On the run

Wednesday was my first full day in my new site. Some new friends from the CTC were going to a nearby city to register students for financial aid, and asked if I wanted to go with them. I had hung out with them Tuesday afternoon while they registered local students, and it was kind of neat to see all the people and chat with them, so I jumped in the back of the truck. I called the PC “whereabouts” hotline and told them where I was going, and figured that I’d be back in two or three hours.

We got to the Multiuso (multi-use gym/auditorium), which was locked, so we drove around looking for the key. We decided to take naps until people started to arrive, and then when they did, we left for lunch (no joke). The place was packed after lunch, and no one seemed to know how to order the people or set up the tables efficiently. I snapped into manager mode, and started suggesting ways of queuing people based on the IDs they had and if they were students or not, and then assigning different people to process each group. This was shot down, and later magically instituted when the mass of people grew.

After about an hour, some people in suits showed up and started asking questions. They told us to stop what we were doing, said they were military, and asked for my ID. I flashed my Peace Corps ID badge, which thank god I had in my pack, and they asked what I was doing there. They took us all outside, cuffed a few of my friends, and put them in an unmarked SUV. I was in emergency mode, speaking as fast as I could in Spanish, searching for someone to call in my phone’s contact list. I refused to get in the SUV, and luckily there wasn’t room for me—“wait here, we’ll come back for you.”

I called the PC emergency hotline, and hid behind the building until I was sure they were gone. I started to panic—I didn’t know where I was, what was going on, where my friends went, who the people in suits were. The PC safety coordinator, Jennifer, said to get out of there and back to my site, and that she would call the Embassy to see if she could find out what was going on. I calmed myself down, and then walked back to the town and asked where the nearest guagua (bus) stop was. I hid in a church until I saw a guagua come, and saw my friends pass by in the back of a police truck. The guagua was headed to Santo Domingo, and I didn’t know how to get back to my site, so I jumped in.

Two hours later, I was hiding out in the Peace Corps office, decompressing in the air conditioning while figuring out what to do. I was never so happy to be in the capital. I txt’d my friends, who said they had been let go, everything was ok now, and that it was safe to come back. I got directions to my site from the person who chose it, took the metro to the guagua stop, and by 8:30pm was back in my site.

So. I am still piecing together what happened, but it looks like a misunderstanding. I don’t think my counterparts were doing anything nefarious, and I don’t think that I was in any real danger. It was one hell of an adventure, and I’m pretty happy that I was able to handle it. I was in touch with the Peace Corps the whole time, letting them know where I was.

Every day is something different!