Friday, December 30, 2011

New Years

I'm staying in my site for New Years.  This will be the first major(ish) holiday that I haven't spent with other Volunteers, and while I like the ability to decline participation in large group activities, the site seems to be conspiring to make me regret my decision.

Let's talk about child abuse a bit. Say you have a kid, and the kid falls and hurts himself. Obviously, you go up to the kid, and start smacking his arms and back. If you are creative, grab a switch and beat him. Maybe throw some rocks. The kid should have known better. Or, let's say one of your kids is picking on his younger brother. The smaller kid is on the ground, being punched and kicked. Naturally, you egg it on, and yell for your neighbors to come out and watch. When it's over, you go over and beat the little kid, because he should have defended himself or have known better. If it is night time, you should probably go ahead and throw the kid out of your house and tell him to never come back.

Every so often, when I'm in my house at night cooking dinner, I'll hear wimpering at the front door. You can't take the kid back to his house, where he'll just get beaten more, and you can't really let him stay at your place, either. So you load up a Spanish-dubbed Pixar film on your laptop, make some chocolate milk, and open a pack of cookies and wait for him to calm down. If your battery is dead and there's no power, you can play the game where you each try to draw a cat/goat/car with your headlamp turned off, and then laugh at the squiggly-lined blob on your paper.  Is his grandma home? Yes. Go to the grandma's house. She starts yelling at him, neighbors come out. Public shaming. He runs away. Go back to your house, pull out the spare mosquito net, and blow up the "self inflating" sleeping pad that you pulled out of the volunteer give-away box. Give him the spare toothbrush you keep for him, and make zombie faces in the mirror with the toothpaste foam.

I can't make parents hug their kids. I can't stop them from hitting them. That's the hardest part of being here--it's not the poverty or lack of water and power and sanitation and American food.

On the other side, I find myself in a great, smiling, happy, welcoming community. Kids run around and play all day, and at lunch, just showing up means you get a big heap of rice. As soon as I moved in, my neighbor decided I needed lunch every day, and I almost had to talk her into letting me pay her for it. Every single person I pass will do a fist pump or wave and smile and chat, including the workers out in the fields. My dog is a rock star, and more people probably know his name than mine. The crazy guy in town, who everyone told me to watch out for, brings me sugar cane stalks and soup, and shouts random words in English. I left a chair outside one night, and a neighbor swooped in to grab it. When I thought it was surely stolen, as soon as I opened my door in the morning, they brought it back and told me to be more careful. I got frustrated with trying to keep order in my lab, and the next time I went back, the youth I'm working with had organized themselves and were enforcing rules, and have worked out almost all the problems in the lab since then between themselves. The organization I'm working with has given me everything I've petitioned for. Little kids sit in my house and draw, and I put the pictures up on the wall. I've spent days with them playing with rocks, teaching them how to pet my dog.

I love waking up, making coffee (and chocolate milk for the muchachos), and chatting with the neighbors who come by to say good morning to my dog. I haven't had a bad morning yet in the batey, possibly because I can hit snooze on my phone alarm as many times as I want to.

So, yeah. Some stuff sucks. Some stuff is good. There is still nowhere else I'd rather be, even on New Year's. This adventure is almost over.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Sweating in December

Batey life is going well. I spend most of the day playing with kids, supplying endless sheets of paper to draw on and fold into airplanes, and dealing countless hands of Uno. The lab is doing alright, and is pretty much running itself at this point. I have a group of youth who make sure it is open in the morning and in the afternoon, and while I’ve given up on any sort of work shift schedule, they make it work. We charge 5 pesos for an hour of internet, and don’t charge if you’re there to do school work.  The vast majority of people go to play Unreal Tournament and look at Facebook, which is fine. They’re learning how to use the keyboard and mouse, and in the case of Facebook, I doubt they have ever read or written this much in their lives. I do movie nights every once in a while, which are a hit until the power comes back on.

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Every 15 minutes or so, the giant sugar cane trucks roll by and make the ground shake. My batey is off the main road, so we don’t have the sugar cane train, and the trucks have turned the road into dust 4” deep.  Zenia and I walked down to the other side of the canal one day to watch them cut cane, and we came back completely covered in dust. They set fire to the fields at night after they harvest, and the whole horizon turns to an eerie red glow. It rains ash during the day, and it collects in the corners of my house and gets caught in my mosquito net.

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I took two kids to the regional Brigada Verde conference, which was pretty fun. We went to the island in the middle of lake Enriquillo, the giant below-sea-level salt lake that is slowly rising, which may make it possible to kayak from Puerto Principe to Barahona in a few years. Thar be crocodiles! And giant iguanas with red eyes!

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Thanksgiving was a blast. Three other volunteers and I stayed at the country director’s house in the capital and baked pies for three days. He and his wife told us stories at dinner about all the things they’e done in all the countries they’ve lived in with all the different organizations they’ve worked for. For example—they went to a Soviet bloc country after the fall of communism, and had projects to essentially create a market economy. I forget if that was with Peace Corps or USAID. When he was a Peace Corps Volunteer, one of his projects was to introduce these small cows to the Andes that could deal with altitude better.

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View from CD’s apt in Santo Domingo

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Sunday, December 18, 2011

Safe Space training

Before she COS’d, Sarah and I started up a QPCV group. Following other PC countries, we may end up naming it Volunteer Diversity and Support. The three main goals are:

Q Volunteer support

Raise staff and admin awareness

Influence new Volunteer training

This past Tuesday, Ellen, Nora, and I pulled off the first Safe Space (Espacio Seguro) training in PCDR! The training director gave us an entire day with the whole training staff and medical officers, without really knowing what we were going to do. The level of support that we have gotten from the administration has been pretty surprising, and we hope to duplicate the training for the rest of the staff and admin.  I think that we were able to start a lot of good conversations, and if nothing else, got the training staff to think about culturally-taboo topics. It was a little strange having the teacher/student positions switched—most of the participants were once teaching us about Dominican culture and how to speak Spanish, and here we were, giving a day-long training session.

The difficulty that we face now is keeping the group active, and trying to develop useful training materials for the admin and new volunteers. Ellen is going to sit down with the training director to go over the curriculum they use during training, in the hopes of weeding out heteronormativity, and making them more open to different voices. The fact that they are asking us to work with them, instead of us trying to convince them, is huge.

So, hopefully, we can leave Peace Corps Dominican Republic more open and inclusive than when we found it.