May 27, 2002 "Two Pits, No Waiting"

Hola amigos, My first two weeks as a real Peace Corps volunteer have come and gone, and I've moved all my belongings (two backpacks and a duffelbag) into my very own house. After three months of living with assorted Dominican families, having my own place has done wonders for my mental health. Of course now all the Dominicans think I'm insane because I'd rather live alone than share a bunk in someone's storage closet with twelve other people, but that's why I'm in the Peace Corps. To expose these people to crazy new ideas. And I have to say that my new house rocks. It's like living in a tree house. I have an outdoor shower stall and a double-seater latrine all to myself. I'm living the dream. I bring my battery charger to the community center during the day so I can run my tape player, flashlight, and short-wave radio in the evenings. I have a gas-powered camp stove and a hose that runs through the kitchen window so I can wash my dishes in a bucket. The place even came with a bed, a table, some chairs, and a bunch of old black & white photos on the walls of babies in frilly church dresses and men in Dominican army uniforms. They belonged to the previous occupant and the landlady offered to take them down but I think they make the place more homey. What else could I possibly need?

The whole name thing has backfired on me. I had decided that rather than come up with a nickname for myself, I was just going to make the Dominicans call me "Dave" and like it. I don't use the English pronunciations of their names, and I thought I was deserving of the same courtesy. This turned out to be more of a struggle than I was up to. The closest anyone managed to get to saying my name right was "Jayfe." My third day here, I was trying to get one of the Donas to spit it out and after the fifth try she said "Daniel is a nice name." It took about an hour for this (pronounced in Dominican as "Don-YELL,") to catch on all over Restauracion and now even the other volunteers in town are calling me by my new Dominican apodo. I'm not exactly crazy about it, but it's still a hell of a lot better than "Dah-VEED," which makes my butt clench up every time I hear it. So I'm just going along with it, and I think everyone concerned is glad to have this particular issue behind us at last.

I guess since I'll probably be mentioning them a lot, I should stop calling Josh and Chrissi "the other volunteers in town" and start calling them by their names. Josh and Chrissi. They're a married couple from Asheville, NC. He's in Agroforestry, she's in Environmental Education. They were both in my training group so we're all trying to figure out what we're doing here at the same time.

On Friday we went to the Haitian market in Dajabon to pick up supplies for the week. We were there for about ten minutes when Josh got his wallet stolen with 40 pesos and his Peace Corps badge inside. I came away with a dozen eggs, a bag of potatoes, two mashed tomatoes, and a used cheese grater, for all of which the Haitians tried to charge me about five times more than the normal price. It gets a little exhausting having to haggle over every single purchase, but because my skin is white no one here seems to understand or believe that I'm just as poor as they are. At least temporarily I am, which I know isn't the same but the point is that I can't really afford to pay six dollars for an avocado. The selection at the market was pretty disappointing, but you have to take what you can get out here, which isn't much. I can't keep much food in my house anyway since I have no way of keeping it cold, but I've found I can survive pretty well on whatever the street vendors happen to pass by my house with on any given day. Pineapples, oranges, arrepitas (corn fritters), eggs, canteloupes, little bags of popcorn for a peso, and sometimes a guy even rides through town on a motorcycle from Loma de Cabrera with a cooler full of half-melted ice cream bars. That's always a treat. The Peace Corps nurse probably warned us about a dozen times that food from street vendors can be full of germs, parasites, malaria and ebola, but then she doesn't have to live in the middle of nowhere. And it's really not that bad. Sometimes one of the neighborhood Donas will take pity on me and invite me to her house for lunch so I can get my rice and beans fix. So I'm not starving yet.

My orders from Peace Corps are to spend the first three months at my site just kind of hanging out and getting to know the community before I start doing any real work or decide what kind of projects I'm going to get involved with. So I usually spend a few hours a day at the community center trying to make things work and writing email, and then spend the rest of my time walking around, talking to people, reading, listening to tapes, and working on my own little project at night, which is burning candles in beer bottles until they're completely covered with wax drippings. I've had worse jobs. I've met with people who want help building a library in town, which sounds like a good Peace Corps kind of thing to do, but most people just want me to teach them English, so I'll also probably try to get a class together soon.

I'm slowly getting to know my neighbors. On Saturday morning I looked out my back door and couldn't help but notice that one of my neighbors was butchering a goat in my yard with a kitchen knife. He did a really bad job of it too, and the screaming went on for several minutes before the thing actually died. Goats make a really horrible sound when they're in pain. Then my vecino started hanging the carcass up by its neck from one of my trees and I just lost it. I forgot everything the Peace Corps taught me about being a good neighbor and being culturally sensitive. I was furious. I ran outside and yelled at my neighbors in my bad spanish until I was red in the face and told them, to summarize, that this was just not acceptable and if they were going to be killing goats they were damn well going to be doing it in their own yard. They didn't seem to understand what the problem was, but the goat was removed and apologies were made. When I calmed down a little I went back and knocked on their door and talked to the Don of the house and told him I was sorry, and that I didn't mean to offend him or his family, but that I just could not have goats being killed in my back yard. It was never explained to me why they had decided to use my yard in the first place, but the Don promised me it would never happen again. The silver lining, I guess, is that he invited me into his house and I sat with him and his wife and kids and grandkids and we talked for a while and got to know each other a little better. It turns out that the Don (Dominicans never say their names when they introduce themselves so I never got his) is a pretty nice guy and easy to talk to. One of his daughters had a baby on her knee and she said, "I don't blame you at all, I don't like to see them killing goats either. I sure do like to eat them, though." That's when she got up to change the baby and I saw the very large pistol in the back pocket of her jeans.

My neighbors on the other side of my house are no picnic either. The very first thing the Don said to me when we met was "give me 15 pesos so I can buy some rum." I guess that was his way of welcoming me to the neighborhood. There is a 16-year-old kid named Robert who lives two houses down from me who's pretty cool. He comes over sometimes and hangs out and teaches me Dominican card games. He's really interested in computers so he comes to the community center every day and I show him how to use email and find pictures of Manute Bol on the Internet.

It's considered rude in the DR to keep your front door closed. Most people sit in front of their houses all night and wait for people to pass by and visit them. The problem with this is that whenever I leave my door open, my house fills up with kids. Then they all want to play with my stuff, and I try to be nice to them until one of them breaks or spills something, and then I chase them all out and close the door and they stand at my window and stare at me for an hour or so until they get bored and leave. Then I open my door and the whole process starts all over again. It would be nice if sooner or later the novelty of having me in the neighborhood wore off and the kids stopped screaming "AMERICANO" at me every single goddamned time I walked by, but I haven't seen any signs of this happening yet. And then there's the hissing. Have I mentioned this before? This is how Dominicans get someone's attention. They hiss. Loud. It's not meant to be rude here, but it's the most irritating sound I've ever heard in my life. It doesn't help that everyone on the street always wants to get my attention for no reason other than to make the gringo look. Now my worst fear is that I will somehow pick up this habit over the next two years and go back to the states and start hissing at waitresses when I want a refill on my iced tea.

I'm heading back to the capital for about a week on the 3rd, so I'll be checking my mail for mix tapes. Some ziploc bags and instant oatmeal would be really nice if someone happens to be putting together a care package. Come on, you're rich Americans. You can afford it. Paz, Dave