June 18, 2002 "Caga fuego, guardar fosforos"

Q: How many Peace Corps volunteers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Just one, but he needs to have about fourteen kids standing in the doorway watching him the entire time. I had one kid, about eight, try to follow me into the shower last week. He couldn't seem to grasp why I wasn't really comfortable with that. People say kids watch too much TV, but I'm not sure that kids whose parents can't afford televisions are really much better off if this is all they're going to do with their free time.

I myself have discovered shortwave radio at home, and I'm hooked. I spend a lot of evenings just listening to shortwave and eating mangos while I wait for visitors. "Hello Tokyo" (7-9pm Saturday on 5995/49m) is my favorite. The announcer's stilted, awkward English gives me some insight into what I must sound like whenever I try to speak Spanish to my neighbors. Which is to say, hilarious. Speaking of Japanese people, I met a volunteer from the Japanese version of the Peace Corps last weekend. I was hanging out in a town on the coast called Manzanillo for a few days and she had come over from her site for a visit. She didn't speak any English so we could only communicate in Spanish, a second language for both of us. For some reason I thought that was pretty cool. We hung out on the beach drinking rum and playing dominoes with some other PC volunteers and some French guy who only spoke French and Spanish, and one day we roasted a pig in the sand, and some Dominican guy came by and gave us all a ride around the bay in his motorboat. Yeah. It's tough to be in the Peace Corps. I didn't eat any of the pig.

So now I'm back home in Restauracion, and I have to say that my goat-killing neighbors next door rock. They totally look out for me. Apparently they, like most of the town, have this idea that because I'm not married, I must be some kind of helpless idiot. As Don Urena from two houses down told me today when he dropped by with a cold orange soda and two packs of crackers for me, "A man alone, with no woman, he suffers. Ah, si... He suffers. Have some crackers." Sometimes the Dona next door sends one of her kids over with an entire home-cooked meal. Another Dona in town does my laundry every week, which I pay her for, of course, but whenever I go to pick it up she insists on cooking for me. What am I supposed to do?

I was eating rice and beans with yet another Dona, Rosa, the other day (she had just kind of dragged me, a stranger, into her house from the street because I looked hungry, she said) and after a few minutes an old man wearing slacks and a tie came in and sat down at the table. Rosa told me to ignore him, he was just the town mute. I told him good morning.

"Good morning," said the mute.

"Oh, he tries to talk, but it just sounds like a lot of noise," Rosa told me. "Blah, blah, blah. HE'S DEAF, TOO." She shouted this last part at the mute like she was afraid he might have forgotten how deaf he was. Then, in a normal voice, she asked him, "Do you want to eat something, Mute?"

"Yes, thank you very much," the mute said in clearer Spanish than half of the people in this pueblo usually manage. Rosa stood behind him and made crazy faces at me, rolling her eyes to show me how exasperating it was to try to communicate with the handicapped. I tried to look sympathetic. Apparently everyone in town just calls this guy "Mudo," which is Spanish for mute. I've noticed that Dominicans love to give nicknames to everyone, but to be honest, they just aren't very creative about it. For example, if a guy is really fat, his nickname is probably El Gordo, or "the fat guy." But everyone will call him this to his face. And he won't mind at all. He will go to parties and introduce himself as "the fat guy." This, I think, is an important difference between Dominicans and Americans. Say you work in an American office, and you have a co-worker who weighs 400 pounds sitting in the same room as you, and you're trying to describe him over the phone to someone who hasn't met him. You would say something like, "You know Bob, he has dark hair, a mustache, works in accounting..." A Dominican would just say, "You know Bob. The big huge fat guy."

Someone (Christy Bracken) asked me recently what "Restauracion" meant. It turns out there's a pretty interesting story behind the name that makes me feel a lot less optimistic about spending two years here than I did when I just knew it was Spanish for "restoration." I apologize to those of you who have already heard this one. Here it is again. The Dominican Republic was occupied by Haiti for about 30 years in the early to mid-1800s, until the Dominicans won their independence in the 1840s. I'm kind of fuzzy on dates here but bear with me. The story gets better. When the Dominicans drove out the Haitians, a lot of Haitians stayed in this region where I live, called Dajabon, and over the years it just sort of became accepted as Haitian territory. Then in the 1960s, the Dominican dictator Trujillo got a bug up his ass about getting all the Haitians out of the country, including the ones who owned land and whose families had been there for over 100 years. So he sent the army to Dajabon where they massacred about 18,000 unarmed Haitians and "restored" the border to where it had been prior to the Haitian occupation, along a river that's now called "Rio Masacre." Trujillo was so proud of himself for saving his country from the Haitian menace that he had a monument built to himself in Dajabon, a smaller version of which is right outside of my town, which renamed itself Restauracion. Makes me very proud to live here.

The Haitians still come into the town of Dajabon once a week to sell whatever comes off of the foreign aid trucks in a big flea market kind of thing, which is where all the obscene American t-shirts come from. I got a pretty cool tie-dye there for ten pesos, and they usually have some great avocados. The problem is you have to get there before 11am, because that's when the market closes and the Dominican army shows up and beats all the Haitians that haven't left yet with sticks and billy clubs. We can't have them loitering over on this side. If I haven't mentioned this before, the Dominicans don't much care for Haitians.

I had to spend most of the week before last at a conference held by the Dominican Secretary of Education, near the capital, where I was more than a little dismayed to learn that the Dominicans have discovered and adopted the 21st century's version of the Chinese Bamboo-under-the-fingernails Torture, i.e. the Power Point Presentation. So they can't have running water in their homes, or make the electricity work more than half the time, or pave the roads. They sure as hell can make pages of rainbow-colored buzzwords and catch-phrases dance across a screen while they simultaneously read them to you verbatim in a monotone. Now that's what I call progress. Power Point... I guess there's no escaping it. I'm thinking about sneaking into the community center one night and erasing our copy and burning the disk and manual. No one here is using it yet. They're still blissfully unaware of its existence. I think destroying it would be the greatest service I could do for this country. Wish me luck. I'm going in.