October 28, 2002 "It's getting hard to come up with titles for these things..."

I'm still trying to track down Doug Whyte, if anybody has any clues for me. By popular demand, here's the complete playlist of the winning tape:

Side One: Al Green- I'm a Ram Olu Dara- Your Lips Shuggie Otis- Sweet Thang Lyle Lovett- Since The Last Time JJ Cale- The Woman That Got Away Tony Joe White- 300 Pounds of Hongry Kris Kristofferson- Border Lord Willie Nelson- Blue Skies Soggy Bottom Boys- I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow Buena Vista Social Club- Chan Chan Bill Frisell- Good Day, Happy Man Leo Kottke- Part Two Nick Drake- Road

Side Two: Al Green- Jesus is Waiting Mofro- Blackwater Papa Mali- Keep Happy 16 Horsepower- Ruthie Lingle Ali Farka Toure/Ry Cooder- Lasidian Rebekah Del Rio- Llorando David Lynch- Pretty 50s Thomas Newman- Dead Already The Dining Rooms- Pure & Easy St. Germain- What You Think About... Garage A Trois- FCR Theme

And now, an illuminating anecdote: During Peace Corps training, one of the first people who spoke to us was an American who had been a PC volunteer and then married a Dominican woman and decided to stay in the country. He's the one that started the school where volunteers in the DR are now trained. He was telling us about Dominican culture and told us a story about his wife picking up the phone, talking to a friend and becoming completely hysterical in a matter of seconds. He thought a family member had died, or at least lost a limb or something. It turned out that his wife was gossiping about another friend who had started seeing a different hairdresser. The point of the story was that Dominicans are an emotional people. And we all laughed and I'm sure we all thought something like, "Why, these Dominicans sound just charming. I can't wait to spend the next two years of my life completely surrounded by them." Well, that's what I thought, anyway.

The Dominicans are such an emotional people that I have to sleep with earplugs every night. Sometimes even that doesn't help. One of my neighbors in particular, "The Screamer," likes to get crazy drunk around three or four in the morning and walk the streets of Restauracion yelling, crying, and howling for hours at a time. He yells about his mujer, his kids, and whatever else he can think of. The strange part is that no matter how long this goes on, none of the other neighbors will say anything. No one tells him to keep it down, which is especially surprising since Dominicans rarely miss a chance to yell out their windows at someone on the slightest pretext. The neighbors would normally rather stand in front of their houses and scream across the street at each other all day and night than actually go visit one another.

Another fun fact we learned in training: The Dominican Republic is the "third-loudest country in the world." When I write things like this, I always feel like it's necessary to add that I really, honestly, am not making this shit up. I don't know what agency is responsible for measuring these things or what kind of criteria they use, but I do know I need to find out what the two louder countries are are so I can avoid them like the fucking plague.

Last Saturday my neighbor Diogenes decided to stand in the middle of my street with a megaphone to inform everyone in shouting distance that they were doomed to burn in the lake of Hellfire. I got out of bed and told Diogenes to shut up. He said he'd be glad to discuss the Lord with me when he was finished haranguing the neighbors. I told him nobody wanted to hear his crap, "everyone" of course meaning "me." He said it didn't matter if no one listened to him. He wasn't doing this for them, he was doing it for Jesus. He also logically pointed out that if he waited until later, people would start playing music and making noise and they wouldn't be able to hear him and who would save their immortal souls then? He had a point there. But I still told him he was full of shit. I don't know if that phrase really translates well, so just in case I added that the next time he woke me up at 7am I would start throwing rocks. I think any good Peace Corps volunteer would have done the same. Luckily most of my neighbors are Catholics and they backed me up. I think most of them had hangovers from the night before.

We recently had a surprise visit at the center from the American ambassador to the DR and about 50 members of his entourage and a TV news crew. Apparently they were visiting a bunch of development projects along the border and just decided to drop by. I gave an interview in Spanish for the Dominican Channel 39 and have no idea what I said. Something about walking hand in hand with the Dominican people down the road of development, I think. Maybe you caught it on satellite. The ambassador took me and Chrisi and Josh to lunch in Rio Limpio, about 40 minutes away and gave us his gold-embossed card. He was really a very nice guy, and he was super excited because he had just had his driver stop at some poor Dominican campo family's mud hut so he could go inside and "see how they lived." Picture this: You're sitting on your dirt floor eating rice and beans and a fleet of a dozen brand new Land Rovers pulls up to your house and a fat white guy in Dockers and a golf shirt gets out and says "Hey, can I look in your house and, uh, see how you live?" Ah, I'm never at a loss for entertainment here.

I went to a Fiesta de Palos yesterday with Chrisi. A Fiesta de Palos is, as far as we can tell, the only time that Dominicans actually acknowledge that they have any African roots at all. They play drums and chant and everybody just dances kind of crazy. I met a funny guy there named Maki. He knew some Kreyol and he taught me some new words by writing them in the dust with his finger. After a while he started telling me about his kids and how sick they were. Since I didn't understand the Spanish word for it, he explained to me with sign language that one of his boys had elephantiasis of the groin, which would have been kind of a funny situation except that it wasn't. I didn't even know that elephantiasis was a sickness that people still got in this half of the world. I felt really bad that there was nothing I could do to help him. When he left, Chrisi said "Don't you know who that was? That was The Screamer. He's the guy that keeps us awake at night yelling and crying about his wife and kids." I said well I'll be God damned.

I was also visited last week for a few days by a Swedish college student named Manne who's doing research on the uses of technology in third-world development work. The day he was going to leave, I took him into Haiti to see the market at Tiroli a few miles away from Restauracion. While we were waiting to get a ride back home in the back of a truck full of corn, we saw a Haitian get arrested by a group of armed thugs that another Haitian told me were Tonton Macoutes. The Tonton Macoutes were the secret police force of the Duvalier regimes years ago. They were infamous for abitrarily arresting, torturing, and killing citizens who were seen as a threat to the Duvaliers, "Papa Doc" and "Baby Doc." They were supposedly dissolved after Aristide was elected president and then later replaced by several other so-called police groups, so I'm not sure if these guys were really Tonton Macoutes. They were basically just a gang with guns and no uniforms. After they put their victim in the back of their car they started shoving the crowd back with their rifles and getting pretty rough for no apparent reason except that they could. I wasn't too worried since I've found that I generally am left alone when things like this happen. Fortunately for me, as a white person I'm not, as Graham Greene put it, "a member of the torturable class." But the implications of this are too much to get into in a lighthearted newsletter such as this one, so I'll leave it there.

After the "police" left, we climbed into the truck and a group of Haitians walked by and I could tell they were talking about us and laughing because I kept hearing the word "blanc." Not in a bad way, I think it was just that when they woke up that morning they weren't really expecting to see an American and a Swede ride past them on top of a pile of big sacks of corn. Manne said I should say something to them, just so they would know I spoke some Kreyol and so maybe they would think we had understood whatever it was they had said about us. So when we drove off I waved to them and yelled the first thing I could think of, which was "Deye mon, gen mon." That means, "Behind the mountain, there's another mountain," but I'm pretty sure the deep meaning I was going for was lost on them because they just laughed at us more and waved back.

I'm leaving Restauracion to spend a week in the capital of Haiti tomorrow so I may be out of touch during that time. Nobody (Mom) panic, ok? If I'm not back by next Tuesday, Peace Corps will send a Black Hawk chopper full of US Marines to go fetch me.

Dave