As Good as it Gets

A sobering thought today: what if I am never this happy again? It's not as if I am bubbling over with joy every minute of every day, but I am completely and utterly content and I will ache for this place when I leave next Tuesday. What if this is As Good as it Gets? I know I could not be content if I stayed. I cannot live as a tourist the rest of my life, but I can't help but dread minus fifty in Winnipeg next winter. There is so much I want to take, with me but these are things that cannot be transplanted. The way I live is about to change and I'm not sure if I'm ready yet.

From one perspective this country is a grid locked, noisy, smelly, polluted, exploited, and often corrupted place. I have perhaps shown too much of that. It is its breathless beauty that impacts me most often. There is no shyness about it. This island's opulence and melodramatic side is embraced at every turn. Some may say that I'm a cynical person, who loves no literary devise more than irony, so, why will I miss this place?: Because they play the Chariots of Fire theme at graduation and everyone takes it very seriously. Because the students come with extravagant and useless gifts for the teachers. Because everyone is snapping photos and signing each others' shirts on the last day of school. Because the students' laughter, curiosity, and boldness is irrepressible. Because frozen Chinola fruit bars on an unbelievably hot day are the truth. Because I cry every time I hear Bob Marley playing at a Colmado, partly because the people dancing do not understand the words. Because they cannot deny their unfiltered happiness, their desire to dance. Because rum is cheap and good. Because absolute strangers are saying thank-you to me and I don't know why. Because everyone says hello to you in the street. Because handshakes, hugs, kisses, and fist bumps really do make you feel human. Because Roberto reads his bible in the teacher's room. Because everything is redeemed. Because I'm starting to differentiate between bachatas. Because Dominicans put their hands over their hearts, unironically, for the national anthem. Because they play baseball in the streets. Because boys on 100cc bikes pop-a-wheely through intersections. Because the street dogs seem reasonably happy. Because it is a 1985 Corolla with holes in the floor and he still drives it like he stole it. Because each day is a holy litany of horns. Because they call their live in maids "Doña" and they are useless without her. Because mangoes are miracles. Because I must dance each time I go into a grocery store. Because the sun. Because the rain can fall so hard that the city is under water in a matter of minutes. Because it "makes me want to be a better person." Because it lets me be sentimental enough to believe that if I think positively I will be a better person.

Goodbye DR! I will try to miss you with the sentimental fervor you deserve. I hope I can bring some of your joy with me. I hope I will cry in the streets without shame. I hope I will yell if I feel like yelling - bah humbug to peace and quiet: "Chofer, turn up the music this is my last ride".

Colmados

They are a part of everyday life. It is impossible to imagine this as a North American, you need to experience it. There is the occasional trip to the grocery store, but every meal, party or day begins with a call to the Colmado. The 50cc motorcycles with milk crates attached in back and in front bring food and drink to every corner of the city: beer, ice, water, "refre[s]co", fruit, rice, eggs. If the beer isn't cold enough, send it back. They will reach into the freezer and pull up a Presidente, "dressed like a bride", put it in a paper bag and rush it to your door.

I don't call our Colmado. It is only half a block away so it is always faster to go there myself. Plus I don't have to pay the minutes on my phone if I walk. They still have soft drinks in glass bottles here. I have never liked drinking out of a plastic bottle, but since living here, I've developed a taste for pop. For RD$15 (about 40 cents) you can buy a 10oz bottle. It costs an extra five pesos if you want to take the bottle with you, so I always sit out in the sun on a plastic chair and put the bottle back on the counter when I'm done. This is what I will miss most about this country when I leave. It is a micro-managing community center that imagines the community as a block on a residential street. It is a never ending block party. It is a familiar face that asks if the white lady is your wife (when she walks by on her own they ask her to marry them, say that she needs to have a Dominican husband because they are better). It is the place to get ice when your fridge breaks for the third time in a month. (They reach for the cooler of ice as soon as they see you coming.) It is the first place you go when the power goes out, while the beer is still cold. It is a place to play Dominoes, dance, eat potato chips, be. It is the type of space that North Americans have abandoned for Wal-Mart and Costco. There are no made up names for Colmados, at least not many, because they are real places. It is a constant reminder to me that capitalism does not have to be completely inhuman, inhumane.

I remember when Simonite's Grocery closed when I was growing up in Thunder Bay. I didn't realize it then, but that was like a colmado. It was a place where neighbours bumped into each other, it defined our neighbourhood. There is something missing in a culture without corner stores. I want to be somewhere where no-one bats an eye when the favourite song comes on and the world stops spinning, to dance.

It Won't Change for Anyone

After eight months here I am believing more than ever, that there is nothing I can do to "fix it". The best I can do is to bear witness to "it" and enjoy the sunshine.

They warned Steph before she left Canada that the pace of life would be much slower here and that she should expect to be bored. This is very true. Corruption, disorganization and lawlessness are a part of every day life and they mean that it can take all day to do nothing. Traffic jams mean that people run out of gas idling their engines. It is not uncommon to see cars and motorcycles on side walks. There is no emergency response. Most children go to school for only two or three hours a day. It takes three hours to have lunch. The poor are at risk of malnutrition and all sorts of horrible disease. The rich go for days without interacting with their children. The middle class is almost non-existent. Then there is Haiti: a gut-wrenching example of how different brands of colonialism can leave one country relatively rich and another completely without any infrastructure. One person here who has been to Haiti a couple of times told us that they should have just started a new city after the earthquake hit. Billions of dollars have been invested and almost nothing has happened. If I went to "help" I would just be in the way, one more mouth to feed, like everyone else. The greatest hope seems to be getting people out of there. There are 2 million Haitians in the DR. I often wonder how many people our Haitian fruit guy could get out of Haiti with a couple hundred dollars. I guess I should ask him. There is so much here that I wish I could change, but it won't change for anyone.

And who am I to think I know what is best? Dominicans are way happier than Canadians. Life expectancy, literacy, education, health care and wealth don't seem to be all they are cracked up to be. From what I've seen here, it is more important to have music to dance to, lots of sunshine and fresh fruit than any of the things I value as a Canadian. As my friend the Rabbi says: "Who is rich? He who is satisfied with his lot. Who is poor? He who is not satisfied with his lot." I have never been in a country as rich as this. Life is celebrated every day. The whole country shuts down for a month at Christmas, Carnaval and Easter. Then in the summer it is too hot to think about doing anything other than going to the beach or drinking a cold beer.

In Spanish a fairly common response to the question "how are you?" is "conformed". It basically means, "fine" or "content". Am I too tightly wound to "conform" to the party atmosphere of this country? Yes. But if anything is going to come out of the time I have spent here it will have to be a change in me.

*The power has just flashed off, but this is not a surprise. The responsibility is on me to make sure I am ready for any turn of events. If I am lucky the changes that the DR has made in me will stick. My dreams for this place are irrelevant.

Dogs

They serve no purpose whatsoever in this country. They bark and they stink and they make this city uglier. To be fair, I'm mostly talking about the dogs that live next to us and I don't count chihuahuas as dogs, but they do seem particularly useless.

I would pity them if they were not so annoying. Our landlords have three dogs: Momma/Grandma, Son/Father/Brother, and deranged puppy. They can get onto the roof of their house and bark at us from a mere 3 feet away. This seems to be their favourite pass-time. They also trip on the cable and knock the TV out daily. So... we have to climb from our balcony onto their roof and plug it back in. We are armed with a stick in case "Pookito", emphasis on the "Poo", gets any ideas. We have tried to train them: they get rocks if they bark, crackers if they are quiet. However, they are so inbred that they can't seem to figure it out. After a good tongue lashing and a couple of small rocks they will usually charge down the stairs and chew on each other for a bit, but that seems to make them smell worse. The only washing they get is rain washing. But they hate the rain. They hide under a rusty corrugated steel roof. Instead of getting a thorough soaking, they just get damp and end up smelling like wet, unwashed dog.

Steph is probably thinking that I am being unfair to these unfortunate animals and as usual, she is probably right. You can never really blame an animal for its behaviour, especially when they never get any walks and the only time anyone pays attention to them is when they scream: "CALLATE!!!" Originally, they must have been intended as some sort of guard dogs because they do seem intimidating until you realize that they are much more frightened of you than you are of them. They are a hideous mixture of pit-bull and stupid. Momma/Grandma ("Pooka", also emphasis on the "Poo") must have some sort of cow in her. She is not big, but when she had her nine puppies (yes, nine) she must have been giving a gallon of milk a day. The udder on her was truly a thing to behold. "Jefe" (the deranged puppy) is one of that litter (emphasis on the double entendre). Steph does a great impression of his deranged bark. Despite the fact that "Pookito" was locked in the front yard for the better part of a month while "Pooka" was in heat, it seems she is with spawn once again, judging by the swelling of her udder.

In the interest of balance, I should perhaps mention the moments of cuteness. When I first get up in the morning they are often sleeping in one gloriously incestuous heap and you can't tell one from the other. "Pookito", despite the fact that he is the meanest, cocks his head to the side and raises one ear. I think he does this because he is trying to count the forks in his family tree and he discovers that it is actually a family plate of spaghetti.

I once heard a girl talking about how disgusting it was to see a man kiss his dog. Dogs are not pets here. I'm really not sure what they are. I guess they are just another domino that makes up the set of Dominican culture.

Making hot hotter

It may have been the slowest 10km race I have ever run in my life (by 10 minutes), but I was proud coming across that line.

There are four thousand people crowded into coral. It is well over 50 degrees Celsius with the humidity and the gun is half an hour late. Nobody knows when it will start, but we have heard the theme from "Chariots of Fire" three times. Here comes the anthem and, finally, the gun goes off. we shuffle across the line, anxious to get some sort of breeze.

After a couple of minutes I pass the man who is hopping 10km. He has one leg and one arm. If this guy can do it in the heat, so can I. It is one long circuit along the Atlantic Ocean, but at this time of year and at 4:30 in the afternoon, the breeze offers little relief from the heat. Luckily there is water or Gatorade at every kilometer mark. I'm only able to skip one or two.

You would think running slower is less painful . I've run 10km in thirty-five minutes, but that was in late fall in Canada when I was much fitter. This race is like running in a sauna. Why didn't they start this race at 7am like every other race in the world and avoid some of the heat? I decide it is because the race organizers hate me. Then I stop thinking entirely and focus on sweating as hard as I can. I do this extremely well. At about the 5o minute mark I see the finish line. The guy beside me starts to sprint and something clicks. "O yeah, this is a race". "Vamanos", I yell. We sprint across the line together and almost vomit at the end. My body thinks better of it and decides that it is more in need of retaining fluids than losing any more. Hi five to my competitor and into the lineup to get out of there.

I am now rethinking what I said about being proud crossing the line. It occurs to me that I may have an addiction. Perhaps I should seek counseling.

Getting Through

We all have our strategies. The ones who find the best strategies are the ones who get through.

Minimum wage in the DR is a little over a dollar an hour (about $200 a month). How can you reconcile that with the mansions, Land Rovers, Porsches and Louis Vuitton that abounds around Santo Domingo? Roberto told me yesterday: there is a lot of money in this country. Yet, for every rich man, there are many who live as de facto slaves. They earn enough to feed themselves and have some sort of shelter. Judging by the observable level of happiness even among these poor people (or perhaps especially), they must be doing something right.

The school where I work is far from being among the poor people, the teachers who work here are rare examples of the middle class in the DR or are international teachers. The families that send their children here are decidedly in the upper class (or international). Nevertheless I see many examples of strategies to get through being employed.

He arrives early with a newspaper under his arm and sits in the shade of a tree to drink his coffee. Throughout the day he will be in the middle of every laughing, screaming conversation, but now he is alone and still.

When she leaves, you notice that her service smock has been traded in for jeans and a canary yellow polo. She has painted her face. The limp is gone, her head is thrown back and she is laughing.

It is something approaching discipline. Every morning he plays guitar in the court yard. He isn't good but he could be.

"Your haircut is gorgeous", "You've lost weight" and "is that a new shirt". The booming economy of compliments nearly bankrupts the gossip (at least on the public market).

Summer vacation.

Habichuelas, rice and chicken (collectively known as "the flag") take you far. Lunch time means mounds of food. They may not eat supper and breakfast was probably a piece of toast, but lunch can get you through. All the supermarkets are lined with people waiting for the food that speaks louder than any rehearsed greetings. Motorcycles are laden with Styrofoam containers full of the stuff as they make their way to the places they are supposed to be. Their roaring two stroke engines belch: "eat and live" as they choke you with black smoke.

Getting through isn't easier here but people are determined to do it. They plan a way to make it happen. The best plans let spring catch you by surprise.

How did we get here?

I know it is about 10 years after I was supposed to, but I am reading Guns, Germs and Steel. It presents a very enticing method of understanding how things are the way they are. Jared Diamond explains how plants became domesticated and manipulated. First a wild plant is identified as edible and someone gets the idea to plant it and continues to gather the seeds. By selecting the plants with the nicest fruit or biggest grains to be replanted, the plant begins to change from its original form in the wild. It becomes domesticated. Eventually corn that had cobs as thick my pinky, starts growing cobs as thick as my wrist.

In class, I find myself continually surprised when a student complains about having to imagine something or tell me why. They say: "I hate it when the question asks me "why" because it is never in the book". I always liked when I got to think outside the parameters of some stupid textbook. I loved making things up. If I recall, I was not the only one in grade seven who liked to think creatively. Yet, I hardly ever encounter them here.

The culture and the education system seem to encourage uncritical thinking, regurgitation and memorization. This is, after all, a country in which the study and teaching of philosophy was illegal for an extended period of time. Those who questioned authority where imprisoned, forced to leave the country or killed. The history of of the oldest University in the Americas is one of martyrdom. The campus is filled with tributes to academics who where killed for their belief that they should be able to speak out against the government. Doesn't it follow that this extended exposure to domination would lead to a population that is made up of people that have thrived because they do not ask questions and they do not challenge authority?

Yet, there are very few species of wild plants or animals that can be domesticated and it is the wildness of this place that is truly fascinating. Yes, people have learned not to ask too many questions, but life is in overdrive here. Eventually all things revert to some sort of natural law and equilibrium. The traffic for instance. It is an enormous living creature that is all id. It is a daily struggle to keep a small apartment clean even in the quietest, cleanest parts of the city. Elephantine leaves continually fall off of trees and hit you in the head; fruit trees grow compulsively without any nurturing. It seems every second woman you see is pregnant and every dog is in heat. Things are metabolized so quickly here that a building left empty for a month looks like it has been that way for a year.

Many, or perhaps most, of the twenty million people that live on this small (by Canadian standards) island live in serious poverty. Yet there is far more than enough to go around. The wealth is just as opulent and affecting as the poverty you see here. Try as I might to understand why things are the way they are, it always comes back to wildness. "All is vanity" says Solomon. Good people starve to death every day and evil people often live in palaces. It's fun to play around with notions of how Hispaniola got to be the way it is, but its wildness will always elude you. There will always be a motorcycle heading the wrong way in a traffic jam on a one way street. I laugh with joy each time I see squash so big it would take both of us just to carry it home and a chainsaw to hack it up.