On making money and mangaring visas

How do people make money here? I often have no idea. In my campo, there are the main industries like the two banana packing factories, the sea port, and the government’s banana farm project. There are colmados (corner stores), three barber shops, a few home delivered nail services, two salons, three bars and four restaurants. Other than that, I literally have no idea how people make money. There are volunteers who live in towns where the economy revolves solely around one cassabe factory, one yogurt and cheese making business, or sparse tobacco farms which are all highly dependent on rainwater for growing crops, feeding cows and seeding new varieties. So how do people feed themselves when their is no rain, it's not cassabe season, or the tobacco doesn't grow? I set out to investigate.

I found that almost 10% of the DR’s economy ($3.9 billion) is remittances, or money sent here from abroad, most commonly through Western Union, Caribe Express or other wire transfers. This is quite a high percentage, but for comparisons sake, in Haiti, remittances account for an estimated half of the national income. An online article I found explains remittances as "keeping the homeland afloat."

Another way people survive is through the a welfare type debit card called the “Tarjeta de Solidaridad.” This card comes stocked every month with 800 pesos for food, two gallons of propane, money for the electricity bill and extra money for each child a family has in the school system. I estimate that 50% of my campo is on the card, and have heard estimates of up to 90% in other volunteers’ sites. To receive this card, beneficiaries must comply with education and health component, cardholders must go for monthly checkups at the local clinic and attend educational presentations on topics ranging from family values to the importance of reading to the prevention of domestic violence. I give this part a big thumbs up. The problem with the card? Many people sell their card benefits to others for profit. This is not new or novel for governments who have welfare program (we have similar issues in the US), but it's difficult to police. 

What do these two major sources of income (remittances and the tarjeta) mean for the DR and it’s people? It creates a lot of problems. Add in the long history of foreign aid coming into campos and (mostly) white people “giving” stoves, medicines, schools, paint etc and you’ve got a pervasive attitude of “getting." The ways this mentality (of getting) manifests itself are complicated and I can in no way explain it adequately without writing also writing an anthropology, history and sociology textbook to accompany it. However, from my small sliver of experience here, I will make a few observations. 

I see a great deal of is young women who spend their days searching Facebook or other social media sites looking for a boyfriend, sugar daddy or American that they can meet, chat with and eventually ask for money, fall in love with (or not) and marry. For example, I have a friend who happens to be my exact age. Three years ago, she was living with her parents and they ended up splurging on Internet for the house. She immediately set up her own Facebook page and told me she would spend countless hours at home on the Internet just chatting with men from America because she was bored and odds were, she told me, if she spent enough time chatting, eventually one would become her boyfriend. Well, three years later, she has a two-year old daughter and just officially married to her baby daddy, a 61-year old Romanian American who lives in Orlando, Florida. He pays her rent, Internet and food, buys her and daughter clothes and sends money for cell phone minutes and trips to the salon. He comes to Manzanillo two or three times a year and each time he comes, they are whisked off to a resort for a few days, making her the subject of much envy in town. “She won,” a friend told me, “She got what we all want.” This is not an unusual/outlier case. 

Another problem with this remittances thing is that it gives people an idea of America as this jackpot of money. There is a huge misconception that if you can “make it” to America, you will be rich and live a great life. Therefore, everyone is trying to move to New York, legally or illegally, no importa. I’ve been asked countless times to “mangar la visa” a semi-rude term people will yell to gringos ordering them to “get me a visa.” When I teach class, students will interrupt in the middle of a lesson and say, “Bea, when are you gonna get me that visa, huh blondie?” I’ve also been propositioned with a legitimate offer of $5,000 if I marry my neighbor’s son and then divorce him when he gets to America. I tend laugh it off as a joke even though they're absolutely serious. The culture of “mangaring a visa” is pervasive. I've come to understand how growing up in this culture would lead one to believe the will only be successful if they make it to Nueva Yol. Everyone has a primo, uncle, abuela, amiga or relative in Nueva Yol and they're just trying to make it, too. It is an undeniable stamp of victory.

And here’s another problem with remittances. Let’s say, for example, someone sent me 4,000 pesos (or $100USD) for my remittances one week. I would go to Western Union and sign for it, and spend it...all of it. Dominicans are not accustomed to saving money and almost no one I know has a bank account. Even though 4,000 pesos could feed a family of four for almost a month, many of the young women I see getting their remittances spend it within a weekend. On what? On the salon, clothes, baby formula, cell phone minutes, makeup, perfume, you name it. This is a culture very preoccupied with appearances and 4,000 pesos can do a lot to propel that image. 

I can sympathize with Dominicans who feel that they have nothing because quite honestly, much of the time there literally is no way to feed their families. The immediate and simple solution has been to ask families in America for money, look for American men/husbands/boyfriends who will send money over, and any other way of getting money and food on the table. People are often shocked that I don't have a sugar daddy/boyfriend sending me over money , "But Bea, how do pay your rent, do you not go to the salon because he doesn't send you money, who's buying your clothes?"

I see the job of Peace Corps Volunteers (and other international aid organizations) is to help these young women (and men) acquire skills that will decrease their independence on remittances. In this day in the technological age, finding a boyfriend and eventually husband online is relatively easy, especially if you have no job and all the time in the world to sit on the street and fish for one. The question of “where do people get their money” is a complicated one without a simple solution, but investing in education, micro-finance loans for women and healthy after school activities (aka Escojo Mi Vida) are a good start and one where I can personally make a dent. The world is a much bigger and complicated place than I ever could have imagined. 

Disclaimer: This was my first attempt at investigative reporting! It started with an email from a former boss/friend from back home asking how people here make money. It was meant to be a combination of my own (limited) observations and a series of facts about the DR's economy. If you have topics you're curious about for the future, send an email! 

On spending pesos and living life

As Jay-Z once said, “Another day, another dolla. In my case, the lyrics go, “Another week, another compilation of stories and too many spent pesos.”

Here’s the highlights.

1) Crashing a fancy Dominican wedding

Last weekend, my mom and dad were invited to a wedding (between the richest family in town and a Dominican from New York) so like any Dominican would, I tagged along sin invitación. I knew it was going to be fancy because all week long people had been gossiping about how much the cake, decorations, buffet, invitations, etc cost. True or not, rumors were spreading that the couple spent (in pesos) $35,000 on the cake, $93,000 on decorations, $64,000 on the buffet and no one could even speculate on how much the chocolate fountain must have cost! In total, the couple spent around $7,000 US dollars on the event, not a shocking figure by American standards, but buys you a hell of a lot here! From the moment we sat down, we were drinking rum, eating chocolates, munching on meringues (smuggled in from America), dipping marshmallows in a tiny chocolate fountain, and watching the couple take thousands of pictures in front of the four story cake. It really was a beautiful wedding, and has since been the talk of the town. Good times were had by all.

2) Participating in a 5k running race

At 8:30 in the morning last Saturday, a bus full of children, the school’s P.E. teacher and I went to a nearby town called Loma de Cabrera for a “maratón” aka a running race. We rolled in around 10am and I thought the race must start around 11. Nope. We ended up splashing around in the local river, eating pounds of rice, going back again to swim in the river (haven’t they heard of the wait 30 minutes rule) and finally heading to the race course (a 1.25km loop around the town) and starting around 4:30pm. It was one of my favorite experiences in this country because a) thousands of spectators were out watching the race while drinking rum and beer and b) every 1km people would be handing out water and throwing water on the competitors and c) there was loud music and people cheering everywhere and d) cash prizes for the top three in each category including 9-year-olds. I got 4^th place, bummer!

3) A morning spent shucking beans and killing cows

On Sunday, I trucked into the capital to visit my old host family from El Portón, the campo where I spent six weeks during Community Based Training. It was so great to see my family again as it’d been more than 7 months since I’ve been back. I got to see my little nephew, my favorite grandma, my 38-year old pregnant neighbor who’s “way too old” to be pregnant, God bless her, and the rest of my favorite families. I also got to help them prepare for their patronales, or a day celebrating the patron saint Altagracia. In the DR, each town/city has it’s own patron, a saint guiding the city to greatness or something like that. And each year, when it’s that community's patron saint day, big festivities (traditional and not) are held to celebrate, drink, dance and worship. For this celebration in El Portón, a town of 40 that was expecting a crowd of over 200, we had some serious food prep to do. The men (and me taking pictures) spent the morning killing a cow and hanging it to cure while the women spent the entire day shucking beans. It took ten women eight hours to shuck an entire sack full of beans. UEPA! And then the women cleaned the church while the men played dominoes. And gender roles were perpetuated...

4) Teaching sex-ed class after the professor cheats on her husband and with the local bus driver

I was on a morning run, when I kindly got invited to dinner with one of the professors I work with in the high school. He’s a great guy and I’ve been to his house lots to eat with him and his family so I accepted right away. “I’ll meet you at your house, I said.” He responded, “No I’ll pick you up,” which I thought was strange. Turns out, he took me out to dinner mostly because he needed an ear since he recently learned his wife was cheating on him with the bus driver. The real kicker though, is that I work closely with him but even closer with his wife, as she’s the sex-ed teacher in the high school. Awkward! And talk about chisme (gossip), the whole town’s been speculating about it for weeks now and it sounds like their lives are kind of in shambles. Anyway, as we are munching away on fried chicken and green bananas, I’m trying to give him advice like, “God’s the only one who knows what will happen, I promise he will take care of you.” Umm...who am I? I felt really bad but we somehow got through dinner without him crying. He took me home and I couldn’t wait to snuggle up in bed and read the rest of the book She’s Come Undone (such a great read). At 11pm, I heard a knock at my door and it was the director of the high school asking me if I could teach sex-ed class alone for a while. “Ya tu sabes, nadie va a cojer clase de un cuernuero,” which translate to, “You know why, no one is going to take class from a cheating whore.” 1) Aggressive language on the director's part, 2) Teaching alone to Dominican youth? God save me and 3) I feel so bad for their family this is the worst place for gossip. 

5) The Peace Corps Volunteer “Gossip Network”

Speaking of gossip...It's not unusual to be staying in the capital at our Peace Corps approved hostel fondly known as the “Bella” and see one two or forty other volunteers there for various medical, personal or work related events. Last night, I happened to be staying there with some ladies in my group and a business volunteer from a region north of the capital. She spotted us and looked like she needed to talk. “Let us have it girl, what's up?” As it turns out, she has been semi-permanently evacuated from her site with four months left to go in her service. Turns out her Dominican boyfriend is a loan shark (loans money to people who can't get them from the bank and has high interest rates) who at some point or another got mixed up with narcotraffickers and owes big kahuna drug dealers $20,000 USD. WHATTTT? So, fearing for her safety should the drug lords ever chose to go after her, she's on permanent evacuation. Hearing her story surreal, we live and learn among Dominicans and it can be so easy to forget the serious problems out there. I intellectually know that drug trafficking is a huge problem here, but it’s easy to forget when you can’t directly see it. Interesting how sometimes the closer you get to a community or a culture, the harder it is to see its problems.

6) Traveling 12 hours to get to my friends site and celebrate the patron saint day in her community

This is a relatively small island. The size of NH and VT combined, okay it’s actually tiny. And somehow, it took me 12 hours to get home on Wednesday. Tuesday, four of my good friends and I went to the province just north of the capital (Monte Plata) to visit our friend Laura’s site an celebrate her patronales because her town’s patron saint also happens to be la Altagracia. I’ve had this date marked on my calendar for over six months because she said, “It’s pretty much the only time my community is fun.” We did end up having a great time, but in general, I love seeing other people’s site and realizing how diverse this country is and how different volunteers make their sites work for them. She’s created a wonderful life for herself in a town without internet or cell service and less than 200 people. And my site couldn’t be more different but we both make it work for us. So we ended up dancing palos a traditional Dominican dance, eating freshly killed pork, hitting the one discoteca to dance bachata, merengue, salsa and dembow and ended up staying out until 6am. We woke up at 8am, made breakfast and I lamented the fact that we needed to be off because I couldn’t miss my 2:30 bus. Well, we were waiting for a bus on the side of the road that only passes once every hour and decided hitch hiking was the way to go. A great ride we got, but the driver ended up getting lost, I missed by bus and the next one broke down...the travel saga continues...I had to call a friend to pick me up from the town over...and I ended up making it back to the ‘Zillo a mere twelve hours after I started. Inefficiency at it’s very best = multiple hours spent reading The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, another must read.

So there you have it, another few weeks in the life! When the going gets nuts/rough, here's to chalking it up to adventure and giving it your all. 

On compartir

From an essay I wrote for a on "compartir" and the most valuable skills I've gained in Peace Corps. 

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After a long day of power walking to the high school to teach sex-ed, eating a lunch of rice and beans with my host aunt, attending a prayer service for my sick neighbor, eating a second lunch of pumpkin stew, playing baseball in the primary school, and sipping coffee on my host grandmother’s porch, I was relieved, finally, at nine o’clock at night when I sat down to eat mashed plantains and fried salami with my host mother. It was an exhausting day and night of compartir, a verb that means “to share” in Spanish. To an outsider, compartir does not look like much of anything as it mostly includes drinking coffee, sitting in plastic chairs, eating fried food, playing dominoes, and simply, sharing the company of others. Technically, my assignment in the Peace Corps is to serve as a community health promoter in a rural fishing village in the Dominican Republic, but I find much of this role includes spending my time informally mentoring youth on my porch, pulling all-nighters to attend open-casket wakes for deceased community members, and inventing games of baseball with children in the street. My favorite time to compartir is just after sunset, when the mosquitoes have retreated for the night, the ocean breeze arrives with semi-regularity, and the smells of fried fish guide my route to the houses I will visit that night. I often find myself spending time with Mama Julia, an 86 year-old woman with more energy and warmth than a strong cup of doña-brewed ginger tea. I began calling Mama Julia “grandma” after our third cup of coffee, and it was around the sixth bowl of shared cow foot stew that she told me we gained confianza— a word reserved for two people who have reached a high level of mutual trust and the deepest compliment a community member could give me. On the nights I stay home, the compartir comes to me. Rosalva, my 24-year old host cousin, is a regular on my porch.

On our first few evenings porch-sitting, we lamented the tragic death of the protagonist on our favorite nighttime telenovela, but as our confianza grew, we started having deeper conversations about God, the treatment of women in a machismo culture, and her biggest goals in life, like finishing high school. Before moving to this small island of the Dominican Republic that I’ve come to call my second home, the idea of spending hours in the company of another person without an explicit purpose was foreign to me. Idaho-born and Boston-educated, I was never taught to see and feel the importance of “doing nothing.” I said “yes” to everything, always volunteering for political campaigns, human rights rallies, and local soup kitchens. I kept a tight schedule and inundated my agenda with activities, penciling in time for homework while saving half-hour slots for coffee dates with friends. I applied to the Peace Corps because the feeling of actually connecting with the human faces behind the numbers and activism was missing from my life. At first, I felt overwhelmed by the collectivist society I found in the Dominican Republic, but now, I cannot imagine going a day without adding four tablespoons of sugar to a cup of Santo Domingo brew or not sitting in a plastic chair listening to doñas gossiping and connecting deeply with friends. Reflecting on what it is that I get from these exchanges, I can list material things like the amount of coffee, chicken feet, and guava juice I’ve shared with my community, but I have also gotten something much more valuable. In compartir, I get to share in the struggles, successes, happiness, distress, celebrations, deaths, and joys with my community in a way that my structured work doesn’t have time for. I would have never practiced this way of achieving profound human connection had I continued to live my whole life in the United States. I am more patient, observant, and sensitive because of the time I have spent consoling, advising, laughing, crying, and maturing through compartir; I have an invaluable skill set to take with me wherever I go next. The foundation of my identity is rooted in the United States, but as I spend more time sharing with others under the hot Dominican sun, my identity flourishes. I see now that in the task of volunteering, providing healthcare, teaching English and mentoring, human connection is the most crucial element which makes the world go round, and drives me forward.

On mind control

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! A long overdue mensaje, I sure hope it finds you well! 

I had a really great 2014! Not everyday was a good day, but it sure was full of learning experiences. I overcame hurdles I once thought impossible, grew professionally and personally, and learned more about international development than I ever could have working in an office. A lot of the work I did was for my community, yes, but a lot of the work I did in the Peace Corps last year was for me. I’ve had what I consider to be a successful service so far, I’ve graduated my women and youth groups, constructed many improved cookstoves, begun to implement an emergency medical system, and taught a few English classes. I’ve checked off the boxes Peace Corps set for me. But I did a lot for myself too. I learned how to cook rice and beans, grew to like children (a valuable skill that was at first met with much resistance), practiced hours and hours of yoga and meditation, exercised daily, took beach days and visited friends around the country, found myself a Dominican family, read fifty books and learned all the words to Miley Cyrus’s new CD Bangerz. To me, this is an accomplishment that deserves celebrating, too (especially the last one!).

Last year, throughout all the trials and tribulations, be it personal or professional, I did most of it alone, in my own head. It sounds strange, but I really did try to tackle every problem I faced in the Peace Corps head on and alone. Yes, I certainly had my fellow PCVs helping me along the way and answering those more than obnoxious late night teary phone calls. And of course I had the support of my wonderful friends and family back home. But through every challenge it was with only myself, in my own head, simultaneously solving Manzanillo’s toughest problems (still working on that one) and facing my own internal battles.

During my vacation back home, I had the great fortune to visit a dear adult friend in the Bay Area. Over dinner one night, as I was telling her all about my experience and work down here, she asked, “Is it hard?” I said, “Is what hard?” And she said, “Being alone all the time.” I thought about it for a second before answering, No, I have gotten really good at it, and I love it. But it is a lot of alone time and was extremely difficult at first. We discussed the idea a little more and she told me she was proud of me and impressed with what I am doing for others but also for myself. She wishes she had taken the time when she was younger to be alone, and said if she had, she probably wouldn’t have ended up married at 24 and divorced a year later. She would have made better decisions throughout her life, she said, if she had only learned to be content being alone.

Talking with someone whom I admire greatly tell me that she was proud of me this simple trait of being content alone was comforting. It reassured me that I am not crazy for spending so much time trying to become a better person. You wouldn't believe the amount of time I've spent in my own head, half the things I write down in my journal, or the crazy things I say aloud to myself in the mirror. My house is filled with crazy life plans, beautiful quotes, inspirational sayings, ideas for future projects and colorful doodles that represent hours I've spent trying to become a better person. Now, instead of being scared or dreading hours of solitude, I relish alone time. It’s taught me that I can. I am powerful, strong and motivated. I have become a better me. That much I found out last year.

Peace Corps in itself is a two-year exercise into the depths of discomfort. In 2014, I turned alone time into a coping mechanism for that discomfort. And at first it was awkward and the hardest thing I ever had to do was spend four, five or six hours alone. But, I’ve really taken control of it. I’m better at setting goals, holding myself accountable, being patient (still working on it). I have become the ruler of my own mind, which sounds maybe like a lame thing to work on for an entire year, but it wasn’t. It took 17 months of Peace Corps service to get here and yes, I’m still working on it, but my alone time is no longer uncomfortable and awkward, it’s a shiny new tool for my life toolbox.

My New Year’s resolution this year to create and develop another life tool. This year is the year of expansion, pushing myself to the limits, growing from others, and truly giving Dominicans the energy they deserve. Last year, I foraged a path alone, but this year, I’ll finish the journey foraging with others. 

Hope y'all are still sticking to your New Years resolutions! Health and happiness for 2015!

Love and resolutions, 

Bronwen