May 11, 2003

I am the god of Hellfire, and I bring you platanos

I'm back in the Dominican Republic after a two-week visit to the USA. I know I'm back in the DR because right after I got off the plane I got into an ugly shouting match with a cab driver who tried to raise his fare on me by 200 pesos after we pulled out of the airport. I ended up making him turn around and take me back to the airport so I could find another cab, and I'm especially proud of myself for having managed to form the phrase "I'm no tourist, don't fuck with me, sir" correctly in Spanish. So now I'm stuck in the capital for a few days while I have my one-year medical exams done. I've been thoroughly checked for worms, tuberculosis, and testicular irregularities. I even visited a Dominican dentist to have my teeth cleaned, which wasn't all that different from seeing an American dentist except that his electric cleaning tool kept jamming and he had to jumpstart it every minute or so by whacking it, Fonzie-style, without removing it from my mouth.

Here's an excerpt from an MSN Messenger chat from before my trip to the U.S. with a fellow volunteer:

DAVE dice: So, I've got this Costa Rican living in my house.

DAVE dice: Also, I found a pair of bloody panties in my latrine yesterday.

RICK dice: Yeah yeah so this Costaricense...eh? eh? eh?

DAVE dice: No, no, his wife of one month threw him out of the house and burned all his clothes.

RICK dice: Women, can't live with em, can't shoot em.

DAVE dice: So anyway, somehow this guy has ended up moving in with me.

RICK dice: Is that a good thing?

DAVE dice: Probably not. Hard to say since I don't actually know him that well.

RICK dice: You need to take control of the situation or at least send in (PCDR Country Director Anita Friedman) "The Hammer".

DAVE dice: Well, maybe, but on the other hand he does know lots of good card tricks.

RICK dice: That's probably a short sighted benefit.

DAVE dice: Yeah, I guess I can see what you mean. But it is pretty funny seeing him walking around town in my Jon Spencer Blues Explosion t-shirt.

RICK dice: Youre getting walked all over, aren't you?

DAVE dice: Did I mention the bloody panties?

RICK dice: He was wearing bloody panties AND your JSBX shirt? ha ha

DAVE dice: Actually, it was the Costa Rican guy who found the panties in the latrine, which makes me a little suspicious. Anyway I guess thats why my duena told me I should always keep the latrine locked.

This guy, whose name, oddly enough, was "Brian," has since skipped town with 100 pesos of my money, 500 pesos of Josh and Chrissie's, a pair of my jeans and my Jon Spencer Blues Explosion t-shirt. He left the panties.

Other random highlights/happenings:
I came home from an hour of saying Spanish rosaries at my landlady's father's funeral a few weeks ago and found a large dead dog in my yard. My neighbor Luche came over and wanted to know what I was going to do about it. I tried to convince her that the dog was just sleeping and that it would be best not to disturb it, but she correctly pointed out that the job of getting rid of the carcass was only going to become more unpleasant as time passed. Unfortunately, she didn't offer to help. Digging the hole in the woods was the easy part. Getting the dog into the hole without touching him was trickier. I wrapped the corpse in one of the curtains my landlady had given me when I moved into the house, dragged the bundle to the hole, dumped him in and gave him a good Christian burial. No rosary though.

A volunteer friend who lives in the campo just told me a story about improvising birthday candles for another friend's party by melting crayons into a suppository applicator tube from her medical kit. She swears the tube had not been used for any other purpose prior to that. Go Peace Corps ingenuity!

Being stuck in the capital as I am, I was hanging out in the office library yesterday and found a copy of National Geographic from 1964 with a long article about the brand-new Peace Corps. Part of the article covered the training process of new volunteers, which included rock climbing, hog butchering, and an "optional" exercise where trainees had their hands and feet bound and were thrown into 10 feet of water to recover objects with their teeth. I shit you not.

Chrissie, Josh and I took Chrissie's youth group on a field trip to one of the tree nurseries belonging to the local reforestation project, where they spent about an hour working, and about two hours complaining about working. Then we camped out in the woods, in a leaky tent, in the middle of a tropical monsoon. Actually... the less said about this experience, the better. So more chat:

DAVE dice: I swear to god the discoteca down the road is playing "Hard Candy Christmas" by Dolly Parton.

RICK dice: Well. I've had a fairly productive week. How bout you?

DAVE dice: Well, I've started helping out at a community clinic in Haiti once a week, so I feel pretty good about that.

RICK dice: sellout

DAVE dice: This week I learned how to give someone a shot in the ass.

RICK dice: !!!

DAVE dice: Yeah, the Haitians have no shame. They just drop their pants wherever. I'm sure you remember everyone peeing in the street in Port-au-Prince.

RICK dice: And I've got the pictures to prove it.

I and a few other PCVs have been working with a community across the border in Haiti called Tilory for the last couple of months, trying to help them organize and raise funds to dig much-needed latrines, make sawdust-burning stoves, eventually build an acueduct and a new clinic, and possibly to produce crafts to sell to the pasty European tourists who are bussed over from the resort town of Puerto Plata every day apparently just to gape at poor people, of which there is no shortage. I've been helping out at the existing "clinic," which is actually just a dilapidated wooden shed. I fill syringes with penicillin, check patients' blood pressure and temperature, clean up, distribute medicine, and do any heavy lifting that needs doing. We supply vitamins to pregnant women, antibiotics for common infections, and treat a lot of sick and severely malnourished kids. As you might imagine, it's been a good bit more fulfilling than teaching uninterested Dominicans how a mouse works, even though I recently picked up a pretty nasty skin infection there. But at least it was in the service of a noble cause and I wear the scars on my butt with pride.

Having made the obligatory mention of my butt, I can now progress to the serious portion of this email. Although our long-term plan is to raise enough funds both privately and through NGO grants to build a brand-new clinic with beds and a generator, in the short term we are desperately in need of basic supplies, equipment and medicines. I met the Haitian nurse who runs the current clinic, Clemencia Profeta, in the back of a truck while I was hitchhiking along the border. She's employed by the Haitian government but often has to buy medicine with her own money, of which she has very little, when supplies run low. A lot of you have been really great about sending me care packages and some of you even asked me while I was in the States what else I might need. So I'm just thinking, maybe in lieu of mailing me all those Little Debbies, Q-tips, and pornography, some of you might like to help some people who really need it? My amigo Josh Mayer and his lovely and talented wife Jill have already kindly offered to collect any donations Stateside and forward them to Santo Domingo. Josh is fairly trustworthy for someone with a telephone in his bathroom who works in advertising, so if any of you are feeling generous, fundage can be sent thusly:

Josh Mayer/Tilory Project
c/o Peter Mayer Advertising
324 Camp Street
New Orleans, LA 70130

I can also send a list of the needed supplies/equipment to anyone who's interested and would prefer sending stuff to sending money. Email me with any questions, doubts, or comentarios.

Love you long time, Dave

DAVE dice: So I've decided to transcribe portions of this conversation into my next dispatch. You may want to try to be wittier.

RICK dice: What is interesting enought to transcribe? I can't imagine anyone else being entertained by this. Just let me see a rough draft ok?

DAVE dice: Don't worry, I'll take out the boring parts. Like this one.