Sunday, May 1, 2016

Some shame on Earth Day

I am in the Advanced Spanish class, the highest level here in CBT. Based on the strength of my conversational skills, I have been placed with native speakers and those who have lived in Spanish speaking countries for extended periods of time. I am clearly bringing up the rear and for this I feel a little vergüenza (shame).

I used Spanish for several years at a job in San Francisco but there it was more important for me to be understood than to understand. I can talk fine with other slow Americans. Also I can communicate easily what I mean to Dominicans but when a Dominican is speaking to me it is like listening to a song from a radio station faraway. I can catch words and phrases among the noise but I understand totally only when the signal is particularly clear. I (almost) always get the gist but often miss details. Yes, I am thrilled to be invited to your party but I have no idea where we are meeting or at what time.

Despite that, I am an "advanced" student so my Spanish class is not focused on the practice of grammar and vocabulary but on practical application thereof. As a group we have been required to plan and execute community projects and that means speaking in Spanish without a net. This is how I came to find myself entering the offices of the ayuntamiento (municipal services division) to meetloop with the alcade (mayor) of the pueblo. Hello. I am Kevin. I come from Cuerpo de Paz from the United States.  Us volunteers are organizing a cleaning of the river for el dia de la tierra. Can the ayuntamiento help us?

Such a meeting is bread and butter for me in English but the idea of doing it in Spanish provoked some anxiety. I knew I would recognize the alcalde from his posters all over town (it's an election year - more on that later) but what would I say if he asked me difficult questions? I ended up speaking to his assistant - the alcalde was presumably campaigning - who thought highly of Cuerpo de Paz and spoke slowly for my benefit.

It went exactly as a meeting would in the US except that he did everything longhand on paper. There was no computer anywhere in the office.  He called in the head of the workers who did not speak slowly but I survived. I had to ask him to repeat himself more than once. Would the ayuntamiento be able to help us? Yes, his honor the alcalde would be thrilled to assist the volunteers of Cuerpo de Paz in cleaning up the river with local youth. How many students would we be bringing?

We had already planned to paint a map of the world on a wall at a local liceo (high school) the day before the river. We had also prepared a short charla on environmental conservation. We hoped to recruit some kids there and there's 16 volunteers, so let's say 30 total?

Thirty estudiantes! Que Bueno!

CBT is a busy time. Training sessions and Spanish class run from 8 to 5. Parts of most weekends and evenings are devoted to tarea: individual assignments and group projects. We get so busy that we barely have time to play dominoes and drink cerveza. The morning of the day of we were to paint the mural we took a field trip to a cacao factory in the campo. In a small settlement of 300 souls a dozen women turned the local harvest into dulces, bollos, and vino. They were supported by a PC volunteer who functioned as a sort of live-in business consultant. It was a wonderful project to see.

The fábrica was 40 minutes from the carretera (highway) deep among the fincas de cacao acessible only by treacherous dirt roads. Our guagua bottomed out more than once and a times the river ran over the road a few inches deep.

they were so treacherous that the locals staged a huelga to demand the local government improve them. It is after all an election year and the síndico (the same guy as the alcalde but in a different position, something akin to a state senator - DR politics will get their own post when I am less confused) should be paying attention. The manifestantes felled trees and blocked the road at both access points to the highway. It was a nonviolent action. We were safe but would be delayed. We rolled up the windows and turned around.

Our only option was to cut north, deeper into the campo, through even worse roads to reach a different carretera. As we proceeded into the interior the houses turned from concrete (the construction staple of the Dominican well-to-do) to frayed wood, a legacy of an earlier poorer time. The faces on the campaign posters changed. People sat on their front lawns and laughed at us from plastic chairs. I am sure they thought us to be profoundly confused tourists. Eventually the land flattened and we were in a new country. The fincas gave way to fields of piña and we found the carretera.

Our chofer got us back without complain but three hours later than we planned. We had called the directora of the liceo from the road. It was not a problem to reschedule the mural and the charla but it would be after earth day and we wouldn't be able to recruit estudiantes for the river clean up. After the

The next day my Spanish class advanced, sin estudiantes and somewhat shamefacedly, to the river. It was a gorgeous morning.

Lacking cars and packed into busy families, Dominican teenagers go to the river to have fun and accidentally start new families. We found evidence of this in the bushes and on the banks. Workers from the ayuntamiento joined us. They had provided fundas (plastic bags; Dominicans use the more common Spanish bolsa to refer primarily to the scrotum) and latex gloves for 50, but between bothe groups we were about 15.

The head of the workers was there. He explained that his men (and they were all men) hadn't visited the river to clean up since Semana Santa the previous month after which they removed about 25 fundas of picnic debris.  We worked side-by-side, my radio tuning in and out of my English thoughts to catch the kind of words that working men exchange on a hot day: curses (Dominicans use "c**t" with the versatility that Americans use "f**k") chistes, and fragments of popular songs.

Some unscheduled Dominicans came and the head man entreated them to volunteer: ¿No tienes consciente? Don't they have a social conscious? No, they were just there to wash their horses, or their motorcycles, or themselves.

The radio signal tuned in perfectly for me to hear him say: "It's a c**ting shame that the only volunteers that clean our river have to come all the way from the US.

I wanted to tell him he needn't be embarrassed. The river, honestly, wasn't any dirtier than one in any similarly poor area of the US. I have sat on river banks in depopulated areas of Michigan where no one has come for the beer bottles and condom wrappers in a long time. I wanted to explain to him all the complexity of what had lead to that moment, but I was shameful of my Spanish and tired.

Between us we removed about 20 bags of trash, some of it half-buried in the tierra. Behind a bush I found some feed bags filled with earth. I asked the head man about them and he told me that they had been gathered by a caco farmer to use as potting soil for new plants. These we let be.

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