Community banking in the land of fiao

Each country that invites Peace Corps to send volunteers has it's own priorities. Some countries could benefit from assistance with environmental education, others want their citizenry to learn English, etc. In the Dominican Republic, volunteers serve in one of three sectors: Youth Development, Education, and Community Economic Development.

Cat's an education volunteer. I'm in CED, or, as I often explain in Spanish, negocios ("business").

There's a joke among CED volunteers that the least useful thing you bring to country is the business casual clothes that Peace Corps insists you pack. While presenting oneself as serio is definitely important in la capital, it's not so necessary in the campo where people are way more casual. What good are khakis when you are working with campesinos in baseball caps and gomas (rubber boots)?

Me, I wear my business casual clothes everyday. This is because my project is una cooperativa de ahorro y crédito – a community bank.

The cooperativa has about 500 members and, aside from some seed money kindly donated by an international NGO a few years back, the funding is composed entirely of the contributions of los socios (members). When the campesinos in my pueblito take out a préstamo (loan) to finance next seasons crop they are using the money of their friends and neighbors.

It's a beautiful thing - and a necessary one given that most of the socios are considered too high a lending risk by other financial institutions. Those big banks are too far away, anyhow. Our nearest "big city" (24,000 people!) is two hours drive and the the trip is expensive. If you make 800 pesos profit on a sack of habichuelas (beans) and it costs you 300 pesos roundtrip to deposit it and another 300 pesos to withdraw it next month, how much money are you really saving?

In the campo, the "bank" part of community bank it not always clearly understood. A friend of a friend, upon discovering that I worked with el banquito whispered to me about some cosas muy malas (very bad things) that were going on. "If you lend me 5000 pesos," he demanded, "How can you can charge me more than those same 5000 pesos? ¡Muy mal!"

To be fair, let's try to see it from his perspective. Say you're a campesino with no real education. Big banks won't give you the time of day and the financial institution set up in your town is only a few years old. It's financed in part by your money and staffed by people you have known your whole life. On top off that you're a Dominicano used to the interest-free credit system known as fiao. 

Fiao is a Dominican version of the Spanish word fiado ("credit"). When you buy something on fiao the store owner trusts you to pay them back later. Bigger stores don't do fiao, but virtually every smaller business does. In the campo, where people often only have cash after each seasons harvest and sometimes not even then, fiao is a necessity. It's how friends and neighbors support each other through the hard times.

The other credit option available to poor Dominicans are prestamistas - loan sharks. Your average Dominican prestamista isn't a dangerous criminal like your average American loan shark, but they still mean business. A "good" prestamista will only charge 20% interest, but  100% is not unheard of.

In this context, the standard banking practice of charging interest might seem fishy. Why would a financial cooperative composed of friends and neighbors do something like that?

I also wonder if religion plays a role. Usury (Bible-speak for charging interest) is denounced in multiple books of the Old Testament. It's literally a sin. “If your brother becomes poor and cannot maintain himself . . . you shall not lend him your money at interest, nor give him your food for profit.” So if our socios know their Leviticus, what are they supposed to think?

But charge interest we must. I work for free but the other staff doesn't. And the lending fund must grow if we are to keep making loans. Interest, implemented at non-sinful rates, helps the “community” part of our community bank grow. A neighbor down the street is using one of our loans to build a new house. A peluquero friend of mine wants to use one to buy an inversor so he can continue cutting hair when there's no luz.

The system works! Kind of.

Because the same lack of education that makes common financial practices seem suspect also makes for poor financial literacy. My neighbors started building the house without a budget, so they ran out of money and had to apply for another loan. And many loans just don't get paid back. To be fair, living off the land is tough – if it rains too much, or too little, your crops just die – but far too many of the cooperative's loans are in default.

My peluquero friend, at least, is willing to listen to me about the importance of keeping books. Maybe it's confianza but I like to think it's part of a general shift in awareness. The board of directors recognizes the need to improve our lending controls. Our general manager, my project partner, is excited about expanding services to neighboring communities.

I think for campesinos, money is like smart phones and computers. It's all so new! And when you've never had access to something before it usually takes a while to figure out how to use it right.

A letter to a friend

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

When men sing for women

One year and counting
Cat and I recently celebrated one year in country. As fast as it has passed I am old enough to know that the next year will go even quicker. I could use this entry to reflect on all that's happened, things I've seen and done, the people I've met, etc. But instead I am thinking about machismo and bachata, two things that are a daily part of my experience here.

Bachata is, by far, the most popular genre of Dominican music. Machismo, is, welllll . . .

The male animal
Machismo is the cultural pattern that defines gender relations in the DR and, indeed, much of Latin America. The word machismo derives from the Spanish macho, which means "male animal." Basically this means different behavior standards for men and women with the difference favoring men. This manifests itself in many ways but generally means that men are free to do as they like while women are expected to be responsible and "respectable" - which usually means staying at home to cook and clean and take care of children.

The double standard extends to sexual relationships as well. Dominican culture is pretty sexual: multiple partners are common, even expected. I say this with no judgement having come from San Francisco, a city in which the average person has 21(!) different sexual partners over their lifetime. (No, not me, mom). But under machismo, men can brag about their conquests while women have to keep quiet lest their reputation be irrevocably damaged. The double standard of machismo also dictates that "quiet" infidelity by men is to be tolerated, even it breaks the heart of every woman involved with the unfaithful man.

Machismo puts suffering women in another bind by restricting artistic expression. In the US woman can sing of their broken hearts and get rich doing it but Dominican popular music there is little space for female artists.

A few words about bachata
Bachata began as the music of brothels. Then it was the music of the campo, a period in which it endured a disdain similar to that urban intellectuals in the US have heaped upon country music, before eventually becoming the king of Dominican genres. It is lovely, melancholic music with a rhythm you can dance to.

A favorite old song of mine:


As the genre steadily marched toward universal acceptance it slowly changed. The rhythm stayed the same but the tempo sped up. Artists from the Dominican diaspora started incorporating pop influences from their time in Nueva Yol. Romeo Santo, the reigning king of contemporary bachata, is fluently bilingual and has cut songs with Drake.

What does it sound like now? Click, close your eyes, and listen:




If you are like me, you may have thought Romeo was a woman upon first listen. It's not just him. For the being most popular genre in a machista society, a surprising number of male bachata artists sing in a feminine style. This androgyny is present in the lyrical content as well.

To women or for them?
Some say that machismo is embedded in Spanish because the majority of nouns have gender. When speaking about a women, or to her, you use  the feminine version of a word. When speaking about, or to, a man use the masculine form.  When saying something as simple as "You are bad" you betray the gender of the object by saying either "bueno" (masculine) or "buena" (feminine). It is really hard to avoid using gender, even by accident.

Yet bachata does this all the time. Virtually all bachata is about love between men and women but it many of biggest songs refer not to men and women but just "you" and "I" in an ingeniously genderless fashion. This is not universal - the Romeo song above brims with rather grotesque, gendered expressions - but it is extremely common.

With high pitched vocals and androgynous lyrics, many contemporary bachatas written and performed by men could be sung by a woman without changing a single thing about the song. This brings me to the belatedly stated thesis of this piece: contemporary bachata, by accident or design, has evolved in such a way that the songs that best to permit the expression of female longing in a machisto society are the most popular.

Instead of singing merely to the women, male bachata artists sing in their place as well.

10 Seconds
When it comes to bachata, I prefer the old school of Leonardo Paniagua and Luis Seguro but I still appreciate the new style. My contemporary favorite  is "10 Segundos by Zacarias Ferreria." I have probably heard this song - no joke - at least 300 times in the last 365 days and still I am not sick of the melody.

Hear:


Dominicans love to sing along, out loud, in public. About 200 of the 300 times I have heard this song, there was a woman singing along, reaching for the high notes in the chorus. It goes like this:

Yo te amo pero tú
buscas sexo y nada más
yo te amo pero tú
de amar bien no eres capaz.

"I love you, but you
look for sex and nothing more.
I love you, but you
are not capable of real love."

A few words about voudou

The most recent episode of Cat's podcast is about our visit to a batey, which is is a type of company town structured around a sugar plantation. Most of the plantations went bust in the 80s but the communities persist. Due to historical and economic factors bateys tend to be poor, congested and populated primarily by Dominicans of Haitian descent or recent Haitian immigrants.

The podcast gives the subject a fantastic treatment but does not mention a fascinating aspect of the community: the important role that voudou ("voodoo") plays an important role in local cultural life. (A quick note about italics: in this entry the italicized words will be from Kreyol, the language of Haiti, instead of Spanish.) Both Haiti and the DR are religiously plural societies with many faiths and there are enough voudou believers in the batey to support a hounfour (temple) in the center of the crowded community.

We were unable to speak with the priest and I am far from an expert on this subject so I'll stick to facts from wikipedia.

Essentially, Haitian voudou is a mixture of Roman Catholic rituals and traditional African beliefs. The slaves that were brought to the island were forbidden to practice their native religion so they gave it a Catholic makeover. It's a much better fit than you might expect!

In both belief systems there is a Bondye ("Good God") who is not directly knowable without the intervention of a priest. This Supreme Being is supported by lesser spiritual powers who are also the objects of devotion.

In voudou the African lwa ("spirits") are associated with the Catholic Saints. For example Papa Legba, who guards the entry into the spirit world is represented by "San Pedro" (St. Peter) the guard of the Pearly Gates.

Saint Peter

St. Jean D'Arc (Joan of Arc - Haiti was originally a French colony) is associated with Ersulie Freda.

I have no idea what she does.

Other familiar faces are:

John the Baptist . . .

John is to the right of Jack

. . . .and Saint Anthony.

The images of the saints adorns the walls but the center of the action is the altar.

Offerings from the devout

But instead of the call of the faithful reaching up into Heaven, in voudou the saints descend to the earth and enter the body of the priest - and sometimes the faithful. And what do they do there? Like Catholic Saints, they intervene in the worldly affairs of the devout: they bestow blessings and bring good luck.

They answer prayers.