On a Caribbean Christmas

Just some fun photos to show (not tell) what I've been up to this holiday season. It is nothing like my typical snowy Idaho Christmas!

Nom nom, we finally killed Canchito the house pig!

Odd picture of me stoked with a cut up Canchito

Sorry lil buddy! Thanks for Christmas dinner!

Bea-chito!

Christmas dulces

Mi querida amiga, Andreina, y su hija, Andrea Nicole at a church gathering

I look like I actually love children!

End of the year baseball tournament! Go Pueblo Nuevo!

Check it, I got the chicken foot in my asopoa! 

Mamma Luisa uncovering Marta's surprise Cena Navideña

Literally attacked by mosquitters, nasty.

Holiday party for the national literacy group I attend

On holidays: Feliz Navidad y Prospero Año

Happy Holidays!

Christmas has passed and I made it even though the internal clock tells me that I should be finishing all my finals, heading back home on a crowded and flu induced airplane, wrapping presents with my mom, working at the Italian restaurant I am lucky enough to have a job at whenever I am in town (where, by the way, I can make more in two nights there than my entire monthly salary here), cross-country skiing and spending time with family. It’s been a bittersweet holiday season. It’s warm and sunny here, but snowy and chilly at home. And I’ve been able to celebrate special traditions with my wonderful family on the beach in Manzanillo, but I miss the old Raff family traditions family in Sun Valley.

Christmas traditions are quite different here. So given that I’m in a completely new cultural context for my favorite holiday of the year, I might as well let you know how they celebrate La Navidad here. Interestingly, Dominicans are eager to adopt many American traditions, like hanging festive wreaths, using plates and cups with snowy scenery and assembling mini plastic Christmas trees. But there is no such thing as present giving, believing or not believing in Santa Claus, or drinking eggnog. And, the main festivities take place on the Christmas Eve, when the mom of the house slaves away at a beautiful dinner of an entire smoked pig, roasted chicken, rice and beans, potato salad, plantain pot pie, Wonderbread with mayonnaise, and of course, beer and rum.

The buildup was insane, people talking for weeks about the cena Navideña we were to have and excited a gathering of all the family members finally in one place to eat together at the table and give our thanks. Well, as it turns out, while my host mother was slaving away at this meal for two days straight, around 7pm, she put the dinner platters on the table and people came in and out of the house until 10pm to get their dinner, eat it standing up, and rush out to party shortly thereafter. I think I was wishing and hoping for a traditional American meal with a set table and a thankful family, but what I got was people who didn’t seem to register this day as a special day, and no thanks out of the normal were given to the chef. And the day of Christmas itself was pretty uneventful, except all the drinking and dancing there was to be done in the middle of the street from 2pm onwards.

I really enjoyed myself! This Christmas was so different from anything I’ve ever experienced and it took my mind off the fact that I wasn’t home. I think it was necessarily and a great cultural experience to spend my favorite holiday in this context. It certainly has given me more clarity into the Dominican family unit, role of friends and traditions of the place I’ve come to call home. I thought perhaps I’d be lonely-feeling, but I felt surrounded by so many people eagerly inviting me to their house for dinner. I ate at three houses on the 24^th and had to turn down invitations for four others – talk about popular!

Here are some other interesting Dominican Christmas traditions:

1) Apples and grapes and those little gooey fruit shaped candies.

This is the staple of Christmas dessert. In the month leading up to Christmas, apple and grape stands popped up on the street everywhere and are constantly being offered at every house I go to. Even though in the Peace Corps we like to call apples “diarrhea bombs,” I ingested one everyday this month and have yet to come down with a bout of diarrhea.

2) Rifas! Raffles!

I live in a culture of hopeful thinking, betting, and luck. And this is the time for raffles because Dominicans think their luck increases with the holiday season so even though they live in abject poverty, they bet their last pesos in the holiday rifas. I entered a raffle to win a live pig, a four hundred pound bull, a washing machine, a blow dryer, and a motorcycle. I’m pretty sure the money went to the person selling the raffle tickets, not the raffle itself. For example, the raffle for the pig was supposed to take place on the 14^th of December and on the 13^th of December the raffle master’s house burned down. Did we raffle the pig? I don’t know. So what happened to the money? It’s probably being used to buy roofing and cement to rebuild Mama Julia’s house. Another girl was shameless about the raffle profit and when I asked her, “So where does the money go?” she looked at me confused and said, “It’s going to help me buy a scientific calculator.” Was there even a raffle? I don’t know, but I certainly didn’t win any of the prizes.

3) Compartir!

For the past six nights, I have not eaten dinner in my own house. One night, we had a surprise Christmas party, the next night a church Christmas dinner, the next another church dinner, the next at a friends, and the next my three-course Christmas Eve feast. The word compartir literally means “to share” and in reality it looks like a bunch of people sitting in plastic chairs, talking, eating rice and beans, drinking coffee, and eating apples. It’s the best way to be Dominican and something I’ve gotten exponentially better at this in the month of December when most social activities are centered around the compartir. Most compartirs, however, are extremely awkward, with people sitting and staring at each other and not saying anything for hours, usually because the endless bachata and merengue music is too loud to talk, but another explanation is that many Dominicans don’t really ask about other people. As someone who prides myself on being talkative, curious and inquisitive, I often find it hard to just sit , staring and tapping my foot offbeat to bachata and merengue, but I definitely got better this month! As I said to my bestie Dante (a fellow Idaho volunteer), this is the best practice we’ll have for awkward dinner parties back home.

4) Slaughtering a pig, or goat, and multiple chickens.

Poor Canchito the housepig had to die. It was one of the coolest things I’ve experienced during my time here, but definitely the most upsetting noise I’ve ever heard. The slaughter ritual begins in the morning when Canchito was given only water for breakfast. (“You don’t eat for at least 8 hours if you’re having surgery” said my host dad Enriquito). At 6pm, the pig slaughterer, Isidro, brought Canchito into our driveway and sat on her while she squiggled, screamed and yelped and as he stuck a knife into her throat for a solid 45 seconds while her wriggling became less and less until she finally became limp and lifeless. Then, Isidro cleaned her off and poured boiling water on her to loosen the hair folicles and shave her hairless. Then, Isidro cut and broke her hoofs off, sliced down her belly to cut out the insides, chopped off her head, and cut her into four pieces. She was then hung from a tree to cure. We brought her in at night to season her with garlic and then smoked in the oven overnight. She was ready for my plate a mere eight hours after she was killed. Now that’s fresh meat!

4) Drinking and dancing!

Who needs a nice home cooked sit down meal when you can have the ama de la casa (housewife) cook it all up on the 23^rd and 24^th with no help from the hombres (men) and serve it to you piping hot on the 24^th for you to enjoy while standing in the middle of the street, drinking rum, blasting music and then changing into your going out clothes for dancing? And that’s just what Christmas was - eating, drinking and dancing. And I loved it. Not like any Christmas I’ve ever had before, but fun nonetheless.

And the parties continue this week and into next with the finals in our town baseball tournament this weekend, family members coming in from out of town, and a general reckless spirit that has embodied the Dominicans in the last week of the year. No one is working, everyone is celebrating, and we’re just trying to make it happily and healthily into the New Year.

On Monday, I will be heading to the beach town of Cabarete in the North to reunite with all the volunteers and celebrate the New Year together. And then on the 3^rd, I’m back here to plan and organize my groups and start the projects I have been anxiously awaiting to begin since I arrived in country four months ago. I can feel it, 2014 is going to be a big year!!!

Wishing you all the merriest of holiday seasons and sending all my love.

Best,

Bronwen

On my Christmas pig, Canchito

I was asked to name our Christmas pig, the terror in the driveway. And so I named her Canchito. What a beauty. When I asked my host brother what he thought of her, he replied. "I'll tell you when we eat her for Christmas." Ahhhh...por Canchito.

Canchito the pig we have in our front porch to slaughter for Christmas dinner. 

 Side view of Canchito.

My project partner, Licelot, in front of our house watching as we prepare the boiling water to skin Canchito. 

My awesome family, cousin Elenne, sister/aunt Billerka, grandpa Mora, and cousin Pulley waiting to eat Canchito!

Christmas time wasn't only about slaughtering a pig! I also had a little get together with some Peace Corps friends and we had a great gift exchange, low-budget dinner and dance off. 

White Elephant style gift exchange (I ended up with a half drank bottle of cheap rum and an alarm clock with no utility to me because it uses electricity which I rarely have). 

Low-budget Peace Corps version of Christmas dinner! 

On the lies I've told

¡Saludos!

This week has been fairly relaxed, with the students in their finals period and everyone else on vacation mode, things have chilled out here in Manzanillo. We still have our baseball tournament going on, and people are certainly still working, but most people are eager for Christmas to arrive and a lucky few are anxiously awaiting family members fortunate enough to be able to visit from the states.

As for me, on Sunday I ventured to the nearby town of Monticristi for a Christmas dinner with five other volunteers serving up here in the Rowdy North. It was no one’s idea of an extravagant meal, but it was delicious. My personal favorite dish being the canned baked beans sent as donations from America but rejected by Dominicans and subsequently given to us to “make good use of.” We also had rotisserie chicken and fried plantains. Dominican comfort food does an American Christmas dinner make.

I’m still chugging along in my community analysis project although I’m pretty sure I’ve reached the point of saturation, meaning I’m not actually collecting new data since the information being told to me is repeated in almost every interview I conduct. That doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s important to be conducting these health surveys, because it’s given me greater access to my fellow community members and allowing me to build trust with them. But the amount of times I’ve heard “No I don’t think obesity is a problem in the community, God makes some people fatter than others,” is remarkable. When asked what they eat for every meal, the usual response is, “I eat what appears, whatever God sends our way.” It’s amazing the way God can be made as an excuse for poor behavior choices and ill-fated health outcomes. Nerdily enough, it’s been extremely fulfilling to be conducting such a methodological community health assessment that was once only a homework assignment in a Tufts Community Health class. I am impressed with the ability of my fellow volunteers and I to enter invasively into the lives of Dominicans and ask extremely personal questions about their health and family. It’s a great lesson in being politely invasive and one I hope will translate to other professional missions I embark on eventually.

Oh, and I’ve been reading Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotamayor’s autobiography, My Beloved World, and it’s inspiring, especially for where I am currently in my personal and professional life. She reminds me to be diligent and hard-working and to continually ask myself, “Am I doing my best work, am I trying my hardest, am I making a difference?” I realize that I can always be pushing myself harder, but pushing myself harder in my current context means taking each day slowly, truly getting to know my community, and preparing my community for the health groups I will start formally in January. It doesn’t necessarily mean to continue with the pace of work-life I had come to know in America, with each day full of meetings, computer time and email checking, I have adapted her advice for my own non-traditional job and it has absolutely helped keep me in check. Her book has also helped reflect largely on what I want to get out of my service, how meaningful I want my service to be, and how strong of a volunteer I wish to be. At best, I feel overwhelmed with the possibilities and scope of the work I can accomplish in two years, and at worst, I feel frustrated by the way people have begun to take advantage of me, believing that I’ll do anything and everything for this community. But two years is simultaneously a long and short time, and I think it’s important for me to periodically reflect and check back in with my progress and set goals for myself. Thanks to my newest role model Sonia Sotamayor, I have been doing just that this week.

Beyond all this self-reflection I’ve been doing lately, I keep wondering when I will wake up and stop feeling like I live in a fantasy world and finally feel like what I’m doing and where I am is real life. I still can’t quite believe all this is real. The day I think “Oh, yes, my life is normal here now,” will be strange at best. And in order to get through these fantasy days, there are lies I have told the people around me. White lies I would say. Here are a few:

   1. I am a lawyer. This is perhaps one of the bolder lies I tell people here. I’ll admit it’s a bit of a stretch, but trying to explain my major in Peace and Justice Studies to an American is challenging, let alone explaining it to people in another language and another culture. So I just say I studied law, and let them decide how they wish to interpret that. Additionally, I am looking at it like self-fulfilling prophecy. If I say it enough over two years, maybe I’ll leave here, head to law school and actually become a real lawyer like was once a childhood fantasy. 

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2. I live in New York. It’s not really that bad of a lie unless you take into account the fact I really dislike New York and will most likely never ever live there. I spend a lot of my free time in America telling everyone how much I hate big cities and how New York scares me, but sometimes, when people ask what part of Nueva Yol I’m from, it’s just too much to explain that “No no no, not every American is from New York.” And it’s even harder to explain that I come from a very small town in the middle of a state kinda sorta located by California and on the entirely opposite coast as Nueva Yol. Usually, if I’m feeling like telling a half-truth, I tell them I’m from Boston, because odds are they know the Red Sox. “Ay, eres amiga de Big Papi!” they say, “You’re a friend of Red Sox hitter David Ortiz!” 

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3. I am a vegetarian. Compared to some of my more carnivorous friends (ahem, my college roommates), I don’t really enjoy meat. Even less so here when the entire chicken (often with feathers) and always the two feet are thrown into a pot and boiled with cups of salt, oil, butter, seasoning, and god knows what else. And I just can’t stomach the rice and pig stomach concoction (the famous chicharron) that I’m often fed. And an entire fried fish with the eyes and gills still in tact is hard for me to eat. So I tell them I don’t really eat meat. Really being the qualifier. My conversation with Chichi went like this, “Okay, so as a vegetarian you don’t eat red meat but you eat chicken, right Bea? And you don’t eat the chicken foot but you’ll eat the breast? And you don’t consider salami on top of your mashed up plantains meat, right? Okay, perfect, I understand.” Ah yes, I have become a Dominican vegetarian where not eating meat means eating chicken, salami, hotdogs and fillet of fish.

 4. I’m feeling sick. Some days I just need to take a few moments for myself to rejuvenate. I tell my family I feel sick, which admittedly I feel a little guilty about, but I just have to give myself personal time and space that will help me remain mentally healthy and happy. Dominicans don’t need “alone time,” and in fact they think it’s strange that I should wish to hole up in my room reading a book for hours on end. The countless hours I spend on porches with my friends and family here are always wonderful and I do it gladly, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s exhausting. It’s only when I come back to my site from a day spent with fellow volunteers that I realize how taxing my days in the pueblo really are. It’s amazing how fast a day goes by when you’re speaking English. The days when I think to myself, oh my god how am I doing this, I tend to take a break by retiring early to my room and watching an episode of the West Wing.  

I feel that it’s appropriate to invoke these white lies to keep myself sane. My relationship with most people exists on a very superficial level, and it’s easy to say something simple and watch them assume something about me. Like when I say, “I’m a mujer seria (serious woman)” and days later having them tell me “Pero, Bea, tu no bailas, you don’t dance because you’re a mujer seria.” Wow wow wow, I never said that, but I don’t correct them. I’ve begun to tell people I’m muy divertida (very fun) and that algun dia (one day) they’ll see me dance. But for now, I’m perfectly content allowing everyone in Manzanillo to assume I’m a serious, no-dancing, no-drinking, no-nonsense hardworking lawyer from New York who’s here to do some health stuff. It’s easier that way, and then I’ll get to surprise them with my sick bachata and merengue skills when I do finally bust them out. Two years here will change me in ways I can’t even begin to comprehend, these first four months already have. I know that I want to come back to America having grown personally and professionally, knowing how to navigate another culture and country, and with passion for helping others, but right now, I am still grappling with how to find my footing as a professional in my community while demonstrating the fun, carefree parts of my personality that I’m proud to have cultivated in my 22 years alive. It sure is a process!

Sending a photo of my housepig Canchito who we’re going to slaughter for Christmas and lots of love.

Missing snow, skiing, Santa and Christmas carols.

Xoxo,

Bea

On World AIDS Day

World AIDS Day commences

My charla on stigma and discrimination

Condom relay races

Julie leading a dinamica

View of El Morro in Monti Cristi

Andy making sandwiches

The Peace Corps Crew from the North!

El Morro beach

El Morro beach and a view of the zapatito

Crew of Escojo Mi Vida

On Dominican weddings and sex-ed charlas

¡Happy belated Thanksgiving!

I am exhausted. These past two weeks have been nuts, even though I’m supposed to be “taking it easy” here in my community. Not me, no way.

Last weekend started just like any normal weekend, washing my laundry and cleaning my room. I found a grand total of 1 cockroach, 4 spiders, 12 moths, and 1 giant hairball in my closet. Not bad. I hand washed a towel and my sheets (the worst) when we ran out of water and luckily did the rest before the power went out. Old news there, though, when isn’t the power running out?

The real fun started in the afternoon when my town’s annual month-long men’s softball tournament commenced with my team, Pueblo Nuevo battling in it’s first game against rival team Cervivi. The tournament kicked off with a parade down Main Street showing off newly gifted jerseys and tshirts of the four Manzanillera teams sent as recuerdos from relatives in the US. I sported a really cool shirt to wear and stood in the dugout with 75 of my cousins, aunts, friends and host sisters screaming for 3 hours in one of the more shrill pitches I’ve ever heard. It was awesome. Then I darted off to a doñas meeting to teach a lil something about combating violence against women to mark the anniversary of the death of the three Hermanas Mirabal, heroines in this country’s history who fought against the oppressive dictator Trujillo.

Sunday, I woke up bright and early to get my ducks in a row for the wedding of my cousins Jhanna and Macho. I am a picky wedding goer since I organized weddings at Tufts during my undergraduate career (seems oh so long ago) and this one was one of the prettiest things I’ve seen in this country, but I can hardly compare it to an American wedding. Roughly ninety percent of it included the bride and groom taking thousands of pictures in front of a three tier pineapple flavored wedding cake and ten percent of the time mimicking traditions from American weddings. There was the service, with bridesmaids and all, but in the middle of it, a fire broke out in the field behind the church. In true Dominican fashion, the service went on with people mingling in and out, standing up to look at the chaos out back, all the while interrupting the pastor and the vows without a care in the world. Then Jhanna put the ring on Macho’s right hand, oops. From the service, we went to eat an awesome lunch on Styrofoam plates with plastic cutlery and more than enough 2-liter soda in grape, orange and raspberry flavors. A single rose of the bouquet was thrown into a crowd of eager ladies, with kids and babies joining in. Christian Evangelical music was blaring at top notch, yet no dancing and certainly no drinking. All in all, it was beautiful, romantic and the talk of the town.

No one gets “married” as we’ve come to know it in America. There are no fancy weddings, no white dresses, and certainly no banquet style comidas. Why? 1) They’re expensive, ridiculously so by Dominican standards. The whole thing cost around $2,000 which is nothing by our standards, but an absolute luxury for most families here. 2) People think they’re stupid. “He’ll just pega cuernos, he’s going to cheat on her, why are they wasting they’re money?” And sadly, most people haven’t seen many faithful, respectful and honest examples of love or marriage to show them otherwise. Even sadder, it’s almost certain he will pega cuernos. 3) They already love each other and live together, why the need to make it official? This is an argument I can get into, and I certainly had a lot of interesting conversations around the idea and concept of marriage last weekend, and interesting to hear the perspectives of people who like me, do not really believe in marriage.

The beginning of the week passed rapido, from meetings, my community health diagnostic, English classes, a community mapping project, and preparing for World AIDS Day activities.

And then it was Thanksgiving! Talk about a turkey hangover! I haven’t spent a Thanksgiving at home since I was thirteen (sorry mom and pop) and I’ve always spent it merrily with friends. This time was no different. All the volunteers met up in the capital for our very own celebration complete with pecan and pumpkin pie. The American food was a great change of pace from my daily rice and beans, and it felt like the right time to day a few days for rest and relaxation away from Manzanillo (even though the journey was long and I came back more exhausted than when I left!). I love my community with all my heart and the trip away confirmed that. I was so excited to come home and rejuvenated after talking to other Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) about their experiences to date. It was useful to share ideas, lament our challenges, and kick it eating turkey. Oh, and I ran a 5k. Won’t even tell you my time because back home, my 14-year old brother beat me in his very own Turkey Trot by over 10 minutes. Embarrassing.

On Saturday, I made the 6-hour trek back home to Manzanillo to arrive by 3pm just in time to devour my rice and beans and head to my doñas meeting for my very first official chat on HIV/AIDS. There was a bigger than normal showing that I was proud of, and I felt really good about the message and suspect it came across. Go me! Next – I made the rounds around town to let it be known I had arrived back to my site so I didn’t have to waste cell phone minutes calling the doñas who insisted I let them know when I’d returned. I made an evening out of it and stopped at for juice, coffee, tostones, and fried potatoes at the houses of Wendy, Mama Julia, Tita, Luisa and Chila, Phew!

And this morning, I woke up early yet again to head to the pueblo of Monti Cristi – a beach town about an hour away for a collaborative workshop in commemoration of World AIDS Day. Along with four other volunteers who have already been here for a year and completed groups of Escojo Mi Vida (the youth health initiative I’ll be working on). Together, we set out to educate sixty youth about condom usage, stigma, HIV prevention, and history of the disease. With my homeboy Domingo, I taught about discrimination and stereotyping of people living with HIV or AIDS. It went super bien if I don’t say so myself. It was really great to have this workshop so close to my site because I was able to see what volunteers a year into their service are capable of. The message definitely resonated with the kids and I am impressed by how professionally the workshop ran. Congrats to Julie, Krista, Yvette and Elana for a productive and inspiring day!

Now, I’m finally home and here to stay for a month at least. I'll be conducting a community health assessment as well as giving charlas about HIV/AIDS, teenage pregnancy, family planning, and nutrition in the high schools and to the doñas. Manzanillo has already started to get rowdy (music blasting until 5am last night) with people coming to visit from the states and people checking out for the rest of 2013. Here we come 2014! 

I’m thankful for all of the wonderful friends and family I have all over the world. I constantly think about how lucky I am to be here, but that doesn’t mean a little nostalgia doesn’t creep in once in a while, especially on Thanksgiving! I am appreciative of you all for allowing me to indulge those memories of home and of our great times together. Miss you and thank you all for being you!

Sending empanadas, warm weather, and many thanks!

Missing all the pesos I spent in the capital, Thanksgiving leftovers, and my family.

Gobble gobble,

Bea