A Whole Bunch' A Words

Today I had one of my tutoring sessions with a nine year old girl who has to think about how old she is before she answers to that question. I’m trying to help her learn how to read and write, which is no easy task. First there’s the matter of the child herself, who I swear would be classified as ADD in the states, and then there’s the whole other matter of the inept school system here in the DR. The children aren’t taught the alphabet, nor are they taught the sounds each letter makes. Instead, they are taught through syllables, starting with “ma” then “me,” “mi,” “mo,” “mu,” and so on. The result is that the kids, and even the adults, don’t know how to differentiate letters from sound snd have difficulty recognizing anything that isn’t a consonant immediately followed by a vowel. That’s on a good day.

Today was not a good day. What letters make up the sound “br” – I asked her. First she counts off “ba,” “be,” “bi,” “bo,” “bu.” When that didn’t work, “bra,” “bre,” “bri,” “bro,” “bru.”  Una “bra,” she decides, as if “bra” were the letter itself. Though, I have to complement myself here, because working with her has vastly improved my level of tolerance – though I still feel the frustration bubbling up, I’m able to suppress it a bit more than I would have.

After she left the house, unable to focus for the last half hour of our session, I asked Zuni (my host mother) if this was normal in a 9-10 year old. Apparently, it’s not too un-common, but even she admitted that this particular case is somewhat special. She’s sick – she told me. And also, she has something wrong with her mind. Okay, I had figured that much out. But sick? When her husband left the room, Zuni told me that the girl as well as her entire family, are HIV positive. I couldn’t quite make out if she thought the ability to learn and the HIV were connected. I did learn, however, that in the district of Miches, El Cedro has the highest percentage of HIV positive residents and that there are still “old men” who “leave there families and spread it with many women.” The community knows this, that HIV is prevalent, and most of them know how you got, too. But still I have not seen one condom for sale in any of the stores.

Anyway, I shall not go off on that soap box. I only wished to reflect on how real HIV became all of a sudden, to me. Though, at the same time, I understood how they feel it is so much less threatening than what we were taught in school. They know, even those we would consider impoverished, that they’re taken care of, and that they can live for at least another twenty years. The major difference here is that there medication is fully paid for by the government. Maybe that’s why there’s no money for the schools.

While I’m on the topic of money and schools, I should mention my talent show. I spent a little more than a month coordinating this event with a group of four women. A couple of weeks into our planning, on of the ladies daughter’s seemed to magically appear and take charge of what needed to be done, including recruiting participants. I was thankful for her help, so told myself not to be annoyed by her randomly showing up at my house and walking into my bedroom while I was sleeping, or things of that nature.

Because she had done so much, I also allowed her to manage the income from the ticket sales. And though I had my qualms about the Dominican system (ticket now, pay later), I let it be, hoping I’d be proved wrong.

After the initial chaos in the beginning of the night when we had no electricity, no equipment, and no participants, things started to go alright. My only wish during the event itself, which started 2.5 hours late, was that I wasn’t stuck behind the counter selling food, unable to really see any of the performances. The up side was, I had a watch over the money at that point and I took the money home with me afterwards to count. Oh, my other regret was that my host brother didn’t win, though I honestly believe he was the most talented there (and he would have given us back the 500 pesos that was the winner’s prize). Anyhow, after all our weeks of work, we only ended up making 3,175 pesos. That’s about 100 dollars. My goal was to be able to buy a projector for the school. And that’s not nearly enough.

Two days later, I’m sitting in the living room with my literacy student and in comes the girl who had been helping me, the girl who was the host for the event and who never mentioned me once throughout it. So she comes in and I figure she wants her purse back. It was what we were using to keep all of the money in during the event. I give her the purse and expect her to leave so I can get on with my lesson. But no. Oh no. Mira, she says. I had two hundred pesos of my own in my purse and I want it. Whether or not she was lying, I still can’t say. All I can say was that it was quite an unlikely story, since she had been using that same purse to collect the ticket money in. What made it all the worse was that Zuni was not home to help me deal with the issue. And she wouldn’t leave the house until I gave her the money. I made her sign a note explaining her circumstance, though I don’t think it will make the slightest bit of difference. What’s done is done. And I’ve learned my lesson.

On a completely new topic, I was finally taken to see the waterfall. It was gorgeous, though I have to say, quite savage. I returned from the excursion with my skin on fire from a combination of mosquito bites, make-shift saddle, and some irritation from a malicious plant.  And since we had to slide down the side of a rock on our bums, you can only imagine how pleasant it was to sit down for a few days after! But not only was the waterfall itself gorgeous, the way there was just as beautiful. We left the campo behind and entered into the mountains. You could really believe that no human had been there before, except for the packed earth of the trail. And now that I have a horse of my own, I plan on returning.

Yes, you read right – I have a horse of my own! He as of yet remains nameless but he definitely has personality. Apparently, so the men tell me, he does not trust women, having had little exposure to the female persuasion. So he plays very hard to get when I reach to pet him. But once I’m on, he’s usually pretty obedient. I say usually because on our way to the beach he stopped half way there and wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard I kicked him. Now, granted, I never kick a horse very hard because I don’t want to hurt them, and I also have this persistent belief that they shouldn’t be forced to do something they don’t want to do. Anyhow, I too was determined and so got down off his back, knowing full well that I could not get back up without help, him being bareback and all, and so walked the rest of the way.

On the way back, he was sluggish, andI wondered why, as most horses like going home. It wasn’t until a few minutes in that I started to notice a clicking noise as he walked that wasn’t there before. Great, I said to myself, my horse is throwing a shoe. A yup. The shoe was half way off and hell if I was going to try to get it all the way off. So we walked at a snails pace back to his pastures and succeeded in avoiding the moto drivers who thought it amusing to pass by us as fast as they could, as close as they could, in the dark.

So I hope that we will be friends in time. Until then, I shall change his shoes and give him his vitamins, or whatever it is I’m supposed to give him, and take the occasional ride to the beach.

And another smooth segue – I participated in my first Reef Check excursion off of the Miches coast line. The experience was quite an adventure. The dive shop is situated just by a river which lets out into the ocean, which is rather convenient to dock a boat at. Unfortunately, it’s rather inconvenient during torrential downpours, especially when the owners of the dive shop also live there, are new to the country, and have never experienced a flood.  After all of our theory training (recognizing fish and corals and invertebrates, etc) we set out for a full day of diving. It was nice and cool on the boat, as there was a constant drizzle, and we got to see a spectacular display of lighting on shore. Unfortunately, we had to pull up anchor much sooner than expected, as we noticed a line of brown water creeping steadily toward us from the direction of the river mouth.

Turns out that line in the water, was all the run-off from the flood which almost completely devastated their house. Not a nice thing to come back to after a day of diving. Anyway, we said that we would come back and help them the next morning with anything else they needed (the local Dominicans had already helped them mop up the layers of mud on their floor). At about one in the afternoon on that next day, just as we were arriving, it started raining again. Paul, the ‘male leader’ of the dive master team, was convinced that the house would be taken out by the next flood. So as the water rose, we spent the next hour and them some, relocating everything in their little house. By the time we were done, I stood, completely eaten by mosquitoes, waste deep in muddy water on their doorstep.

I haven’t spoken to them since that day, as we’re not scheduled for another dive until August, but I haven’t heard anything, so I’m assuming no news is good news. In the mean time, now that I’ve settled in with the Miches team, I have a place to go when I need to escape and a kitchen to cook in where all the food is paid for – courtesy of Columbia University. It’s not a bad deal.

Well, there’s another chapter in this novel of mine. In a couple weeks I’ll be off to my three month IST (in-service training) and that will be another. For now, I must put up a mosquito net around my freshly planted garden so that the chickens don’t eat my plants. Hasta luego!