Friday, October 22, 2010

Weekdays

I woke up today thinking it was Thursday. I planned my day for a Thursday. Today is Friday. The last time I remember being this disoriented was in high school, when the summer smushed into one long weekend. Instead, I’ve had a month of weekdays.  I need some wins.

The little island is chugging along.  The new class of volunteers swears in on Wednesday, and on Thursday I get my green card.  There is a lot going on, and I’m trying to be present for it all—good and bad.  There is a lot of good: the sweet neighbor who gives me bags of bananas and bread; the quickie-mart owner who knows I like avocados and eggplant; the dozens of smiles and “hola” ‘s when I walk anywhere; long phone calls with volunteers; the weird chickens that don’t have feathers on their necks and look like dinosaurs; bizcocho (Dominican cake), and people who give you bizcocho. I think I’ll focus on those things, even though they mostly consist of food or things that will soon be food. I will also take pictures.   IMG_0010 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the horse that sometimes eats my front yard at night. It may or may not be a ghost.

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Dusk from my front porch, through the bars.

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Power lines at night.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Bridge

There's this bridge in my town that eats cars and people.  Lots of them. So, the community decided to get together and clean it up, and build a pedestrian walkway on the side.  My youth group kids participated in the cleanup effort, hiking up their pants and picking up trash in the river, whacking away at overgrowth with machetes, and removing layer after layer of plastic bags from the gutters. I got there late… oops… but they were already at work!
It turns out that some people didn’t think we were working hard enough (and disparaged the group), which is kinda silly.  I was amazed that so many kids turned out to pick up trash on a Saturday morning! They rocked, and did it all on their own accord—I had extremely little to do with any of the planning or coercion. 
They also all came to Escojo mi Vida (the youth group meeting) today!  I gave a charla on discrimination, and we played a game where they all sit in a circle, and the person in the middle tells everyone with X to change seats, and then tries to sit down, leaving someone else standing up (calling out people for different color hair, eyes, shoes, etc).  They explained why I have pelo bueno (good hair), in a very matter-of-fact way.  I told them about the kids committing suicide in the States after being bullied and teased over their (perceived) sexual orientation.  That shocked them. We talked about how each and every one of us makes a decision about how we interact with others, and those actions affect other people.  They talked a lot about how rich people are treated differently than poor people, not just in general, but also in the schools (student-student, and also teacher-student).  Quite a few participated in the discussion, but a few stayed silent.  I think it was a good charla, but there is so much more I wish I could get them to understand.  I’ll have to figure out how to do that.
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Picking trash out of the river.
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La comunidad trabajando- the community at work.
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Si se puede!
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Sharpening a machete.
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Making green hats look gooood.
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Guy building puente peatonal.
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The bridge.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Naranjito

I spent the last week on a medical mission up in the mountains outside Santiago, translating for American doctors and dentists.  It was a good experience, and I was surprised at how much I was able to say—I didn’t know much medical terminology, but neither did the patients. The group comes three times a year to the community, and over about 13 years, has constructed three clinics, a church, and a school house.

I helped a dentist pull a tooth, and sucked up blood with the sucker hose.  The tooth broke off, and he had to really dig in there and cut open the gums to get the rest out.  After that, I didn’t assist with any more tooth extractions… I stuck to translating. I was paired with a doctor in the women’s clinic, and did a lot of pap smear and breast exam translating, which was quite an experience.  In my down time, I did patient intake, taking blood pressure, temperature, weight, and height measurements, and patient history. 

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Peace Corps has a med mission group, but this was not a part of it. I’m actually still trying to figure out how I feel about this group. They didn’t pay for PC volunteer travel, and the volunteers they brought had to pay quite a bit in program fees.  The clinic runs three times a year for 3.5 days, and they keep files on all the patients they see, but there is no health education or follow ups.  People are given drugs with no real explanation of the side effects, and for things like diabetes, no one explained the need for sustained dietary change.  They should have required a class or group or something for every patient who had high blood pressure, taught by locals, and sustained between clinic visits—use community members who frequent the clinic as health education workers. The director was also pretty direct about asking for donations, which put a bad taste in my mouth. I also don’t want to hear the phrase “we just touched so many lives this week” ever again.  Talk about a circlejerk.

Poverty tourism. Well-meaning people paying to sleep under mosquito nets, eat beans and rice, “help the poor” for a few days, and take cold bucket baths to wash off the white guilt; then, back to the posh hotel, and back to the States, without ever leaving the group or holding a peso. 

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13 years is a long time to have a presence somewhere. A few of the Americans had known local kids since they were born, and really seemed to have a connection to the place, but would never come visit on their own—they wouldn’t know how to get there.  We all stayed with host families in small tight compounds of caneboard kitchens, bedrooms, and outhouses, and while not posh, they were comfortable; like most things in the DR, they were arranged to different material aesthetics and functions than Western standards, but that doesn’t mean that they are inferior (or that the people who built them are inferior). I guess that’s what I’m trying to say with a lot of this—walking through a campo like Naranjito with a lump of acidic repulsion-guilt in your throat doesn’t show you anything other than your own views. You “see” part of the island that doesn’t look like an all-inclusive resort, but if that’s a solitary event that doesn’t affect you any longer than the good feelings after visiting Disney World, and it’s main change is only in your dinner party anecdotes, then the only result of your stepping off the airplane was to add a few pounds of human waste to the Dominican sewers and rivers.

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We think of poverty as an economic benchmark, which dictates living standards, education levels, and culture. Poor people are different than us. If they weren’t poor, they would live like us, go to school like us, and be like us. We have, they don’t have. We visit, and give advice, give medications, give dentures, give bottles of shampoo from the hotel, give clothes, give hugs, give buildings. These are all good things, but giving is never sufficient, and in this culture, free is wanted but not valued. With health care, there is so much more to do than simply giving. You have a whole community that values the clinic, but which has nothing really to do with the clinic. If foreign donations dry up, so does the stream of visiting Americans. 

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The clinic does serve a purpose, and does a lot of good. A lot of teeth were pulled, a lot of pain was alleviated, and routine checkups no doubt improved the general health of the community. I am being pretty damn harsh on the operation. Maybe the visitors can come and go, and don’t have to experience the place, and can give whatever they want to.  It’s just… haven’t we learned alternative ways of implementing community health programs by now? I think about these things a lot, what with being a foreigner living here and trying to save the world.

There were a few Dominicans working at the clinic, and they were or had become important people in the community. In 15 minutes, I was trained to take vital signs.  Is that something a local couldn’t be trained to do, and to continue doing as a health education worker?  But then, what would the tourists do?

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