Baja Panti

Of all the events or ‘dinamicas’ or information the Peace Corps could give, the Volunteer Visit was by far the best. Over the weekend I visited Stephanie who lives in a small barrio of El Limon called Baja Panti in this wonderful house – and she’s the best.

My first day there, we walked over a hill behind her house and swam in a river or crystal blue water, a wonderfully refreshing surprise after the fear they have instilled in us of contaminated water.  In fact, this was the weekend of water. The day after, we hiked to El Limon waterfall and spent some time in the pools there.

 On our final day we took a couple horses over the mountain and to the beach, where the water was so clear I could swim out past where I could stand and see the bottom.

However, contrary to how it might seem, my experience wasn’t simply wonderful because of how often I was able to escape the heat. It was wonderful because I truly got a sense of what life is like a year into PC service (other than being able to take off on a Friday morning to hike to a waterfall). After bathing in the rio, she took me around the town and introduced me to all three labs she works in. The fact that she has three labs is unusual, as most people only have one, but I think her situation is ideal. She has a variety of projects she can work on intermittently as well as all of her self-driven classes. I sat in on three of these classes, one that was a teacher training, one that was a computer class for kids, and another called “escojo mi vida” that is a peace corps wide youth group teaching kids and informing them how they might take control of their lives.

My weekend with Stephanie was fabulous also because it reaffirmed the positivity I’ve begun to feel about working as an ITC PCV. I shared with her some of the ideas I have for youth group projects and technology classes, all of which she gave great feedback for. She gave me advice on how to approach my first three months in site, how to get in with the community and develop a repore, how to best appeal to the youth with printed invitations and other such trifles. The encouragements and truths she offered fed this optimism, in spite of tales of tarantulas.  She’s even interested in collaborating on a documentary project with me and has invited me to be a member of the Gringo Grita staff – the tri-annual magazine printed for DR PCVs.

While in El Limon, we happened across a house in the process of being built on a hill overlooking a green vista, the town beneath hidden from view. The owners of the house emerged and Stephanie stuck up a conversation with them in typical Dominican fashion. As it turns out, they’re the king and queen of El Limon. They own practically half the town, including the expansive vista and the land that the aqueduct is on, all of which was inherited. We assumed that they are descendants of the Spanish and that the land was conquest, they were quite blanca, after all. And as we walked back down the unpaved road into the town, we marveled at how little has really changed since the days of ‘colonization.’ The gringos up on a hill while the others live in squalor.

Walking down this same hill, I couldn’t help but notice how there is an everpresent smell that permates life here in the DR. In the city it’s exauhst, rotting rivers, and littered streets. In the campo its fire. People burn their trash and the smoke seems to cling to everything. I’m not a smoker, but if you checked my lungs, you’d never know it. The only place to really escape it is submerge yourself in the only fresh water remaining.

As with everything and everywhere, there were also the small things that brought a sense of wonder and beauty to my short trip. As I lay in bed and watched the fireflies zig zag across the room, the realization struck me that when you meet a fellow Peace Corps volunteer, there’s an automatic assumption that you’re meeting a future friend. Spending the weekend in Samana with Stephanie showed me this for the second time since I’ve been a trainee. She, like Sabrina, didn’t know me from Adam (or Eve), but the faith she had in the yet unseen bond between us, not just as PCVs, but as people, assured a connection. I think that’s what makes Peace Corps volunteers special , at least the ones I’ve met – the idealism and the faith that we all have more in common than we might think