He's a witch!

Blindly, I walked into the teacher's room. I do this everyday...walk with purpose through the door, find a surface to place my things on and sit at a computer pretending to be awake, while I wait for my all too infrequent classes to begin. I had my earphones in, as I often do, listening to radio or music. I think on this occasion it was music, Jazz, Emilie-Claire Barlow. Keep in mind that it is 7:30 in the morning and it has been six years since I've made a habit out of rising early. Something seemed amiss this morning. A certain frantic milling about the computers just down the line from me, but I was too immersed in trying to look busy to pay it any mind. The other teachers often erupt into some frenzy that I do not understand. I blame the language and cultural barriers, but it is probably just my anti-social nature. I paid them no mind and was on my way to teach a class.

I returned about two hours later after I had done some supervision and taught the class. Now, slightly more awake, I notice that, despite the reduced population in the room, there is still an uneasy buzz and a general looking-around. Not seriously bothered, I continue my reclusive behaviour at a computer, this time without the earphones. I do some marking and pick away at a lesson plan. My ears are always busy, listening to the sounds around me, so work happens very slowly in this room where sounds are everywhere. To my right I pick up the Puerto Rican delegate asking one of the American teachers if he knew anything about the bag of candies and coins on the shelf. All the English-as-a-first-language folks had been left out so far, but Robert decided that it was time to widen the circle of interview.

"Everybody's freaking out", says my Puerto Rican friend, "they think it is some sort of curse, or something, you know the candied corn, money, and little beans. One of the ladies picked it up this morning and wanted to eat a candy, but there was all these coins mixed in with it, so she thought it was some sort of voodoo. Then we were searching online, because the plastic bag was green. Man, Dominicans are so superstitious."

I get a sinking feeling that only a new teacher in a foreign culture can get when there has been a strange misunderstanding. This was my bag of voodoo, only, it wasn't voodoo, it was the playing pieces for my own simplified version of Settlers of Catan, that I was playing in class to teach my kids about trading in the Ghana Empire. I told Robert what it was, in English, and he says: "watch this". He goes over to the shelf and picks it up (not afraid of the curse any more) and starts parading it around the room, threatening to drop it on the desks. He has his laugh and then announces what it is. In my broken Spanish, I confirm his tale as true and for the rest of the day everyone who walks into the staff room is greeted with "did you hear, we found the witch!"

Sundays

Traditions come slow when you are constantly pulling up roots and trying to plant them again. There has been little consistency in the traditions my little family has held over the past few years. Yet, they hold great value to me. In Newfoundland we would get together with our good friends the Sams to brew wine every couple of months. Events like this have always been good for me and kept the ground from spinning. After a couple months of the spinning sensation that is culture shock, Steph and I have been able to find some traditions that help us lay claim to our own culture here.

Sunday is my favourite day of the week. Once upon a time they consisted of CBC Radio and Church but recent events (moving to the DR) have forced a change. The appeal of CBC has always been, for me, the ease of flicking on a radio and having voices instantly populate the room. A computer playing a podcast is no comparison for a real radio. As for church, that has morphed into something called "Sunday time". A natural lack of like minded people here (at least when it comes to how church should be) has lead us to create our own time of reflection, music and reading. We sing only the songs we like, read long passages out loud and pray. This has become a new tradition and it has stopped the ground from spinning.

The other part of most Sundays is making the Sunday Dinner. Borrowing several pages from Lorna Goodison, we have begun making our own variation of rice and peas on Sundays. The ritual begins with the cracking of a coconut. We don't have a hammer. We have a cement step. After ten good wacks on the sharpest edge of the step you can drain the slightly milky fluid out and save it for the cooking the rice later. With more smashing and careful prying, the hard, fatty flesh of the coconut comes off the bone-like shell. One small piece at a time we grate the coconut and add it to a pot of rice bubbling over the gas. While we wait for the water to be absorbed, we dice onions, garlic and sweet peppers and caramelize them in our Dutch Oven adding hot peppers and other spices. We add the most important part, the guandules to the vegetable mixture. By this time the rice and coconut is ready and we add the rich steaming mixture to the vegetables. We heat and mix it all together adding some lime juice and cilantro to finish it off. The dish is served with a slice of avacado and a poached egg. We eat the leftovers for the rest of the week.

Traditions grow like house plants: slow and tenuously. But they keep our feet on the ground and give us tangible ways to practice our love for family and community, whatever size that may be.

Back to School

The city still sleeps. Sunrise is an hour off, but the roosters are anticipating it with preemptive crows. The only other people out are pedestrians or watchers sitting on plastic patio furniture. There is a man sorting through garbage to find bottles. We walk on the streets, for once able to claim the space as our own. Near the major streets the lights shine brightly, on the residential byways trees obscure the light, if there is any at all. Puddles from the night-time down-pour keep you on your toes, despite the early hour. Occasionally a motorcycle buzzes down the street. When the pedestrians pass we keep our heads down, not wanting to disturb this rare peace.

The school is a strange place in darkness. Teachers are eating breakfast, huddling against sleep on this first day back after the Christmas break. The humidity is rising from the courtyard stones, still a little wet from the rain the night before. The sun sneaks around the corner while you've ducked into a room for a minute to prepare the class for the morning's lesson. Soft yellow light warms off of the walls. In a couple hours the light will not be so much warm as hot, but now, in the grace of the sunrise, we are cheered to see the natural light. The day begins with a bell like a steam engine leaving the station.

The teachers continue to be associated with coffee: the smell and the idea. Nothing has changed except that it will be forty degrees today and it is January. The smell of bad coffee and perfume wafts out of the teacher's lounge. People find their small places to be when they are not teaching. Slowly taking over a carol until it is theirs or working on a computer until it adjusts to them. They add their labour, searching for the silver bullet activity.

The minutes add up to hours and the hours turn into a day. Teachers come and go into classrooms, tagging out their partners. Some talk loudly in the teacher's lounge, others are sleeping on the couch or in work stations. 3:30 comes sooner that you would expect and we head out into the heat of the day. We will sleep well tonight.

Happy New Year, baby

The sun revealed a beach: a long, thin, golden crescent of relief from a steadily pounding ocean. It is almost empty now, this first morning of the new year. It is families that occupy this margin today. There is a mother with her three children gathering the bottles from last night into two wheelbarrows. They are almost finished now and we will not see them again today; they live in the shadows of blond haired surfers and pasty white folks sunning themselves. This little family will wheel down the beach and disappear up a mountain road to resume their life in the shadow of Europe and North America. A smaller family still, walks beside us: parents and a young daughter who, like us, are wondering if breakfast is ready yet. The short answer is no. The beach and its restaurants need to breath. Cigar stubs and cigarette butts, plastic hats and cups need to be raked up. Stages need to be disassembled. We wonder in vain searching for something wholesome to fill the gaps we are feeling this morning. A firework that was somehow missed last night is found and impotently set off into the brilliant blue sky.

Cream-cheese and cool cucumber slices on fresh German rolls. There was still some cream-cheese left over from the night before and the whole sale vegetable market was open. We press in to the table, under the umbrella to avoid the sprinkle of rain. We are killing time as we wait to catch a guagua or public car to Sosua and be on the bus back to the capital. We peel the cucumber with a swiss army knife and cut thin slices. Then we cut into the rolls and spread cream-cheese generously on both sides, then layer the cucumber onto the buns. We are silent as we chew through the delicious (and durable) sandwiches. Between the two of us we polish off a litre of fresh yogurt that was cultured a couple of kilometres down the road. A curious feast followed by a game of cribbage, packing and a walk out to the road to make our way along the coast.

The guagau that picked us up was the first one that I truly believed could not hold another soul, this was a lack of faith on my part. The cobrador assured us that there was space and physically pushed us into our seats, bumping our heads on the door in the process. My leg was hanging out the door, but there was no way for the rest of me to move, so it seemed safe enough. The gentleman we had displaced was only riding another kilometre, so he stood on the running board and hung on like the cobrador. This van was about the size of a VW microbus and could comfortably seat twelve. There were no less then thirty-five people on board. My initial counts produced smaller numbers, but I kept discovering more children in he laps of parents. As my mind slowly grasped the situation it became clear that the majority of the people were together. Judging by the Bibles in the hands of the adults, the home tailored suits on the children and the amount of Criollo being spoken, a large Haitian family was making their New Year pilgrimage to a religious gathering. The cobrador (despite all odds) began collecting their fares, collecting their money and counting out change with one hand while the other arm held on to the roof. One by one the family members unfolded themselves and got out of the van. The sound of religious fervour blasting from a P.A. not too far away. Once we started again we only had a minute of road to enjoy breathing unrestricted before we came to the bus terminal and got out.

There is something melancholy about New Year's day. It's as if the country has taken a vow of silence to balance the noise of the night before. Adam Duritz sings “we can probably fix it if we clean it up all day”. Yeah, probably, but who's going to spend the holiday cleaning?