A bit about the foundation we volunteer with

Alex had been waiting so long that he had learned how to play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on his cell phone. The container full of dental equipment from Canada was supposed to have arrived on Friday some time in the morning. It is now supper time on Wednesday and the container still isn't here. The shipping company only gives you a couple of hours to unload the container until they want it back, so a bunch of neighbours have been on call and are now waiting around for the container to arrive. We've cleared away some space in the cluttered warehouse to make room for the new donations. Some of the older donations include such “useful” items as hand knit scarves and toques for all those nippy mornings we get around here, and bags full of stuffed animals. Reports say that this container will, mercifully, be only dental supplies and equipment.

I have just finished my second day of teaching English and Steph has been killing time waiting for the container just like everyone else. Alex calls Regino for the fourth time and he assures him that the truck is on its way but that it has been stuck in a traffic jam for a while. More waiting. We watch the chickens flap up to the hood of a truck and then up to a branch to roost. The rooster clucks and struts around the gravel parking lot. The night watchman has already arrived, apparently the rooster is an early warning system for intruders. Although, I'm not entirely sure how much good it will do because the night watchman will probably only ply the intruders with the hard candies that he carries around in his pocket. Despite the fences and razor wire all around the Sonrisa's clinic in Pentoja, it is apparently necessary to employ a night watchman.

The truck has finally arrived, but we are still waiting on Regino, who has the official documents. Regino arrives with a big pair of red bolt cutters and the men begin circling the back of the container like moths. The women stand back waiting for their brothers and husbands to stumble across some way to unload this colossal blue steel box. Someone brings out a couple of boards nailed together that will serve as a ramp. Someone else brings a McGyvered light fixture to put inside the container. It quickly shorts out and needs to be re-wired. At last the unloading can begin. Fuelled by testosterone, Christmas Meringue music and the energy stored in waiting, men hurl the boxes down from the truck and pandemonium ensues in the warehouse. Sometimes the chaos forms into a line and the boxes pass from hand to hand and are stacked on top of old dentist's chairs covered in dust, waiting to be rehabilitated. But before too long, their favourite song will come on again and they will starting hurling and dropping the boxes in some attempt to outdo one another. The women retreat to the office and return with coffee. The box hurling halts briefly each time a three hundred pound dental chair needs to be unloaded. Four men walk the chair down the ramp while another steps on the bottom of the ramp so that it won't slip out. The chair is slammed onto a board with wheels attached to it and is wheeled off to the nether regions of the warehouse. The hurling commences once again and the mountain of dental supplies continues to grow.

After an hour or so we are half way through the container and it is time to stop for beer. Four one-litre bottles of light beer arrive on the back of a forty year old motorcycle. Everyone stops and drinks until the beer is gone. Some get into the container and dance a little bit. And like the wheels of some chaotic train engine beginning to turn, the boxes come flying down the length of the container once again and it is a mad scramble to find spaces to pile them inside the warehouse. After another hour and a half there is only a couple of large chairs left to jockey into the increasingly limited warehouse space. Then, as if by magic the world of the container is drawn away and we are left waiting once again for cabs to take us home.

Waiting on the weather

I only saw Waiting for Godot once and it wasn't under circumstances that would lead to focusing on the intricacies of Beckett's celebrated text. All I really remember is a couple of homeless guys waiting for this Godot fellow, who never shows up. (I remember the bit about the carrot and the turnip too, but that's beside the point). I wish I would have paid more attention, because I think I would have a lot in common with those homeless guys after spending a month in the DR. Perhaps I could find, in that play, a method for dealing with the frustration of waiting. Unlike Godot, the people here usually do show up, but they always make you wait. I feel like I'm on the outside of an inside joke. For example: someone tells me that the bus to the beach is leaving at eight in the morning. I'm not so naive as to think it will actually leave then, so I come half an hour late, but I'm still the first one there. The thing that really makes me think that it is a conspiracy against people who lack the ability to interpret DR standard time is that the twenty other people all arrive between 9:05 and 9:15. How did they all know that the bus would actually leave at quarter after nine? Why didn't they just say that in the first place?

It can't be said that things happen more slowly here, because really important things happen quite quickly. Steph had been feeling feverish all day. So Merecedes, a very kind Dominican friend, brought us to the clinic. Within five minutes, Steph had had a blood test and within another forty five minutes we had the results and a doctor confirmed that she did not have Dengue fever. After another hour the doctor had determined that it was some kind of infection and written a prescription for some antibiotics and we were on our way. That would have taken all day in Canada if we had simply walked into a clinic or an emergency room. We hardly had to wait at all. The same is true of the public cars here. They may be crowded and falling apart, but you never have to wait for them. They are always there when you need them. The things that make you wait are the things that are scheduled. Things happen when they happen, despite when somebody may have said they will happen.

Dominicans deal with schedules the same way they consider weather forecasts. All figures are approximate and dependant on several variables. They treat their clock like I would treat a thermometer, only trusting it to give accurate readings for the exact moment in which they consult it. “Who knows, if you look your clock again in what seems like an hour, you may find that three hours have passed.” I come from a place where everything is supposed to happen at a certain time. If class is supposed to start at nine, it does. When you go to emergency you are supposed to wait for five hours before seeing a doctor, and you do. Things follow the schedule pretty steadily. What can't be predicted is the weather. There could be any sort of precipitation blown in off the lake, snow, rain, sleet, hail and the temperature could fluctuate more in a day than it does in a year in the Caribbean. Here, the schedules are more transient than the weather. Every day is hot and sunny with a few clouds, and every day you get about twelve hours of sun, burning its way across the sky. Chances are, if you look at your thermometer, it will say twenty-five degrees (or thirty-five in the summer) add ten degrees worth of humidity to get the “feels like” temperature. There are a couple months of rain, but you could set a Swiss watch by the time of day the rain comes. On the other hand, you never know what you will find when you look at a clock in the DR, why bother to set it at all?

Learning to wait is an invaluable lesson. It teaches two things: preparedness and faith. Preparedness because you always need to be ready for something to happen at any moment and to continue happening until it is over. We waited for an hour and a half for the bus to take us to the beach once, but we didn't get back until late that night. Faith because the things that we wait for here do happen, even if it is not when we are expecting them to.

Juan Dolio

But it is beautiful,
and almost enough
to make you forget the cramped
hour of Bachata polluted
bus ride it took to get you here:
children falling asleep on your shoulder
then nodding their heads
down your back
forcing you forward
their head between you and the seat.

The sun soaks deep and hot
into the sand,
for a moment
(after looking into a radiant – unbroken
sky)
you can't see the sprawl of burned
white skin
(the casino-resort down the strip)
you can't see your own pinkening
flesh.

There are things so perfect
that they draw out the human presence
as if it were venom
as if it never existed.

High above the surface
the palm invites such
inhospitable elements as raw sun
wind
and below the steady crush of salt
and the bake of sand.
Still, it takes these elements
from which we hide,
and makes something
alive.

Another View of the City

It's not so much that the charms of certain things wear off. The charms are still there, but slowly, the stink filters through the perfume.

I've spent a lot of time in Universities. I barely know what to do with myself if I'm not on campus and don't have access to a good library. This is something that I am only realizing now that I have spent the better part of three months away from the familiar patterns of University life: sleep in until panic sets in, read a little, write a little, eat breakfast, go to the library, read more, write more, go to the gym, watch a little t.v. and so on. University life seems to be a constant struggle to delay or deny deadlines. It is structured around procrastination. This is even true (or perhaps especially true) of administration: a maze of committees and requests and repeals of requests. Finding myself lacking this familiar structure of procrastination, I took a crowded bus to the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, hoping to find a library and the energy of more than a hundred and seventy thousand procrastinating students. I wander around for a while, comforted by the institutional architecture and the omnipresent construction of newer, better buildings. Walking up to the library I am told by what appears to be a bouncer, that I can't go in. I asked why and was informed that people wearing shorts cannot enter the library. It's forty degrees and I am expected to cover my legs out of respect for the gods that live inside books? Walking away I realized that it seems I was the only one on campus not wearing long pants. We do what we do because it is done. Self consciously, I walked around the rest of the campus wondering what is so disrespectful about my legs. Just a few days before, Steph had been kicked out of a church because her dress only went down to her knees.

It took a couple weeks to realize that my hair and my finger nails are growing like crazy. At first I thought I was imagining it, but it's true: hot climates raise the blood pressure and increase the blood flow to your hands and head, which in turn increasing hair and finger nail growth. I need to cut my nails twice a week. I've already had a haircut and am just about due for another one.

When the rain comes, it's like someone is turning on a shower. Usually, it pours straight down in a torrent of all consuming flood waters and completely transforms the view. If it rains for more than a day the walls begin to leak and the water creeps across the tiles forming inexplicable pools in the middle of the room. Sometimes the rain is a welcome relief from the unrelenting sun. But when it comes as a tropical storm it shuts down the whole city and nobody can stay dry.

You make it through a couple weeks without too many encounters with ants and cockroaches. The weather has been good, it's not so hot that you can't breathe and so far no hurricanes. You haven't even had a sunburn, yet your skin is bronzing nicely and hair is turning blond. The food is good (no Diarrhoea yet) and the rum is cheaper than wine. Guilt hasn't overcome you when you see the poor people, because they're not that poor, right? You are finding enough to do so that you don't go crazy. You don't have cholera or Dingue fever or Malaria. But this is not like home. You don't belong here. You will always be called “Americano” or “gringo” when you walk down the street. What are you doing walking anyway, in shorts and sandals no less. Daily things are consolation for the inevitable turmoil of the planet. The view of earth is so serene from the moon and this Island is a paradise from ten thousand feet as your plane approaches the runway, just a twenty minute air-conditioned bus ride from the resort. On the ground the streets are clouded with the haze from burning (still) leaded gasoline. You can smell the garbage and can't escape the ants, mosquitoes or cockroaches.

In too many ways I came here to escape real life and find a little bit of paradise in the sun. Perhaps I wanted to keep procrastinating my life away, but I'm beginning to realize that it's better to accept the realities of where you are. It's better not to be caught in the heat without your nail clippers.

A poem

Perception

Hearing the world from
behind a wall
is an act of conjecture:
the sound of the rain as it pools off a cement roof
various pumps and generators
whirring water up to cisterns
and power all around,
dogs barking
cell phones ringing their songs
like pathetic digital birds,
“yes, that's Doña's phone”
someone has just walked by with the same
bird/phone as me
“Nunca y nunca”
“aguacate”
(shouts from the street, someone selling something)
cars and motorcycles
and always, somewhere
the vigorous shuffle of dominoes.