May 1, 2002 "Peace Corps Hades"

So, I'm back in Santo Domingo for the next two weeks, and I have semi-regular email access again. Expect individual responses to your messages of love, prayer, and support by Sunday at the latest. In the meantime, there's been a lot of crazy shit going down here since my last stale message a few days ago:

Like I mentioned last time, I finally know where I'm going to be working for the next two years. A tiny but beautiful pueblo in the mountains called Restauracion. Even the name makes me feel optimistic. My assignment packet says that my job will be to help run a new community center that has ten computers with Internet access, a television and VCR, the only four telephones in town, and something called a Telemedico system, which uses a webcam to put sick or injured campesinos in visual contact with volunteer doctors in other parts of the country so they can receive instructions on, say, how to remove a ruptured appendix with a machete. It hasn't been made clear to me yet who exactly is responsible for carrying out these instructions once they're given, but I personally expect to be too busy holding the webcam and fighting the urge to vomit.

Actually, not a whole lot about my job has been made clear to me yet, because the Dominican who is supposed to be my Project Partner, Eulalia Canela Vaquero (a fellow volunteer was nice enough to point out to me that his two surnames translate in English to "Cinnamon Cowboy" right before I met him, which made serious conversation difficult to say the least) has not shown a whole lot of interest in working with me so far. He was supposed to have picked me up in Santo Domingo on Wednesday to take me into Restauracion but never quite made it, so I had to get a bola with three Agroforestry volunteers and their partners, making eight of us in a pickup truck. Which wouldn't have been so bad except that the Dominicans had to stop every ten minutes or so. I swear we stopped at one gas station to use the bathrooms and then at another one ten minutes later... to, um, get gas. We also made stops to visit various friends and relatives, to buy sacks of platanos and chicharonnes (fried pig stomach), and sometimes, I think, just to piss me off. The only thing that made this bearable was that the scenery was so incredibly beautiful, and became even more so the closer we got to my future home, which we then bypassed so I could sleep in a cabin in the woods in the middle of a Dominican reforestation project. The next day the Cinnamon Cowboy was still nowhere to be found, so I ended up spending the next four days touring tree nurseries, driving around a National Forest, and learning how to make organic fertilizer out of goat manure and rice hulls. I didn't even know that rice had hulls.

During this time, I told one of the Dominican Forestry Project Partners that I used to be a graphic designer. He told me that they were beginning a project to use GPS devices to map out and inventory a huge area that had been recently designated as a National Forest. He showed me a software package they had been sent that used GPS coordinates to create maps that no one in his group knew how to use because 1) it was all in English and 2) none of them have computers. I, on the other hand, have access to a state-of-the-art, computer-filled community center, at least in theory. So it looks like I might already have a secondary project, which would be to spend weeks at a time mapping out sections of forest with the Forestry team. So I have that going for me, which is nice. Now I just have to get into the center, unbox everything, get all the equipment working, learn all the software, and I'll be ready to go. It's just too bad I don't really know anything about computers. The night we discussed this project, I found a large scorpion in my bed, so I'm taking that as an omen that everything is going to work out for the best. Don't worry, I took a picture before I squashed it.

While we were making the rounds of projects that have nothing to do with Information Technology, we took a side trip into Haiti. I've been close to Haiti a few times, but this was the first time I've actually crossed the border. The volunteers who work there call it "Peace Corps Hades." Now I know why. Dominican kids always beg me for pesos. That can be annoying. The kids in Haiti kept begging us for WATER. That just about killed me. It really is a pretty hellish place. The landscape has been almost completely stripped of trees. You can actually see where the border is from miles away because the Dominican side is all lush and green and the Haitian side is like a desert. The deforestation in Haiti is so severe, I was told, that the climate of the entire island has been affected and rain in Haiti is becoming pretty scarce. People still live in huts made of sticks and mud. It was exactly like pictures I've seen of Africa. It was hard to believe that what I was seeing was real. But then again, I didn't see any trucks with gigantic speakers driving around and blaring merengue either, so maybe it's not all that bad.

Okay, time's running out for today, but I still have a lot more for you. Watch out for part 2. Hasta la vista y nos vemos. Dave