On compartir

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

_________________________________________________________________________________

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.