeling was largely to blame. I kept feeling the phantom of those six months and thinking of how it would feel like that all over again – like my body was made of lead and every movement was tasking, like my world was foreign and unknown and unfriendly, like I was alone and not me and I could not find my bearings. Although I count that experience as incredibly useful, and I continue to be very glad that I stuck it out, it wasn’t a pleasant six months and I am not looking to repeat the experience. I knew the circumstances were incredibly different, and I was pretty sure that this would eventually feel totally different, but I wasn’t sure that that would be true for the first couple of weeks or months, as I got used to the environment and found my bearings.
It doesn’t feel like that.
It definitely has its own challenges, but I am different enough, or the experience is different enough, or both, that I have not felt like that. (So far anyway – since it’s only been 2 weeks it may be premature to be saying all this, but let’s keep our fingers crossed, okay?) I have felt frustrated by the organization I am working for, and distressed by my living situation, and uncertain about how my social life was going to work out, but none of those things felt like they displaced me – the way they did when I was 16. I feel that with a little time and a little elbow grease on my part the work situation will resolve and the housing situation will change, and if I find no friends for the year, that I will still somehow be okay – I have a deeper network now than I had 6 years ago, and I am more self-contained – I can make do much better than I used to be able to. It feels pretty amazing to realize that.
Despite all the personal growthy-ness and the growing up and the new-found sense of self last week still pretty much put me through the ringer. As I looked over my new life it looked something like this:
Work: hah
Housing: total mess, spent all my energy all week working on it, still have to live somewhere that wears me down for the time being.
Friends: that’s a negative, Houston
Yoga Class I wanted to take: you have to wear all white to be able to attend, but the only yoga pants or gym shorts I have with me are black and navy blue.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So, even though I felt so much better than I had expected to feel at this point, I was still feeling pretty alone and defeated by Friday afternoon when I forced myself to call the friend of a friend who is living here this year working on similar issues and with whom I had not yet been able to meet up. Since it was Friday I was sure she had plans for the evening, so I suggested that we get lunch Saturday afternoon. Rachel said that would be fine, or if I wanted, she was going out later with a couple of other girls to a bar for a couple of drinks, did I want to come along?
No – I didn’t, actually. I was alone and defeated and the idea of trying to get to know a group of new people, including the girl who felt like my last chance for friendship here, felt pretty much overwhelming. I wanted to hide in my room and be anti-social and unenlightened and awkward, thank you very much. But instead, I said “That would be great!,” and made plans to meet them. So I took a shower and a 15 minute nap, got dressed (trying on multiple outfits, feeling like it was a job interview), and forced myself out the door.
About three hours later I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of what can only be described as a small platform nest, in a packed, hip bar in the Zona Colonial, watching the mixed group of study abroad students and young expats and Dominicans around me all talk and sing and bop along to American hits from the 90’s. I really liked Rachel, and we are going through very similar experiences in terms of work, and I really liked her friends. Suddenly, one piece of that dismal list looked much more hopeful and all I could think was grace. It's amazing how much difference strangers can make. One thing that week had gone right!, and I was having fun!, and maybe I was not going to just have to make do all year.
I had expected this time to feel differently – I have lived abroad before, and when I was in high school and lived in Argentina the experience was somewhat comparable because I was alone – when I lived in Guatemala I was with my family, and when I lived in Uganda I was living with two very good friends, the incomparable Amity and Nienke, and with Nienke’s wonderful family (say hi to them for me Nienkie!), and in Prague I was involved in a program with about twenty other American students my age so – none of those experiences required me to be alone in any real way. In Argentina however, I lived in a tiny little town with a host family I didn’t really integrate well into, and although there was another exchange student living there who I still count as a friend, I was much more left to my own devices. I didn’t have an immediate community that understood me and which I could find refugee in and I found that incredibly difficult. That experience was definitely trial by fire and if it had not been for the support of my community across the world cheering me on, and for Ruth from Australia, and for my pure stubbornness not to have given up, I think I would have packed my bags and headed home after the first month. The feeling of those six months was pretty searing and I can still remember it in that phantom way that lingers well after the original sensation has passed.
I was pretty terrified in the weeks leading up to my departure for Santo Domingo, and I think that feeling was largely to blame. I kept feeling the phantom of those six months and thinking of how it would feel like that all over again – like my body was made of lead and every movement was tasking, like my world was foreign and unknown and unfriendly, like I was alone and not me and I could not find my bearings. Although I count that experience as incredibly useful, and I continue to be very glad that I stuck it out, it wasn’t a pleasant six months and I am not looking to repeat the experience. I knew the circumstances were incredibly different, and I was pretty sure that this would eventually feel totally different, but I wasn’t sure that that would be true for the first couple of weeks or months, as I got used to the environment and found my bearings.
It doesn’t feel like that.
It definitely has its own challenges, but I am different enough, or the experience is different enough, or both, that I have not felt like that. (So far anyway – since it’s only been 2 weeks it may be premature to be saying all this, but let’s keep our fingers crossed, okay?) I have felt frustrated by the organization I am working for, and distressed by my living situation, and uncertain about how my social life was going to work out, but none of those things felt like they displaced me – the way they did when I was 16. I feel that with a little time and a little elbow grease on my part the work situation will resolve and the housing situation will change, and if I find no friends for the year, that I will still somehow be okay – I have a deeper network now than I had 6 years ago, and I am more self-contained – I can make do much better than I used to be able to. It feels pretty amazing to realize that.
Despite all the personal growthy-ness and the growing up and the new-found sense of self last week still pretty much put me through the ringer. As I looked over my new life it looked something like this:
Work: hah
Housing: total mess, spent all my energy all week working on it, still have to live somewhere that wears me down for the time being.
Friends: that’s a negative, Houston
Yoga Class I wanted to take: you have to wear all white to be able to attend, but the only yoga pants or gym shorts I have with me are black and navy blue.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
So, even though I felt so much better than I had expected to feel at this point, I was still feeling pretty alone and defeated by Friday afternoon when I forced myself to call the friend of a friend who is living here this year working on similar issues and with whom I had not yet been able to meet up. Since it was Friday I was sure she had plans for the evening, so I suggested that we get lunch Saturday afternoon. Rachel said that would be fine, or if I wanted, she was going out later with a couple of other girls to a bar for a couple of drinks, did I want to come along?
No – I didn’t, actually. I was alone and defeated and the idea of trying to get to know a group of new people, including the girl who felt like my last chance for friendship here, felt pretty much overwhelming. I wanted to hide in my room and be anti-social and unenlightened and awkward, thank you very much. But instead, I said “That would be great!,” and made plans to meet them. So I took a shower and a 15 minute nap, got dressed (trying on multiple outfits, feeling like it was a job interview), and forced myself out the door.
About three hours later I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of what can only be described as a small platform nest, in a packed, hip bar in the Zona Colonial, watching the mixed group of study abroad students and young expats and Dominicans around me all talk and sing and bop along to American hits from the 90’s. I really liked Rachel, and we are going through very similar experiences in terms of work, and I really liked her friends. Suddenly, one piece of that dismal list looked much more hopeful and all I could think was grace. It's amazing how much difference strangers can make. One thing that week had gone right!, and I was having fun!, and maybe I was not going to just have to make do all year.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Blog Post #1
So, Blog Post #1, huh? Well hi all, and welcome – I decided that a blog was a better way to keep my friends and family updated on my year in the DR, rather than mass emails, but just so that we are clear - that does not mean that I don’t want to be in touch with you personally – I really want to hear from people, and feel like I’ve still got you all around me, even if not physically. So - comments and emails in my inbox, please! I hope everyone’s doing well and having fun and liking where fall is leading them. Even though there do not seem to be any clearly identifiable seasonal changes in my current home, I definitely have a sense that this is fall – the return to order and thought after the abandonment of summer.
It’s been about a week and a half (11 days, to be exact) that I have been officially an expat, living in the Dominican Republic, in the capital city of Santo Domingo. I am working, for those you who don’t know, with a nonprofit called Censel (Centro de Servicios Legales para Mujeres – Center for Legal Services for Women). The organization provides direct legal support for women, and also runs a number of educational programs and initiatives designed to educate women about their legal rights and standing. It has also in the past worked on political lobbying campaigns to change legislation and legal code in favor of women’s rights. It’s small – there are officially seven women who work for the organization full-time, but there are generally only four or five of us in the office all day. There are also a number of other lawyers who work for Censel on a part time basis and come and go a few times a week or less, depending on appointment schedules. The office is a little house with blue walls and an overgrown garden which sits on a tiny crooked street on the edge of Gazcue, one of the main residential districts in the city. There are four offices, a conference room, a front lobby, and a little kitchen where we all eat lunch together. I share an office with another intern named Anna who has been here since June and will be here through November. Anna is Canadian, from Quebec, and she spent some time here a number of years ago as an undergrad during a study abroad program. Luckily for me, this means that she is well-versed in this city, and is extremely helpful – translating Spanish words I don’t know, giving me advice on where to go shopping for a bedside lamp, and telling me how to get to the closest pharmacy last week when my work shoes gave me blisters.
A wonderful surprise has been how much I like all the women who work in the office – Lucila, Naomi, Gladys, Maria Luisa, and Isabel among others - they are all easy to talk to and quick to laugh and quick to reach out to the new intern. I am, as of yet, not feeling like I a good fit professionally in the office, but I am already feeling very happy about the social interaction (although I am really looking forward to that feeling increasing as my Spanish picks up – I’m clearly missing out on many of the jokes and conversations by virtue of not being truly fluent).
Another welcome surprise has been Doña Ramona. Doña Ramona is in charge of keeping the offices clean and for cooking lunch for everyone. I pay $300 pesos at the start of the week (roughly $9 dollars), and then at about 12:30 we hear Ramona yelling from the kitchen at the end of hallway that the food is ready and everyone slowly filters in. Ramona will have already dished up heaping plates of rice and generally beans with some other accompaniment (on Friday we had rice and lentils with fried chicken and platanos), and then at the end of the meal everyone makes fun of me when I cannot finish my portion. There is a study abroad student from San Diego, Andres, who is renting a room in the apartment I am currently living in, and he comes to Censel everyday to eat lunch as well. It is the mission of the ladies to fatten him up, and Ramona always serves him an indescribable amount of food. He refuses to be beaten by them however, and everyday it is entertainment to watch him slowly win out over the mountain on his plate.
So far things have been moving pretty slowly, which has been a little hard for me, but I don’t think it’s out of par for this type of experience. The non-profit world in general typically moves slower than I would like things to, and when you combine that with Latin American temperaments, it shouldn’t be surprising that nothing happens here at warp speed. Censel is going through something of a difficult time as one source of funding was cut some months ago, and a few other international sources have been delayed in their payment. This means that the organization is scrambling for funds, in particular the funds to buy a permanent office space, and that most of their programming has been sharply curtailed, both because they need to spend all their energy focusing on finding funding, and because they can no longer financially support it. For me this means some not trivial adjustment – while they can always use another person to search for funding and to help with preparing proposals, the programs that they had suggested I focus on last March are no longer in active mode. While I am hopeful that this period will pass and the organization will find itself in better footing, it is clear that this is not happening this week or next. It also adds to difficulties for me since the state of emergency within which the organization currently exists is incredibly consuming for the director, which means that she has no time to think about how to put me to work, even on the funding projects she’s currently working on. Accordingly, I spent much of the last week waiting to meet with her, meeting with her, preparing a new proposal for myself, and waiting to meet with her again. By Friday I felt like I at least had a couple of points to start with, so I began to explore some of the projects they have been working on that are currently somewhat dormant.
Yesterday I actually managed to grab the chance to set up a funding proposal for equipment – sometime ago the offices were burglarized and emptied of everything – computers, DVD/VHS player, battery-powered generator, digital camera, printers, copiers, etc. Since then the office has been working with 2 computers and one printer, which is just enough to get by with but seriously impedes efficiency. The generator in particular is incredibly important – the power goes out quite frequently here, in the past week and a half it has been out for a combined total of two and a half days. The building we are in has a generator that runs on gasoline, but it is controlled by the dentist’s office upstairs and to conserve gas they only power it when they have patients, with no notice to us of when they will be turning it on or off which means that work gets lost as computers turn off, and we all sit around in the dark in the front lobby fanning ourselves and losing precious working hours. So, a proposal for funding for these items needs to be formulated, and for the time being, it looks like I have a concrete, definable project, which I am incredibly excited about. My days at work have been filled with a lot of literally sitting around and reading the newspaper, so I’m very happy to have something productive to do for the time being.
Besides trying to figure out work, the other main item on my agenda these days is finding an apartment. I rented a room for a month from a colleague at Censel who generally rents two of the rooms in her apartment to people here on study abroad programs. While I have a while longer on my lease here, I’m pretty unhappy with the situation, and am looking forward to finding my own place as soon as possible. Luckily, through the friend of a friend, I’ve “met” (through email) a roommate. Eva is another recent college grad moving here for a year on a Fulbright grant. She arrived late last night and this afternoon when I get off work I’ll walk over to meet her and a realtor I’ve been working with to see a couple of apartments. The first one we’ll see is one that I saw on Monday afternoon and have fallen somewhat in love with, so I am hoping Eva will feel the same way and I will soon have a permanent place to live.
In general, I’m finding this city to be pretty intimidating, but bursting with vibrant, exciting culture. There is dance music, bachata, merengue, salsa, bursting from every small colmedor (corner store stocked with small necessities – everything from sodas to batteries) on weekend (and not so weekend) nights. There is an obvious love of dance – my first weekend Andrew and I went down to the Zona Colonial to grab some pizza for dinner on the main walking/shopping street, and there was a group of Buddhists dressed in robes walking up and down the street with drums and maracas, and no one seemed at all focused on the religious message, but instead stopped what they were doing and everyone – parents with small children, old couples out for an evening stroll, high schoolers gathered together on in groups on the benches which run down the center of the street, all spontaneously started dancing right there, in the middle of the restaurants and stores, dancing and laughing and carrying on. When the Buddhists would move on people would slowly resume their previous activities, just moving on, as if they hadn’t just been getting down. It was quite impressive to my newbie eyes.
It’s also a difficult city to get a hold on. It’s extremely poor (I read before leaving the US that apparently the DR has the highest incidence of BMWs per capita – so while income averages evidently make the country seem relatively prosperous, poverty is literally rampant and the “gap” as we like to talk about in the US is probably somewhere more along the lines of the Grand Canyon than something scalable), and pretty intrusive, especially if you look like an outsider. That’s one thing I am finding extremely hard to get used to – although I have done my fair share of traveling, and have accepted that when I am outside the US I am probably going to stand out in a crowd as the foreigner, I have never felt like such an obvious foreigner, like such a sore thumb. I don’t know exactly what it is, but so far my guess is that it’s a combination of the poverty present here, the racial composition of the country, and the complexity of this city’s operations. Racially, the only place I’ve been where the population was so heavily black was Uganda. Anyone who looks as white as I do instantly stands out, even if they are actually Dominican. And when you combine that with my clothes, and my obvious discomfort at the piropos, and how clearly I do not know what I am doing, it must just be pretty well spelled out.
On this city’s operations: holy crap. There is – to my knowledge at least – no officially organized transportation system in this city. What there is, however, is an abundance of privately operated options which get people around the city quickly and cheaply. And, if you’re from here, easily. For me however, forget difficult-to-understand-Caribbean-accent-spanish, they truly might as well be speaking Greek. There are what are called carros publicos (public cars) and then what are called guaguas, and then the occasional private taxi (which you are supposed to call for, rather than take one which is driving around). The guaguas and the carros publicos both take set routes, and exist literally all over the city and the country in fact, and differ only in their sizes (publicos are normal cars and guaguas are typically small buses) and price - $12 pesos for a publico, and $15 for a guagua (roughly 36 and 45 cents). Shouldn’t be too hard, I thought. I have plenty of experience in getting around and figuring it all out. Hah. The catch is multiple: there are a series of hand motions which indicate where you are going, and allow you to flag the right car going in the right direction, the city is pretty dangerous, and so you have to make sure you’re flagging a legitimate operator, and you are in charge of letting the driver know when you’d like to get off, by calling out “donde pueda” (where you can) when you see your destination. This means that you have to be paying close attention to the road, that you have to know where you’re going and roughly how long it will take to get there, and that you have to have a sense of direction. So, for a new resident of the city, who even when home in the US never really knows where she’s going, how long it will take to get there, or has any sense of direction ever, - well, let’s just say I am not holding out any hope of looking like a native any time soon.
As per usual, this post is now only slightly shorter than the Odyssey, and I’m not sure I’ll have anything left to write about for the rest of year, so I’m going to sign off now. I hope to be posting at least once a week, and maybe more often, in smaller, bite-sized pieces, although those certainly sound like famous last words to me, so no promises. I’m sending you all the beautiful blue skies and radiant sun I’m learning to expect to see each morning, but without the attendant heat. All my love.
It’s been about a week and a half (11 days, to be exact) that I have been officially an expat, living in the Dominican Republic, in the capital city of Santo Domingo. I am working, for those you who don’t know, with a nonprofit called Censel (Centro de Servicios Legales para Mujeres – Center for Legal Services for Women). The organization provides direct legal support for women, and also runs a number of educational programs and initiatives designed to educate women about their legal rights and standing. It has also in the past worked on political lobbying campaigns to change legislation and legal code in favor of women’s rights. It’s small – there are officially seven women who work for the organization full-time, but there are generally only four or five of us in the office all day. There are also a number of other lawyers who work for Censel on a part time basis and come and go a few times a week or less, depending on appointment schedules. The office is a little house with blue walls and an overgrown garden which sits on a tiny crooked street on the edge of Gazcue, one of the main residential districts in the city. There are four offices, a conference room, a front lobby, and a little kitchen where we all eat lunch together. I share an office with another intern named Anna who has been here since June and will be here through November. Anna is Canadian, from Quebec, and she spent some time here a number of years ago as an undergrad during a study abroad program. Luckily for me, this means that she is well-versed in this city, and is extremely helpful – translating Spanish words I don’t know, giving me advice on where to go shopping for a bedside lamp, and telling me how to get to the closest pharmacy last week when my work shoes gave me blisters.
A wonderful surprise has been how much I like all the women who work in the office – Lucila, Naomi, Gladys, Maria Luisa, and Isabel among others - they are all easy to talk to and quick to laugh and quick to reach out to the new intern. I am, as of yet, not feeling like I a good fit professionally in the office, but I am already feeling very happy about the social interaction (although I am really looking forward to that feeling increasing as my Spanish picks up – I’m clearly missing out on many of the jokes and conversations by virtue of not being truly fluent).
Another welcome surprise has been Doña Ramona. Doña Ramona is in charge of keeping the offices clean and for cooking lunch for everyone. I pay $300 pesos at the start of the week (roughly $9 dollars), and then at about 12:30 we hear Ramona yelling from the kitchen at the end of hallway that the food is ready and everyone slowly filters in. Ramona will have already dished up heaping plates of rice and generally beans with some other accompaniment (on Friday we had rice and lentils with fried chicken and platanos), and then at the end of the meal everyone makes fun of me when I cannot finish my portion. There is a study abroad student from San Diego, Andres, who is renting a room in the apartment I am currently living in, and he comes to Censel everyday to eat lunch as well. It is the mission of the ladies to fatten him up, and Ramona always serves him an indescribable amount of food. He refuses to be beaten by them however, and everyday it is entertainment to watch him slowly win out over the mountain on his plate.
So far things have been moving pretty slowly, which has been a little hard for me, but I don’t think it’s out of par for this type of experience. The non-profit world in general typically moves slower than I would like things to, and when you combine that with Latin American temperaments, it shouldn’t be surprising that nothing happens here at warp speed. Censel is going through something of a difficult time as one source of funding was cut some months ago, and a few other international sources have been delayed in their payment. This means that the organization is scrambling for funds, in particular the funds to buy a permanent office space, and that most of their programming has been sharply curtailed, both because they need to spend all their energy focusing on finding funding, and because they can no longer financially support it. For me this means some not trivial adjustment – while they can always use another person to search for funding and to help with preparing proposals, the programs that they had suggested I focus on last March are no longer in active mode. While I am hopeful that this period will pass and the organization will find itself in better footing, it is clear that this is not happening this week or next. It also adds to difficulties for me since the state of emergency within which the organization currently exists is incredibly consuming for the director, which means that she has no time to think about how to put me to work, even on the funding projects she’s currently working on. Accordingly, I spent much of the last week waiting to meet with her, meeting with her, preparing a new proposal for myself, and waiting to meet with her again. By Friday I felt like I at least had a couple of points to start with, so I began to explore some of the projects they have been working on that are currently somewhat dormant.
Yesterday I actually managed to grab the chance to set up a funding proposal for equipment – sometime ago the offices were burglarized and emptied of everything – computers, DVD/VHS player, battery-powered generator, digital camera, printers, copiers, etc. Since then the office has been working with 2 computers and one printer, which is just enough to get by with but seriously impedes efficiency. The generator in particular is incredibly important – the power goes out quite frequently here, in the past week and a half it has been out for a combined total of two and a half days. The building we are in has a generator that runs on gasoline, but it is controlled by the dentist’s office upstairs and to conserve gas they only power it when they have patients, with no notice to us of when they will be turning it on or off which means that work gets lost as computers turn off, and we all sit around in the dark in the front lobby fanning ourselves and losing precious working hours. So, a proposal for funding for these items needs to be formulated, and for the time being, it looks like I have a concrete, definable project, which I am incredibly excited about. My days at work have been filled with a lot of literally sitting around and reading the newspaper, so I’m very happy to have something productive to do for the time being.
Besides trying to figure out work, the other main item on my agenda these days is finding an apartment. I rented a room for a month from a colleague at Censel who generally rents two of the rooms in her apartment to people here on study abroad programs. While I have a while longer on my lease here, I’m pretty unhappy with the situation, and am looking forward to finding my own place as soon as possible. Luckily, through the friend of a friend, I’ve “met” (through email) a roommate. Eva is another recent college grad moving here for a year on a Fulbright grant. She arrived late last night and this afternoon when I get off work I’ll walk over to meet her and a realtor I’ve been working with to see a couple of apartments. The first one we’ll see is one that I saw on Monday afternoon and have fallen somewhat in love with, so I am hoping Eva will feel the same way and I will soon have a permanent place to live.
In general, I’m finding this city to be pretty intimidating, but bursting with vibrant, exciting culture. There is dance music, bachata, merengue, salsa, bursting from every small colmedor (corner store stocked with small necessities – everything from sodas to batteries) on weekend (and not so weekend) nights. There is an obvious love of dance – my first weekend Andrew and I went down to the Zona Colonial to grab some pizza for dinner on the main walking/shopping street, and there was a group of Buddhists dressed in robes walking up and down the street with drums and maracas, and no one seemed at all focused on the religious message, but instead stopped what they were doing and everyone – parents with small children, old couples out for an evening stroll, high schoolers gathered together on in groups on the benches which run down the center of the street, all spontaneously started dancing right there, in the middle of the restaurants and stores, dancing and laughing and carrying on. When the Buddhists would move on people would slowly resume their previous activities, just moving on, as if they hadn’t just been getting down. It was quite impressive to my newbie eyes.
It’s also a difficult city to get a hold on. It’s extremely poor (I read before leaving the US that apparently the DR has the highest incidence of BMWs per capita – so while income averages evidently make the country seem relatively prosperous, poverty is literally rampant and the “gap” as we like to talk about in the US is probably somewhere more along the lines of the Grand Canyon than something scalable), and pretty intrusive, especially if you look like an outsider. That’s one thing I am finding extremely hard to get used to – although I have done my fair share of traveling, and have accepted that when I am outside the US I am probably going to stand out in a crowd as the foreigner, I have never felt like such an obvious foreigner, like such a sore thumb. I don’t know exactly what it is, but so far my guess is that it’s a combination of the poverty present here, the racial composition of the country, and the complexity of this city’s operations. Racially, the only place I’ve been where the population was so heavily black was Uganda. Anyone who looks as white as I do instantly stands out, even if they are actually Dominican. And when you combine that with my clothes, and my obvious discomfort at the piropos, and how clearly I do not know what I am doing, it must just be pretty well spelled out.
On this city’s operations: holy crap. There is – to my knowledge at least – no officially organized transportation system in this city. What there is, however, is an abundance of privately operated options which get people around the city quickly and cheaply. And, if you’re from here, easily. For me however, forget difficult-to-understand-Caribbean-accent-spanish, they truly might as well be speaking Greek. There are what are called carros publicos (public cars) and then what are called guaguas, and then the occasional private taxi (which you are supposed to call for, rather than take one which is driving around). The guaguas and the carros publicos both take set routes, and exist literally all over the city and the country in fact, and differ only in their sizes (publicos are normal cars and guaguas are typically small buses) and price - $12 pesos for a publico, and $15 for a guagua (roughly 36 and 45 cents). Shouldn’t be too hard, I thought. I have plenty of experience in getting around and figuring it all out. Hah. The catch is multiple: there are a series of hand motions which indicate where you are going, and allow you to flag the right car going in the right direction, the city is pretty dangerous, and so you have to make sure you’re flagging a legitimate operator, and you are in charge of letting the driver know when you’d like to get off, by calling out “donde pueda” (where you can) when you see your destination. This means that you have to be paying close attention to the road, that you have to know where you’re going and roughly how long it will take to get there, and that you have to have a sense of direction. So, for a new resident of the city, who even when home in the US never really knows where she’s going, how long it will take to get there, or has any sense of direction ever, - well, let’s just say I am not holding out any hope of looking like a native any time soon.
As per usual, this post is now only slightly shorter than the Odyssey, and I’m not sure I’ll have anything left to write about for the rest of year, so I’m going to sign off now. I hope to be posting at least once a week, and maybe more often, in smaller, bite-sized pieces, although those certainly sound like famous last words to me, so no promises. I’m sending you all the beautiful blue skies and radiant sun I’m learning to expect to see each morning, but without the attendant heat. All my love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)