Aidan on an Island: Batey 1

I’m a sureño! I moved in temporarily with Chloe, and at the moment, an evangelical church has set up massive speakers and about a hundred chairs (a bit hopeful…) two houses down, and everything is vibrating. If they turned it down just a bit, you could hear something besides a billion decibels of static (screaming is…better?). It´s worse than what they do in movies in hostage situations, and has been going on for over 4 hours. Chloe and I complained, and they explained that they were doing god´s work. Bean is hiding under a chair.

I started teaching basic computer classes in the batey! I have ten students, and they´re awesome. Class is at 9am, and the bike ride out is absolutely beautiful in the mornings. The first time I rode out, a group of about 25 muchachos surrounded me, in awe of my sweet bike.

This is pretty much how my day went:

I woke up around 6:30am, made coffee and toast, and let Bean out of the bathroom (that´s where he sleeps). Around 8, Chloe went for a run with Bean, and it started raining. No biking today. I grabbed my helmet, and set out for a moto taxi. On Thursdays and Sundays, there is a massive street market that winds through the streets of Tamayo, selling pretty much everything from tomatoes to mini tubes of toothpaste with American dentists´ names printed on them. They also have tables of pharmaceuticals, “Dolce & Dabanna” t-shirts, and roasted nuts. On the other side of it, I hopped on a motoconcho to Batey 1. The dirt path goes along the canal between sugar cane fields, with barren mountains in the background and lines of palm trees in the distance.

The mountains and palm trees are kind of like in the side-scrolling Super Mario games, where they move at different speeds than the sugar cane whizzing by right by you. It´s kind of neat. After longer than you remember taking before, and when you think you´ve missed a turn, the mountains are big and looming. You can see where there have been mud slides, and the parts that have been recently deforested and burned. Then, you see a small white water tower and squat yellow buildings—the school—off to the left. That´s Batey 1.

The lab was open when I got there, and a few students were waiting. It was our second class, and two new people showed up. After class, I sat in front of Mirta´s house (essentially my new doña), drinking lemonade from a plastic bag. A small dust storm blew up, caking all my sweat with dirt. It switched from dust to rain in a matter of minutes, and then in a lull I jumped on a moto back to town.

Walking back through the street market I bought a bunch of veggies, and then made a massive veggie sandwich for lunch. With ketchup. mmmmmm.

I walked Bean, talked with some neighbors, and then sat on the porch and read for a while. I went to the colmado to exchange an empty water jug for a full one, and carried it very manly on my shoulder. 5 gallons of purified water is 30 pesos (25 off the truck), but a liter of beer is 100 pesos. A dollar is about 37 pesos. A more reasonable rate of conversion, widely used by other volunteers, is the egg rate. An egg is 5 pesos. So, a botellon of water is 6 eggs, and a beer is 20 eggs. You can get a beer, or you can eat breakfast for like 2 weeks.

Here are some pictures from the last week:

Bean, on Chloe´s back porch, protecting us from delincuentes and tigueres.

My lab! 15 HP computers in total. 2.5ghz Celeron dual-core, 320gb HDD, 2gb RAM, Windows 7, Office 2010, 19” widescreen LCD panels. Pretty damn nice—nicer than some of my labs were at UNC.