Things that I do in the DR that I don't do in the US

 Greet 90% of the people I pass on the street.

Take baths out of a plastic bucket.

Walk 1 km+ to find a decent cell signal.

Carefully fold the TP after wiping to make sure only white is visible before throwing it in the zafacon.

Take a nice long nap after lunch.

Take transit 2+ hrs to the nearest ATM.

Eat fresh fruit from my backyard.

Eat fresh eggs from my backyard.

Drink milk.

Eat meat.

Buy TP by the roll.

Ride in the back of a pick up truck.

Ride on the back of a motorcycle.

Drink hot chocolate 4+ times a week.

Shave every day.

Play with strangers' children.

Things that I do in the US that I don't do in the DR

Sit next to strangers without introducing myself.

Take hot showers.

Spend hours on the internet doing nothing.

Flush TP down the drain.

Sleep outside of a mosquito net.

Commute 1 hr+ to work.

Buy fresh fruit at the grocery store.

Eat fresh veggies without first dunking them in bleach water.

Drink water from the tap.

Eat at restaurants.

Buy anything in bulk.

Ride a bicycle in the street with traffic.

Get a ride out of town a moments notice.

Drink more than 1 kind of beer.

Receive mail.

How the Salchicha is Made

Now that elections in the DR have passed, I think it is safe to talk some about politics here. Not that I can say that much about them: Peace Corps volunteers are deliberately apolitical. I certainly have political opinions but it is inappropriate for me to share them here or anywhere else during my service. They would only get in the way. But I think there is no harm in describing how the democratic process works here - to the extent that I understand it.

On 15 de Mayo 2016 Danilo Medina, the sitting president of the Dominican Republic, was re-elected with 60% of the popular vote. This gave him a margin of 25 points over his nearest challenger, Luis Abinader, in the most crushing defeat in the history of Dominican democracy.

Danilo is a member of the PLD and Abinader the PRM. The remaining 5% of the vote was split between 6 other minority partidos. The biggest winner of these was the Alianza Pais with 2.5% of the presidential vote. In the American two party system we would call these "third parties" but this would be a total misnomer here. The minority partidos are more than three. They are more than 6 actually. All told, there are 32 registered partidos in the Dominican Republic and 26 of them matter enough to be included on the ballot.

Why, you ask, if there are 26 partidos were there only 8 presidential candidates? Well, there were more candidates initially but they dropped out when their partidos formed alianzas with either the PLD or PRM. On the surface the Dominican process looks a lot like the US: direct democracy, bicameral legislature, etc. The key difference is alianzas and the difference they make is huge.

Using an example from US politics, let's turn back time to the 1992 presidential election. Many believe that Bill Clinton was elected because Ross Perot, a "third party" candidate, cost George HW Bush crucial votes. This was exactly what the Republicans worried would happen. But imagine: what if, instead of saying "well, it's a two-party system and there's nothing we can do," the Republicans had signed a preemptive powersharing agreement with Perot's Reform Party? In exchange for dropping their presidential spoiler the Reform Party would receive guaranteed appointments for non-elected positions and support in some local elections. This would help the Republicans retain power by guaranteeing them the presidency and would help build the Reform Party from an upstart operation into a real party with office holders spread throughout the country. The parties could even campaign together!

In the DR this happens all the time. It is the bread and butter (or, better put, the beans and rice) of Dominican politics. This is why there were only 8 presidential candidates on the ballot. All of the remaining 18 "major minority" partidos formed alianzas with either the PLD or PRM. This is why Danilo, the most popular presidential candidate in the history of his country, appeared side-by-side on posters for candidates of the BIS, a minority Socialist party that took in less than 100,000 votes nationwide.

Sure, the BIS won't win the presidency without a candidate, but it's not like they really had a chance at that office anyhow. Significant local wins can help BIS establish a stronghold in certain parts of the country. This can be expanded upon over time and suddenly your minority partido isn't so minor anymore. That's exactly what happened with the PLD. PLD is currently the majority partido in Dominican politics. One of the 18 parties they allied with was the PRD, which used to be the majority partido. In fact, the PLD began life as an offshoot of the PRD!

So that's how the sausage is made at the levels of the partidos. But what does it mean for citizens? Like Americans, Dominicans grumble about how their politicians are all crooks, but to judge by voter turnout they are far less jaded than we are. This years election had over 70% voter turnout. I imagine it's because Dominicans can vote their conscience with the party of their choice without feeling they are "throwing their vote away" on a candidate who will never win.

The Dominican enthusiam for democracy is apparent not only in the polling place. Unlike the US where campaigns are mostly media affairs, Dominicans campaign vigously in the streets. Each of the 26 partidos has their colores and groups of suppoters regularly parade the streets in matching outfits, shaking hands and going door to door. This do this for months on end. I have been in here less than 3 months and not a week has gone by that I haven't encountered a parade or manifestacion of some kind, even when I was in a small town of less than a thousand people. It is exactly the kind of rowdy, participatory democracy that I have read that the US used to have.

Of course, there is a dark side. This year's election was notable not only for it's surprisingly decisive presidential victory but also for it's orderliness. At the church I attended during CBT the priest implored from the pulpit against violence on election day. Like Americans at sporting events, sometimes the excitement gets out of hand. Cheers for your team turn to jeers for the other. Rough words and blows are exchanged. Sometimes people die. In previous years, Peace Corps issued security alerts for volunteers to stay in their homes on election day.

But not this year. I was able to walk the streets of the small town where I now live and feel safe as I shared in the exictement. It was truly something to see.

Final note: Since my last entry my wife and I have been quite busy! We have received our site assignment, visited it for a few days, returned to the capital to complete training, and have moved permanently to our new site in the northern reach of the province Elias Piña where we live with a new host family.

I have a lot to write about! But I need time to process things. I'll post here when I have understood enough to have something intelligent to say.

Mudos, Ciegos, y Locos

In a small town, 20 minutes inland by camioneta from the northeast coast of the DR, lives a young mudo. His name is Edwin, which he prounounces with the thick accent of those with Down's Syndrome. If you ask Edwin his name in front of his father - with whom he is almost always - his father will prompt him, with visible delight: "Y el otro?" And Edwin will respond with his last name. If dad prompts "And the rest?" Edwin will say "Capicua."

Capicua is a special finishing move in dominoes. If one end of the train of fichas is a 6 and the other end is a 1, the capicua is the 6:1 ficha.  If you win a game by playing the capicua you are awarded extra points because you are awesome. Mudo ("mute") is the generic Dominican campo term for those with developmental disabilities. In the capital, Juife, a young man with cerebral palsy is called "un chico especial" by his grandparents Dona Esperanza and Don Chicho, but in the country he would be mudo.

I rode in a truck with Edwin and his father from the coast into the campo where they lived. I sat in the cab and Edwin sat in the bed, even though there was plenty of empty seats. He rode the bed the way Dominican men do when they have it to themselves: in a partial lunge over the roof, squinting into the wind.

"Why doesn't he ride in the cab with the rest of us?" I asked.

"Because he likes it back there!"

This is far from the sheltered existence that many disabled people live in the US. I can't fault the decision. Edwin really seemed to have things under control, and what is more, he was having fun. His father, too. He expressed his love for his son by allowing him to be a man.

And a man he is. We sat in front of a colmado, watching the night come in and waiting for the electricity to rcome back on. When the delivery truck came, Edwin took his turn with the rest of us, unloading the goods as a favor to the owner of the colmado. He shouldered the heavy bags of rice far easier than I. When we sat back down, Edwin took out a broken cell phone and pretended to take calls like his father, a local mover and shaker. "Dimelo" Edwin said. Tell it to me. Let's talk business.

His father is respected in the community and that respect is extended to his son. His affection, too, is extended to his son by the community. I have heard, but not did not see, that at fiestas Edwin will be given a drink with the rest of the men and that he loves to dance. I did see, however, a young man pat Edwin's shirtless belly and call him tiguere, meaning something like "lady killer."

In the same community as Edwin lives an old man named Reyes. His birth certificate says he is 90 but he estimates that he is closer to 100 since the certificate was not filled out until several years after he was born. He lived through the entire era of the Trujillo dictatorship. He played in a merengue band and was, by his own testament, quite the ladies man. He retired to a small shack where he lives alone. He has a small propiedad of cacao that he cannot maintain but visits daily. He does this altough he is almost ciego (blind). He doesn't see you coming until he is within a meter of you and he hollers when he addresses you because is almost sordo (deaf).

The local boys - not all, but far too many - like to sneak up behind him to scare him. They clap their hands close to his head and when he turns away they are gone. A variation of this hateful game is played by boys the world over, but I found it shocking in this society that normally affords so much respect to elders. It is permitted here because Reyes has no family in the community to shelter him with their respect and affection. A local woman cooks food for him and cleans his house upon occasion but she does this quietly.

I know these stories because I was visiting a friend, fellow PC volunteer, in this town. He tells me that the muchachos torment Reyes much less since the intervention. A friend of Edwin's father, also respected, and member of the same agricultural association talked to directora of the school and she in turn talked to the children.

I do not want to judge these children too harshly but I don't want to excuse them either. Instead, I will say that theor behavior makes sense. What supportive services exist here for the elderly and disabled are paid for by family. If the family can't pay, they do the work themselves. Similarly, special education doesn't really exist. Disabled children have the right to go to school but they are enrolled in classes with normally functioning children. Dominican teachers I have spoken to say that the training teachers receive on disability at university is superficial. When the students are in class they don't know how to care for them, which distracts the other students, who are not taught to respect them. I remember boys on my school bus mocking children with special needs and wonder how much worse it would have been if we hadn't been taught respect, repeatedly, by teachers who had themselves been well-trained.

The intervention occurred because Reyes got into it with a loco (this word means exactly what you think it does). I wasn't there and don't know exactly what happened, but after the fracas the community agreed that things had gotten out of hand. Mental illness is no more or less common in the DR than in the United State, but locos are more visible because again the burden of care falls on the family almost exclusively. During CBT, I facilitated a workshop with a group of local girls where we brainstormed a list of community needs. At the top of their list? A place for the locos.

I am sharing these stories mostly to process them, but as I write this I reflect again upon disparity of development. In a previous entry I wrote that sometimes a lack of organizational infrastructure can be a good thing. When it comes to mudos, ciegos, and locos I must disagree with myself.

A Tale of Two Murals

Two friends of mine in San Francisco are landscape designers. When, about this time last year, I was asked to oversee the installation of an educational garden at an underserved school I went to them first. They are at the top of their game, well-respected and well-connected, and were generous with their time and talents and their network. They not only worked for free but recruited a well-known local artist to paint a mural at the school and got them to work for free, too.

It was an exciting project. My friends put together an innovative design with several unique features, almost all of which never got off the drawing board. There was a permit that we had to sign, you see. It was over 20 pages and had very specific guidelines about what could and couldn't happen. Must of what we wanted fell into the "couldn't" category. The mural was one of these things. It wasn't exactly prohibited by the garden permit but was subject to it's own 10 page permit. This required the artist to, among other things, submit the proposed design to the Design Approval Committee for review and sign away all rights to their work while at the same time agreeing to maintain the mural if it was damaged.

They didn't sign it and I can't blame them. I wouldn't have signed it, either, though I did sign the other permit. The kids didn't get a mural but they did get the garden, even if it was a pale imitation of the original vision. The permitting process dragged on for months and was so dispiriting that one of my designer friends literally broke down in tears at one point.

What does this have to do with the DR, you ask? Well, despite having been here for less time than the aforementioned permitting process, my fellow volunteers and I have already completed a mural at the wall of a school. This was another project of my "advanced" Spanish class. Here's a picture of it:



I am (almost) not exagerrating when I say that we were able to complete this world map in less time than it took me to read the permits for the San Francisco project. The "permit" here was a simple conversation with the directora of the school. Instead of bureacratic obstructionism the process was marked by trust and flexibility. When the project was delayed (twice) by political actions and (once) by weather we had only to make a simple phone call to change plans.

In a previous entry of this blog, I used the phrase "Third World" when reflecting upon the Dominican Republic. A fellow volunteer has since told me that "developing nation" it a more accurate phrase. As I noted, it's not that the DR doesn't have the stuff of modernity it's just that it's not always evenly distributed or hasn't reached same height of complexity. In that vein, it's not that don't Dominicans have bureaucracy but it hasn't invaded all levels of society in the way it has in "developed" countries like my own.

Sometimes, this is a good thing.

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.