Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Site Change

I’ve been in the Dominican Republic for over 14 months, and in my site for almost a year. I decided a few weeks ago that another year in Yamasa may not be the most productive, and that I was ready for a new challenge.  It also didn’t help that, during this period, two of the girls that had been in my youth group, and who had also been in my English workshop in the High School, had won a regional Model UN conference, and one of them had done it in English.  It’s awesome, but also codifies the nagging feeling of not really being needed here. 

So, I started talking with other volunteers, trying to see if anyone knew of a good site.  I had managed UNC’s computer labs before joining Peace Corps, and I was nominated and accepted and trained for service as an Information and Communication Technology Specialist, so finding a strong IT site was importante (and, I know, crazy—working within my sector? whoa!)

I had already narrowed the region down to the south—generally the poorest, most underprivileged part of the country. Chloe mentioned that World Vision had recently donated computer labs to a few of the Bateys around her, and we set up the visits over the next few days. 

Bateys are essentially sugar cane work camps that have grown to include families and a few colmados and a small primary school. They’re poor, dusty, and surrounded by kilometers of sugar cane fields. The sugar companies (for the most part, 5 families) brought over men to work in the fields from Haiti.  Many of the workers are undocumented, which makes leaving the Batey hard- all major roads in the south have numerous military checkpoints. Undocumented children can’t go to High School, won’t be allowed to vote, and are denied many other rights based on their parents’ nationality, even if they themselves were born in the DR. 

So, I found a challenge.  More specifically, I found a challenge with a computer lab.  The Bateys in this part of the south are numbered 0-9, although a few have actual names.


I was riding on the back of Andres’s motorcycle along the canal, mesmerized by the bright green of the 7” high sugar cane swaying in the wind on either side of the path.  Andres called out to a group of women walking some cows down the path as we passed them—he knows everyone out here, I’m convinced of it.  Off in the distance are stands of palm trees, and beyond that, the unbroken line of tree-less mountains that extends into Haiti. I made a mental note to look up the range’s name.  Suddenly, we were out of the cane fields, and turning past a small blue water tower emblazoned with the European Union flag into a small grouping of houses.  Batey 1.

A small group of locals showed us the brand new, still-wrapped-in-plastic rows of computers in the lab.  They were all modern HP desktops, with what looked like 19” widescreen LCDs on top of them.  Damn... World Vision doesn’t fuck around.  They all had USB WiFi antennas next to the monitors, and the same off-brand Chinese WiFi router that I had told my mom to buy off Newegg.com sitting on a table at the front of the room.  This was easily the nicest lab I’d ever seen in the DR, and certainly the only one that had ever been in that batey.  The second floor of the building was supposed to be the library, although in place of books it had stacks of empty computer boxes and some random chairs.

We walked around the rest of the community, a simple U shape with a big space in the middle that used to be a baseball field.  6 churches in all—Catholic, Adventist, and Pentecostal, not including the witch doctor. Around 200 families, with a total population of something like 1300.  My current site has northward of 50,000. 

I was excited.  This place felt good.  I hope that feeling wasn’t due to the unseasonably cool weather and light breeze, and the exhaustion of going from batey to batey in the past few days…but it felt good nonetheless, and the people walking with us were friendly and happy to sit and chat under a tree. 

It took me a few days to decide to pull the trigger and submit the site change paperwork to my program assistant. My temporary acting APCD (they fired the last one after just a few months on the job) called me a few days later, and thought it was a great idea.  Now all I have to do is find a house in the new site, and wrap things up in the old site, and try to not stress out in the process.  It’s going to be a crazy month… it’s a crazy change. But hey, I only have a year left, and Yamasa has let me get too comfortable. I think this will be good.