Embarazos Adolescentes

Disclaimer: Once again, this entry is not intended to ridicule or devalue people's lived experiences. I apologize in advance if it may seem that way.

Going back to ampliar the list of twenty things you're approximately 1,000 times more likely to see here in the D.R., I've realized once again how trivial and not necessarily deserving of their own blog post some of those things are.

However, teenage mamas definitely fit the bill.

It's something that struck me, slapped me squarely across the face within my first week here. Seeing girls that couldn't be any older than 13 or 14 walking down the street, huge with child. And after having conducted ten interviews in El Fracatán, and having personally met some women who aren't much older than me who have four, five, six kids, it's become real and profoundly disturbing.

On Thursday, I talked to a woman named Yajaira who is 23, has five youngins, the oldest of whom is ten years old.

Do the math.

Two important questions I ask in my interview are:

- How many kids do you have, what are their names, and how old are they?

At this point I'm normally just concerned with getting their names spelled right ('cause they tend to be rather...imaginative), and I'm not thinking too hard about how old they are and what that means for their poor mother.

- How old were you when you had your first kid?

Upon asking Yajaira this question, she replied, matter-of-factly, "Trece". Trece = thirteen. I reply, "¿Trece?", and she responds, matter-of-factly, "Sí, trece".

My body language said, "Well, moving on now..."

Let's learn some Dominican

Given that I featured some classic Dominican language in my previous post (i.e., beginning every sentence with a nonsensical "ah po'", etc.), I figured I'd give y'all a lesson in some of the more entertaining aspects of the language (note that since it bears almost no resemblance to the Spanish I learned nor that which I've heard spoken even by Dominican Americans, I call it Dominican)

Today we'll start with words that have been kidnapped from English and subsequently, brutally beaten, chewed up, and spit out.

Examples:

(By the way, I'm expecting you to look at these words and recognize them immediately. If you're that dense, the answers come at the end.)

konflé - What you eat for breakfast. It's crunchy, kinda bland, and gets really soggy if you pour enough milk in the bowl.

boche - What you say when you just simply can't believe what someone is telling you.

poloché - What uppercrust young Dominican men wear to school.

kolín - It can chop your hand off if you're not careful cracking open that coconut.

jilé - Men use it on their faces, women on their legs and armpits (or not, if they're European).

jipeta - It's obnoxious and unsustainable, but very necessary for getting around a country that, let's be honest, kinda sucks at paving its streets.

baguada - It causes you to get wet by standing outside, possibly electrocuted if you're lucky.

safakón - You put things you don't want inside it. Sadly, many people here miss the mark because such unwanted items often end up on the sidewalks instead.

frise - It keeps things cold.

pire - Great for baking things.

And, last but not least:

vivaporú - A mentholated miracle cure. Perfect for Montezuma's Revenge.

Answers: cereal (Corn Flakes), bullshit, polo shirt, machete (Collins, a historically grand knifemaking firm from New England), razor (Gillette), jeep (or SUV), thunderstorm ("bad weather"), garbage can ("safety can"), freezer, baking dish (Pyrex), Vick's Vapor Rub

Concho Travels

Yesterday, on a whim, I decided to ride the M route all the way around the city. Starting at the lush environs of PUCMM, the route makes a big circle, crossing a bridge and entering the jungle of the Zona Sur, passing through La Villa Olímpica, Pequín, along the Río Yaque between the shanties falling into the river (uninspiringly named Villa del Yaque) and the Nibaje district (so named that if you take the word apart, ni and baje, it means "Just don't go down there"), skirting the edge of the frenzied guagua terminal in the center of town, and then out the bullet-pockmarked Zona Oeste (such glorious neighborhoods as the famous Cienfuegos, Rafey ("Rrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaafffffffffffffeeeyyyyyy!!!!", home of the life-sustaining and life-taking vertedero (garbage dump), Las Colinas, Monterrico, etc. All the streetlights in that part of town have been shot at.

It got a little awkward as I was the only passenger for a while there.

Then, as we rolled into Cienfuegos, the driver finally couldn't contain his curiosity and asked me, "¿Tú va pa Puelto Plata?" (You going to Puerto Plata)

"No, 'toy paseando"

"Ah po' me da má plata o te pielde la bida, gringo" (translation: Well, give me more money or you die, gringo. I'm not sure what he actually said at that point.)

Kind abuelita sitting next to me: "Dale dinero, gringo." (Give him money)

Me: "Donde pueda. Pero no voy pa Puerto Plata."

"Ah po' o sako mi arrrrma e la meto en tu kabeza, gringo!" (translation: Well otherwise I'll take out my gun and put it in your head, gringo! - once again, I have no idea what he actually said)

I reach into my wallet and pull out another 15 pesos.

"Ah po' eliges bien, gringo!" (You chose well, gringo!)

His temperament eased significantly as the dusty, bullet-strewn, naked cinderblock houses of the Noroeste faded into the luxuriant concrete forests of the Nordeste (where the Cibao's wealthiest unsymbolically look down on the rest of the city), and proceeded to take me back to Puerta 2 of PUCMM.

Al borde de un ataque de nervios

Today is the day the residents of El Fracatan get their asses handed to them about why they never got their kids' birth certificates. Well, maybe not so antagonistic-like. It'll be an informational meeting, a "taller" (workshop) for them, so that they know the process and the necessary steps to take in order to procure this all-important document. This meeting will set them toward changing their children's lives for the better. We hope.

Moral of the story: What do I do? Do I just sit and watch, and nod my head? Or do I pretend to have the slightest smidgen of authority on the matter?

I'm standing on the precipice of really starting my investigation into this threadbare community. Complete with voice recorders, consent forms and delicious shantytown coffee (I mean that seriously). Needless to say (but I'll say it anyway), I'm scared shitless. Not because I think I'll screw it up (how many possible ways could I do that, highly unlikely), more because I ain't never done did nothing like this before.

Feel free to leave me some gratuitous moral support.

Niños ambulantes

So instead of following Raquel's list of DR fun facts, I've decided to switch the "happy children seemingly content with running around in circles" with a discussion of street kids. It seems more applicable to my life right now.

Long story short, you can't miss 'em. With their beaten-up wooden boxes (which appear to be lunchboxes to the untrained eye) complete with shoe mold on top, rest assured they're there, at any commercial establishment frequented by the relatively better off. Sometimes they carry around gallon bottles of water and a dirty dishrag, hoping to find a willing stalled-in-traffic windshield to wash. Sometimes they have parents, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they attend school in the morning, sometimes they've never been. Sometimes you buy them ice cream or an empanada at the internet cafe you frequent, where they hang around outside all day but never in their wildest dreams will they ever enter. Sometimes you notice that amazingly broad, ear-to-ear grin spread across their face when they notice you walking by, and you stop to chat with them, always small talk, because you can't really get much deeper than that before the ear-to-ear quickly dissipates into a look of foreboding that you can't even hope to comprehend. Sometimes you play sports with them, on a run-down blacktop covered with trash and forgotten laundry that's now growing more grass than the eroded hillside they call home. Sometimes they cooperate, other times they curse you out to your face imagining your well-intentioned gringo ass won't understand them, but you understand them perfectly and you take them aside to let them know that although they want to hurt you, they can't, and you'll always be there for them. But you also know, as damn well as they do, that you have no fucking clue what's going on inside them and outside, and sometimes it makes you feel, for a split second, as utterly disempowered and marginalized as they have their whole lives.

Clean Rivers (y otras cosas)

So since a couple of you insisted that I review (not resume) my stay in Río Limpio during the last week of February, I've complied.

Río Limpio is a small town close to the Haitian border, in Elías Piña province (the most isolated, deprived province of the D.R.), and in turn Río Limpio, for most of its existence, has been the most isolated and deprived municipality of the most isolated and deprived province. That's been changing, however. Ever since a few beneficent Peace Corps volunteers established CREAR, the agricultural-technical high school in 1980 (?), Río Limpio has surged forward (at a typically Dominican snail's pace, but nonetheless). The town is home to several NGO's, some international and some local, which have done a great job at involving a great deal of townies. Additionally, CEDDIEL (one of the Dominican NGO's, whose initials are so verbose I forget what they stand for) has established an ecotourism complex with several roomy and relatively comfortable cabins for foreigners, where I stayed with my group. The eight of us spread across four rooms of a large cabin made for an unforgettable bonding experience, with each other as well as with a multitude of frogs who call the bathrooms home.

During our six days there we learned how to make fertilizer (in a process that eerily resembled lasagna or shepherd's pie), learned different organically agricultural technqiues, under the tutelage of Don Domingo Alcántara, one of the first graduates of CREAR and now a wise old (err...middle-aged) sage in the field of organic, sustainable, renewable agriculture. On the fourth day (Wednesday), God (Elaine) divided each of us up with different NGOs, and I went with Don Juanito to the CEDDIEL cooperative farm, which was a thoroughly heartening experience - not only are a great many Río Limpienses employed by the cooperative, but they're also working under two female overseers (only after spending two months and a bit in the DR would that make any kind of impression). They have a timber plantation as well as a horticultural center, and they educate locals how to slash wood without burning it. Consequently slash-and-burn agriculture has been eradicated in the valley of Río Limpio, although it continues in the surrounding mountains. One of Don Juanito's major concerns, as head honcho of CEDDIEL, is to make sure people stop moving into the nearby national park (Nalgas de Maco ["Toad's Butt"] knocked out of commission by Hurricane Georges over ten years ago) and, well, slashing it down and burning it up.

Along with all that boring stuff, we got to know some of the CREAR students a little, who were shy but awfully friendly once they opened up. For once I felt like I could really share myself with people whose experience is so fundamentally different from my own.

Since returning to civilization, I've been busy. I've started my investigation in El Fracatán almost in earnest, going to many different people's homes and chatting it up (Dona Gloria, for example, served me the best coffee I've tasted here so far). It always amazes me how warm they are and how open and ready they are to receive us gringos/Spaniards/rich Dominicans.

Anywho, I hope this fulfills your expectations.

Hasta próximo!

More apologies...

For any of you who might be concerned, I'm not dead. I left my heart and soul in the campo near the Haitian border last week, where I (unsurprisingly) had no internet access, and lately I've just been procrastinating updating this thing because I don't know what I should blog about next. I almost can't be bothered to resume the entirety of last week, but if y'all are curious, I guess I can do that...

So, please comment if:

- You wanna read about the rural stay in Rio Limpio

- You wanna read about something else