April 29, 2002 "I was peace corps when Peace corps wasn't cool. "

***This message is about two weeks old, but there was a blackout before I could finish and send it, so it's been sitting on the Backpacker e-mail server since then waiting for me to do something with it. So here it is:***

I know there are at least a dozen people that I owe email to, and I will email all of you when I can, but for now I am still hitchiking to another town a couple of times a week to beg for a little computer time here and there, so please be patient.

What's hitchiking like here, you ask? Is it safe? Usually it's pretty easy for gringos to catch a bola (free ride) out in the campo, especially if one of the female volunteers is with us. It's not a bad way to travel, as long as you don't mind sharing the back of a flatbed truck with a few dozen Dominicans, a ton or so of produce, or whatever livestock is being carried into town to end up on your dinner plate that night.

As a former vegetarian, I'm still a little uncomfortable with knowing my food so intimately and I plan to give up meat again as soon as I don't have to rely on other people to cook for me anymore. Yesterday I saw a live goat hanging from the trunk of a moving car by a rope around his legs. It looked incredibly painful and I'm sure he was thinking that somehow a terrible mistake had been made. I also recently saw a kid about ten years old on the street swinging around a dead bird whose legs he had tied together with string like it was a toy. My Spanish failed me like it always does when these things happen and all I could think to yell after him was "Y POR QUE??" He just laughed at me and dragged the bird's head on the sidewalk. Little fucker. Did I say I loved the kids here?

I will start sending pictures in a few weeks, but in the meantime here's a few things I've seen that I wish I had taken a picture of but didn't have my camera:
-A little naked boy on a dirt road popping a bullwhip at passing motorcycles. Kids love bullwhips here. They're like the Dominican equivalent of Frisbees or something.
-A blind-drunk Dominican campesino doing some kind of surreal interpretive dance routine to the Archies' "Sugar Sugar" in front of a bar. I guess I would have had to capture this on video to truly do it justice, and I wish I could say this was some kind of freak occurence, but oddly, there are only three American artists who get any airplay on Dominican radio: Britney Spears, Air Supply, and the Archies. Some days I suspect that I've actually died and gone to Hell.
-An elderly Dona carrying a huge bucket of water on her head, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette and wearing a t-shirt that said "Masturbation Is Not A Crime" in English. Tons of American T-shirts come down here and to Haiti through various relief organizations and I have to think that someone could be doing a much better job of screening them for content. My first week here I saw a very sweet-looking old lady wearing one that said "Shut Up Stupid Bitch" in huge block letters. I don't make this stuff up, y'all. I don't even have to embellish.

I'd like to say a little bit more about the music here, if I may. The music here blows. Bachata is all right, but I've found that a little bit of it goes a long, long way with me. And yes, I know I constantly pissed and moaned about music in the States, but the difference here is this: In the Dominican Republic, you literally can't go anywhere and not hear this music played at full volume. You just can't. Every public place, every bus, every public car, every truck that picks you up is equipped with refrigerator-sized speakers with no off switch. As I'm writing this, the walls of the lab are vibrating slightly from the force of some merengue song or other being blasted from the back of a pickup a block away. The Dominican senatorial elections are coming up in a week or so. I haven't yet seen or heard any candidates campaigning, but each of the major parties (there are five that I can count) hires trucks with their names painted on the sides to drive through town all day at random intervals and broadcast top-40 radio at earth-quaking volume. This goes on until around 11 or 12 every night and I think it's the reason that no one in this town has glass in their windows. I don't think I can overstress this point: this country is insanely f-ing loud.

I feel like I've spent more time than usual in this letter bitching, so I guess I need to think of some positive things to say before I close. Umm...

***That's as far as I got when the power went out, and now I can't seem to remember what I was going to say. Something about one of the kids I'd been teaching giving a speech on behalf of her Youth Group about how we've changed her life and given her hope that things will get better in her country, and then everyone started crying, etc. But I need to finish up here soon, so I'm just going to wrap this up. I promise to write to everyone ASAP, whenever that is. One more thing: I've been assigned to a community called Restauracion, it's in the mountains, it's on the Haitian border, it's very remote, and it's beautiful. In two weeks I'll be packing my bags and moving there for the next two years. I'll give lots more details next time.*** Dave