Hey Kenny,
About a year ago you were here on the island for a wedding. You offered to come out and see me but I couldn't make the time because I was still in training. Training is mostly powerpoint marathons and icebreaker games but your visit overlapped with something important - my first trip into the field to visit an actual volunteer. This is like job shadowing but compressed and abbreviated: since PC service is a 24/7 job you spend three solid days hanging out to get an idea of what it's like.
One year on, it`s on me to return the favor. This past weekend I played host to a new volunteer, still in training, so he could get an idea of what life is like. My site is super tranquilo: clean, safe, and isolated, near the Haitian border. There's not a lot to do for fun and what gets done for work gets done more slowly. During the visit I showed the newbie around and introduced him to some of old timers I work with. It's SOP for getting anything done: no one takes you seriously if you haven't the decency to spend a few hours on the front porch with them shooting the shit and drinking coffee. At one such gathering newbie tells us a story.
In training they stick you in a barrio outside the capital. It's safe-ish, as long as you don't walk around at night, not that different than the neighborhoods where you and I worked in San Francisco except your street smarts don't always translate. One night newbie wakes up to all the dogs on his street barking. He gets up to see what the fuss is and sees two guys running from roof-to-roof being chased by what can only be described as an angry mob. The two were trying to steal motorcycles - way more common than cars here - but instead of getting away they get caught. The police show up but stand back while the mob works the thieves over a bit: this, too, is SOP. When the crowd is done the thieves are bloodied but not seriously hurt. The cops take them away and the neighbors use the occasion as an excuse to party.
Newbie has been in the country less than three weeks and is telling this story to practice his Spanish and make conversation but also to process the event. The old timer responds with a story of his own: a few weeks back, two guys were caught trying to steal motorcycles in a town just on the other side of the border. They, too, were caught by a mob. But instead of turning them over to the cops, the mob doused them with gasoline and set them on fire. I am reminded of the Old West: they didn't have gasoline back then, so when mobs caught horse thieves they hung them from trees.
When I first got to the DR I was still processing the experience of our work in SF. I made constant comparisons not just between the US and Dominican and Haitian culture, but between the Americans I had left behind and the Americans I found myself working with. The average PC volunteer is a decade or more younger than I am, which makes them the exact age as the "at risk" folks we used to work with. That was the biggest difference of all: not the Spanish or the threat of violence (plenty of both of those in Bayview, right?) but going from working with 23 year old gang members who couldn't write a complete sentence to working with 23 year olds with masters degrees. Because PC has been on a big diversity push in recent years the demographics even overlap: plenty of African Americans and Latinos, though not any Pacific Islanders - at least not in my group.
A year on, this education gap remains the biggest difference that I am aware of. Not just between the kind of Americans who get accepted into PC and the kind of Americans who end up in programs like the one we used to run in SF, but the difference between Dominicans and Americans and Dominicans and Haitians and even the difference between Americans now and Americans in the Old West. I think this one key difference eventually manifests in the other types of differences that bring PC here to the DR: a struggling economy, too many teen moms, violent crime, etc.
When we were in the thick of it in SF, we were usually too busy putting out fires to reflect on what we were doing. At least I was. Now, here, in between the cups of coffee and parlays in Spanish, I have had a little time to process it all. I know we weren't always able to make the difference that we wanted to, to prevent the violence from reaching the kids or reaching out of them, but I want to you to know I am proud of what we did, as small as it might seem in retrospect. I am proud of you and thank you for being there with me through all of it.
I hope you and Amy are well,
Kevin
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