June and July 2011
Lost control: Signing up for a government program is equal to putting your life and all of its possible decisions in the hands of others. There are the other people, whether it is a recruiter or the APCD, juggling your information, tossing darts, and trying to decide what to do with the skills and assets of you and many others. When they go to sleep at night, do they worry about whether you will be a perfect fit for a site? Maybe, a little, perhaps, a lot. . .or maybe not. I haven’t asked. But I am sure they don’t fill with the same anxiousness and anxiety as the person who is being placed. Someone placed me in the Dominican Republic. Perhaps it was the only Spanish speaking country available for that time with an environmental sector. Okay, that’s fine. And then someone sent me to my site. After community based training and having two wonderful host families, I started to feel comfortable with the people of this “pais”. If my new community was as warm, welcoming, and supportive as my host families and their communities. . .well, things will turn out alright.
Your fate: Beautiful beach? Peaceful mountains? City? North, South, East, West? The Frontera? They decide.
Decided: A campo in the Sur far from anything that would remind you of a Caribbean island. The South? All hearts sink when they are sent to the south. . .but I am told hearts eventually arise with a lot of time and a lot of hard struggle. Can you have a Peace Corps experience on a Caribbean Island??? Oh yes, sure you can. . .some may wake up everyday to the sound of crashing waves at a beautiful turquoise blue beach. They’re in the Beach Corps. . .and well, some of us are in the Peace Corps (and of course, no offense to those at beach sites- I know this experience is tough for us all). We wake up to the sounds of our campo and know the only way out is on a dirt road on the back of a motorcycle.
The Struggle: Well, I’ve never known a Returned PCV personally, but I had the impression somehow that the Peace Corps might not be so easy. However I got that impression, well let me just tell you right now: it’s no joke. Peace Corps life is not something to take lightly. In fact, at least for the beginning months in site, it is everything challenging, exhausting, and uncomfortable Dominican-style packed into every single moment with absolutely not one tiny instance of relief (except for perhaps moments during deep sleep where you forget where you are and who you are). You are stuck in this world. This is your fate. At most moments, which at most times is every moment, a wrenching part of you wants to change your fate immediately. Part of you wonders if this is really where you belong. Can you really live here for 2 whole years?
The community: Your world could have possibly been a warm welcoming community by a beautiful beach. Or exnay the beach- it could have been a warm welcoming community period. But let’s not talk of what could have been a possibility. Because the reality is you were sent to your campo. And this is the world you have to live with and figure out and learn to like. There are no beaches (well 1.5 hours away or so), no mountains (well in the distance), no pools (well a motor concho ride away in the pueblo), no escape (well an expensive plane ticket at the airport). They gave us cultural training, a nice introduction into understanding the Dominican way. But campo training happens in real-life time on your own. This is how my in-campo-entrenamiento has been going:
My campo: I live in a campo that is more developed than most. It has a beautiful school covered in murals with a library and two teachers that speak English. It has a computer center (without internet), a community center, a woman's club center, a clinic, a park, a baseball field, a cemetery. The road, granted, needs repair. . .and the bridge entering the community is non-existent (making it an issue to get past the river in times of lluvia). . .and there are people living in poor (and even dirt poor) conditions in some parts, but over-all, this is one of the nicest campos I’ve seen. My first impression was “Wow, why do they need me?” My campo has had 2 Peace Corps volunteers before and currently has numerous organizations involved with the community. They normally have groups of Americans come every few months or so to bring medicine, formula, and other supplies. They should have a lot of things to be grateful for. They should feel proud about their community and its achievements. After all, in the past (maybe 25 years ago), the whole community rallied together to build a school. When the school needed to be expanded, they raised money as a community to buy the extra land to construct an additional building. I would love to talk to the volunteer from 15 years ago. I feel like quite possibly this was a different community back then.
And now? My community now may be an example of what happens when a community receives too much attention from the outside world, has been given too much aid and faulted sustainable development. Aid is for countries like Haiti, not for my community. These are people who can get things done if they hadn’t been spoiled and lost sight of their strengths. Most people I encounter tell me how horrible their life is, try to demonstrate to me how poor they are, correlate their horribleness of life with their absolute poorness and their unelected participation in such a way of living, and beg me if I can build their house, buy their medicine, buy their formula, build their add-ons, finish their indoor bathrooms, fix their flushing toilets, give them dinero, etc. Daily conversations quite often focus on the negative and don’t stray away from pains, needs, and wants. These conversations are sometimes abrasively forced in your face, where the volunteer becomes an object or, let’s just call her a “thing” and that “thing” represents the symbol of dinero (and all of its power to bring latrines, houses, and other cosas to their hands). The person trying to converse grabs the “thing” and doesn’t dare ask the thing how she’s doing or what she’s up to (because things don’t have emotion nor will) and drags the “thing” to their house to dramatically explain the hardships over and over again in an alarmingly manic manner. No response from the “thing” will help calm the person down. The only thing the “thing” can do is offer money if she was such a “thing”. But she’s not and always has tried to explain the need of the community working together to improve the whole. But that doesn’t seem to satiate the poor person. But they don’t understand that they’re like this. To them, poordomness gives you the right to not have to work or pay for what you have. It gives you the right to receive without giving any type of contribution.
It’s a State of Mind: I am beginning to realize that “poor” is a state of mind. If you’re in a “poor” state of mind, you’ll forever remain poor (perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy you might dare say). Everyone here views themselves as poor. Even the people who live in tile floor houses that have 24-hour electricity view themselves as poor (the only difference between their house and one in the states is the lack of hot running water and A/C). And yes, other people are very, very poor (one might describe as “dirt poor”) but there are also a lot of positive assets to life here in the campo. Even if things are good here, things aren’t good here because the majority view the state of affairs in a negative light.
“What are the positive aspects of the community here?”
“There are none. Everything’s wrong here.”
“What are our necessities? “
“There’s a whole ton!”
“Like what?”
“Muchas.”
Sanity: My campo is a sane community. How many times do I have to be told it’s a sane community to be convinced that it is sane?! So many times that I am officially alarmed and not at all convinced. No sane person in this world tries to convince others that they are sane. This holds true for campos too. What do they do with the insane here might you wonder? Well I officially know of two “locos” in the hood: One is locked up in a cell without clothes and is never permitted to leave. The other is rumored to be chained up in a building somewhere. Granted, I know this shows a lack of education, but it is quite disturbing to walk down the main street and see a group of people enjoying their day in front of their house while their brother is staring out of his cell naked at the passerbys.
I feel like I just might lose my mind in 2 years working with this community. If I don’t return back home to the states or notify anyone that I’ve gone off traveling to South America, you know where to look for me. I’ll probably be locked up in a cell in my community, because I will be “loca” and that’s what they do with “loco” people. Please come rescue me if this happens.
And to top it off, I failed to mention that there’s the friendly local serial killer in the area! Well, he lives in a community a little bit of a ways away, but everyone talks about him. From what I’ve heard, his last killing was about a month ago. My host family told me how people from his community are here in this campo all of the time and even the family of the serial killer came to visit them (in other words, they know his family!) The police never caught him. So, if I am not locked up and I’m still missing- maybe the serial killer got me. I feel super good.
Project Partner: To me, an appealing aspect of Peace Corps was the fact that even though we would be placed individually at sites without another fellow volunteer to help us, we would be working with a Dominican counterpart. True to form, like in most of my work situations in the past, I am working with a crazy person. I may have the craziest Project Partner in Peace Corps history. Granted, the project partner thing doesn’t usually work out like you would imagine, but sharing my story with other volunteers, I’ve realized that my campo is a unique and abnormal situation. Imagine the most self-pitying dramatic 300 lbs. woman on this planet. Now imagine her naked, with no teeth, gnats flying about her eyes and her mouth, boobs flying around, fat flailing about, a raspy voice wailing “Ayyy mi madre!!!.” Now let’s move onto snot being snot-rocketed on tile floor and snotty hands wiped on pants only to offer food for the guests in the next moment and talk about her role as a health promoter, pant zipper unzipped with holey underwear (and holes in all the wrong places), her insisting that she knows English and the American volunteer doesn’t, attempts of force-feeding a 31 year old after the 31 year-old politely refuses food 3 times, manipulation to the extreme degree, lies, hypocrisy, asking the volunteer to steal, asking the volunteer to buy lottery tickets. . .oooooooooooooohhhhhhh and the list can go ON and ON! Unfortunately, I have to pass her house every time I need to go somewhere. Somehow she still likes me. I must be too nice. She assures me that she’s like my mother. If that is true, I may have the worse mother in the world.
Now to my host family: I live with the alcalde’s (the mayor’s) family. Now, the alcalde in the campo is a different matter. You can pretty much consider that I live in the Wild Wild West: lawless, gun-toting, horse riding. The only difference is that there are motorcycles co inhabit the streets. The alcalde doesn’t work in a government office or even help govern. He’s rather the law enforcement and the peacemaker. If anyone has a problem they come to him. He uses his judgment and decides whether the real police from the neighboring city need to be called in. I enjoy my host dad very much. He’s one of the few people in this campo with the slightest evidence of a sparkle in his eye. He has a deep resonating voice that breaks down barriers of communication with animals and children. He is an animal and child whisperer. There’s no one else here like him. He taught me how to till the land with oxen and I look forward to learning more about how to work the land from him.
My host-mom told me an inspiring story. The back-story is she got married and pregnant at age 15. She never got far in school. 7 years ago, she decided to pick up where she left off at 4th grade. She and a few others worked through the grades with a professor of the community on the weekends. She made it through high school and graduated 2 years ago in her mid 40’s. She had a goal and accomplished it. Way to go host-mom. Despite the inspiring story, she like most Dominican moms resorts to screaming and shouting orders (to me included), delivering “pelas” (punishment by hitting often with a switch from the tree), and making uneducated decisions regarding the rearing of her grandchildren (her 3 children are all grown and out of the house). She’s relatively active in the community, attending meetings about children’s rights and educating adults how to use alternative more humane forms of punishment. After one of these meetings where I heard talk about the cruelty of the “pela” and how they’re breeding violence in their society (it is a violent society in my opinion), I came home to find her threatening the two-year old grandchild with a used medical syringe!!! (x100,000,000,000,000,000 exclamation points!) (Would you ever think that this was possible?! I surely never thought I would see such a thing in my life!) She sent the 5 year-old grandchild to the neighbor’s house to retrieve a used syringe (probably from insulin) so that she could threaten the 2 year-old to behave herself. She had the two year-old in her grasp at the arm, the cap off of the needle, and flicked the skin of the squirming and wailing child. Extremely alarmed, I got her to stop and had a talk with her. She, for the life of her, could not understand that what she had done was wrong. She assured me that she was never going to actually prick the child. No importa, accidentes pasan. The next day, 22 year-old died of AIDS in the community. We talked about how AIDS are spread. I pointed out that this is the reason we don’t handle used needles period (and ESPECIALLY around children). She proceeded to tell me that she’s never done such a thing. The following day I found out where she hid the syringe as she began to threaten the 2 year-old once more. I grabbed it and told her I was going to properly dispose of it in the clinic. She offered to dig a hole in the backyard to bury it. No, not good enough. She offered to toss it in the latrine. No, not good enough either. There was no more resistance. I took it to the clinic and I haven’t seen anything with a syringe again. The other day she was threatening the 2 year-old with a lit match. This is incorrect too, but at least it wasn’t a used syringe. Needless to say, I don’t feel comfortable here.
The 2 year-old is one of the cutest children I’ve seen and despite her tendency to say every cuss word in the Spanish language, I’ve become quite fond of her. She’s the result of an affair that my host brother had with her mother (a prostitute, according to my host-mom. . .and I believe it). For the first 2 years of her life, she was raised in a whorehouse. My host-mom always points out the poor start in life that she had and how horrible her mom was to raise her in such conditions. Poor 2 year-old. Horrible mom. What about dad?!?!? Nope, men get away with everything here. He’s not even really helping raise the child as he lives with his wife and his other 2 children (who are older than she). He gave that responsibility to his parents. Despite the fact, my host-brother seems to be a nice guy. Men are not the cause of affairs here. It’s very common for men to have multiple partners. It’s the women, however, that seduced the men to leave their wives and become unfaithful. For a Catholic and Evangelistic country, there’s a lot of infidelity.
There’s the 14 year-old who’s not a daughter of my host-family. Her mom lives in a neighboring campo over the hill and is too poor to take care of her large family. She lives here and my host-mom claims to treat her just like a daughter of her own. I would love to meet the daughters of my host-mom to ask if they labored all day everyday of their lives and were not permitted to leave the house. If that’s how she treated her blood daughters, well then she’s not lying. She’s the sweetest girl and has turned out to be the one person in this campo that I can confide in. She’s my friend. It’s sad to see though- she washes, mops, cleans the entire house, does the dishes 4 times over, cooks, cleans. Every possible house chore there is, she does it. She never complains. My host-mom will bark orders at her and you can see that the 14 year-old is secretly upset. She misses her mom dearly. She needs a person whose caring and treats her like a daughter. And my host-mom is the one who sits down in the shade with her shirt lifted up trying to cool off and complaining that life’s so difficult and that she’s tired because she’s worked so hard. This is another reason I don’t feel comfortable here.
And the trash of our house? Years of trash sit on the riverbank in the back of this house. It’s the biggest collection of trash of all the houses I’ve seen. I asked my host-mom what she does with the trash. She burns it of course. Of course! There’s a lot of eye opening to do here. A lot of owning up to how they’re really living their lives.
And so that’s just part of how my “in-campo training” has been going. Only if you could be here. . .only if you could see!
The bright side of things is there is room for a lot of improvement. Vamos aver if I can change perspectives, change habits, change an entire community! It's quite the undertaking and seems nearly impossible. We'll see how they respond.
This experience would be different if I was in my early 20’s. #1- Without my prior experiences, coming to a foreign country with a group of other young volunteers would instantly be a life changing and bonding event. #2- After all of the sacrifice, even if it didn’t turn out good in the end, I would still have the rest of my 20’s to experience. In your early 20’s you don’t feel the gravitational desire to find the love of your life, to settle-down, to have kids, etc. I’m not exactly feeling the gravitational pull of kids per say, but the gravitational pull of love, sharing my life with another person, encountering a place I can call home is “too strong” (as Prince Royce would say). This gravitational pull makes itself present in your late 20’s to early 30’s. It’s very real for me right now. When I am “released” from the Peace Corps, I will be 33. I don’t like to play the “what if” game, but if I still want to travel down to the land of my soul, I’ll still have time right? My parents are doing better right now. But what if cancer returns? What about my master’s degree? What about love? What about South America?
All parts of my soul are pulling me to South America. And my body remains here, in this campo, in this country in the Caribbean. I am not anti-American. I love my country. The U S of A is the country of my heart. But I encountered a place where I felt absolute “paz en mi alma” and I would like to reconnect with that and experience it in a much fuller context. I am a citizen of this world. I feel the need to experience other places and people other than my own.
Faith: I still put my faith in life. Things work out in the end and if things aren’t working out, it’s not the end. Right? Well right now, I’m not too sure where life is taking me.
I have to find a way to be happy in this place. If I can be happy and give the opportunity to find happiness to others in my community, then there will be hope to survive the Peace Corps.
