On my life being strangely similar to Orange is the New Black

My life here is a combination of the TV show drama, Orange is the New Black, and Wild, a book about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. It sounds awful to say, but hear me out. I just read the book version of OITNB and there are some quotes that serve to explain what I mean. Peace Corps is not jail, I can always leave. I wasn't forced to be here and I am not trapped in prison with thousands of convict women. But many of the sentiments expressed in Piper Kerman's novel have struck a chord with me. And for a synopsis on why Wild rings true with me, check here.

"I had only the most tenuous idea of what might happen next, but I knew that I would have to be brave. Not foolhardy, not in love with risk and danger, not making ridiculous exhibitions of myself to prove that I wasn't terrified - really genuinely brave, constantly reminding myself that yes I can."

From taking that first step and joining Peace Corps despite all the what ifs, to boarding that plane in DC, to pushing through the hardest days of training, to making my site and projects work for me, to coping with all the hardships, bullshit, loss, drama, etc, I've been brave.

"I nodded, not understanding a thing."

This was every single day for the first six months.

"By now conflicting things were churning around in my brain and my guts. Had I ever been so completely out of my element as I was here in Danbury? In a situation where I simply didn't know what to say or what the real consequences of a wrong move might be?"

Cultural competence takes time!

"There are a dizzying number of official and unofficial rules, schedules and rituals. Learn them quickly or suffer the consequences, such as: being thought an idiot, being called an idiot, getting on another prisoner's bad side, getting on a guard's bad side, being forced to clean the bathrooms, eating last in line when everything edible is gone...Everything else - the unofficial rules - you learn by observation, inference, or very cautious questioning of people you hope you can trust."

Peace Corps rules, cultural rules, DR guidelines, rules for friendships, rules for enjoying yourself, rules for work, rules of engagement. So so much riding on a simple understanding of the way society works...complex!

"It was easy to tell the difference between women who were lonely and wanted comfort, attention and romance and a real, live lesbian: there were a few of them. There were other big barriers for long-term lovers, like having sentences of dramatically different lengths, living in different dorms, or becoming infatuated with someone who wasn't actually a lesbian."

Except in this quote, change lesbian for Dominican, or HCN, host-country national. Life is boring in the campo.

"I settled into rituals, which improved the quality of my existence immeasurably. The ritual of coffee-making and drinking was one of the first."

Exactly.

"Larry came to see me every week, and I lived for those visits - they were the highlight of my life in Danbury, a chest-filling affirmation of how much I loved him. Some women never got visits because they had effectively said goodbye to the outside world. No children, no parents, no friends, nobody. Some of them were halfway around the world from home, and some of them didn't have a home."

I cannot express how much texts, emails, phone calls, Skype dates and best of all, visits, mean to me. These are the things that keep me going, push me forward, make me sane. Thank you!

"Any story you heard from another prisoner had to be taken with about a pound of salt. Think about it: put this many women in a confined space, give them little to do and a lot of time - what else can you expect? Still, true or not, gossip helped to pass the time. I had no way of verifying whether it was gospel truth or not, like most things I heard in prison, but I understood that these stories held their own accuracy. They described our world as it was and as we experienced it. Their lessons always proved invaluable and inviolable." 

Gossip runs this town, currency of sorts. There are always those "in the know" and those telling you what not to do to not get talked about. It's exhausting!

"I had learned a lot since arriving in prison five months ago: how to clean house using maxipads, how to write a light fixture, how to discern whether a duo were best friends or girlfriends, when to curse someone in Spanish, knowing the difference between "feelin' it" (good) and "feelin' some kind of way" (bad), the fastest way to calculate someone's good time, how to spot a commissary ho a mile away, and how to tell which guards were players and which guards were nothin' nice. I even mastered a recipe from the prison's culinary canon: cheesecake."

These are mostly all true to my case, but I have instead learned how to bake a mean banana bread!

"I was too engrossed in prison life, that the "real world" was fading too much into the background, and I probably needed to read the paper more religiously and write more letters. Focusing on the positive was hard, but I knew that I had found the right women at Danbury to help me do it. A little voice in my head reminded me that I might never see anything quite like this again, and that immersing myself in my current situation, experiencing it, and learning everything there was to know might be the way to live life, now and always."

How will I re-integrate? How weird will I be when I get home? What will I not know? Will there bye reserve culture shock? Will I remember how to work, use a computer, drive a car?

"Certain things brought my absence from the outside world into sharp relief, like once-in-a-lifetime events that would happen without me. The world kept going despite the fact that I had been moved to an alternate universe."

Weddings, birthdays, deaths, events, graduations...PCVs miss many of these.

"The more friends I had, the more people wanted to feed me; it was like having a half-dozen Jewish mothers. I was not one to turn down a second dinner, as you could never be quite sure when the next good one would be served. But despite my high-calorie diet, I was getting pretty competent at yoga, I was lifting eighty-pound bags of cement at work, and running at least thirty miles a week, so I wasn't getting fat."   

Amen sister.

On the nights that change you forever

Disclaimer: This is a very hard mensaje to write. It documents the toughest night of my life, including a motor vehicle accident and the subsequent death of three young men. Don’t feel obliged to read if you’re of the weak stomach, don’t like sad tales or don’t want to read about blood. While this may not be the perfect medium to express my grief and sorrow, I want to let you, dear readers, in to a melancholy corner of my life: the dark hole I’ve found myself in this week. I hope that if I can just get it all down in words this one time, it’ll help me move forward and prevent me from having to rehash details over and over again, so thank you in advance for your support. However, if you read no further, at the very least, I remind each of you of the fleeting and precious moments that make up this one truly special life. Today, make someone happy, give someone a hug, tell someone you love them, eat cookies, and remember how much you are loved right back.

Here goes:

This is the kind of night that changes a person forever. It started out like any other Saturday night in Manzanillo, but soon became more raucous than most because we had patron saint celebrations in town and some no-name dembow artist with Barbie-like proportions took the stage while a crowd of drunk onlookers grinded with each other in groups around bottles of rum. Milka left the stage around midnight and the masses made their way to the local bar to dance.  I was dancing to a nice Romeo song when the music turned down suddenly. The crowd erupted – “TURN UP THE MUSIC” and for a brief second it did and my partner and I went back to dancing. Then suddenly, the music shut off and the DJ announced over the microphone that he was closing for the night, and told the men to "take their ladies home". The whole place was confused and in uproar, it was 2am. My friend Anny grabbed me by the hand and yelled to me to follow her. With the rest of the crowd and optics of a flowing river, went hundreds of people running in unison toward the street. I asked what was going on and someone mentioned “accident, dead, kids, motorcycle” but I couldn’t piece it all together, I just followed the crowd. I arrived to the hospital with over 500 Dominicans crowding the emergency room door. As in all confusing situations, people we crying, speculating, screaming, rushing the door and trying to get in. It was utter chaos - terrifying, terrible and heartbreaking. Two days later, we’re still trying to piece it all together, but from my best guess, this is what happened:

Two boys were at the Patronales festival and left in their motorcycle heading the 9km home when they crashed into an unlit semi-truck stopped on the side of the road. The first to the scene were trained paramedics in the town ambulance. They loaded the boys into the back and jetted off the hospital. Upon arrival, someone yelled to them to go back, that an accident happened. “We know, we know, we’re bringing the patients here,” said Alexis. “No,” said the onlooker, “Another two just crashed, hurry!” Apparently, the culprit semi-truck backed up to make room for the ambulance and that’s when another motorcycle with two boys from Montecristi also crashed into the same unlit semi-truck.Two identical accidents within a span of 45 minutes. Of the four, two were dead on impact. One of the boys died in the ambulance in the hands of our trained paramedic Alexis (in his words, “I felt when the soul was taken out of him, he was just gone.”) The final victim is still in critical condition in the city of Santiago. Alexis said when he got to the hospital with the second two, he could barely work because so many people were crowding the ambulance and tapping the window to see in. “Savages,” he kept saying over and over.

In the chaos of the crowd and frenzy at the hospital, I ran right away back to the house and put my “leader” shirt on and ran back to the hospital to do crowd control. I knew trained first responders were in the emergency room with the critical patients and would need a space to get the stretcher into the ambulance parked outside, but there were at least 100 people standing in the ten feet between the door and the ambulance. As best I could, with the help of another paramedic, Anny, we got the crowd back and the stretcher into the hospital and the jet off. Then it was up to us to deal with the screaming, crying, yelling, fainting and crazed onlookers. I was trying so hard to keep it all together, to prevent people from blocking the hospital door, prevent footage from being recorded, help screaming friends of the victims, control the rumors already spreading like wildfire. I’m not sure I did a very effective job, but I was doing what I could.  

And then a moment changed all that. A friend from Copey approached me to say, “Bea, you know it was Enmanuel and Yunior who died, right?” I couldn’t breathe, it couldn’t be. My students? The boys who just helped me build a chimney for the stove in his mother’s house? No! No! No! And then, a tear slipped out, but before I could completely break down, another friend came up to me and yelled, “YOU CANNOT ACT NERVOUS, GET IT TOGETHER,” and I had to regain my composure and put it all back together inside and out with the burden of knowing the victims well. I had hours to go before I could walk home, crash in bed, break down and cry.

Eventually, I decided it was time to go inside the emergency room and piece together what information I could from the doctors. Never before have I seen such ugliness. The two boys...my students...laying face up in hospital stretchers with sheets over their faces...they’re really dead? No! No! No! I watched as the fathers of the boys came to confirm their sons’ identities. “Si,” they wailed, “es mi’jo, mi’jo...mi’jo.” I approached the hospital director who just said with a blank face, “Oh Bea, oh Bea, you’re here, thank you.” I felt paralyzed. 

This night was hard for me to varying degrees and on multiple levels. First, I have never seen dead bodies, let alone those of my students, and two of them, faces up, bodies destroyed and faces indistinguishable. Beyond that, I was in the emergency room with them for more than an hour, so to see the two corpses for so many hours of the night, and then more vile images from friends who sent me photos afterward was more blood and guts then I bargained for. 

Secondly, I had to search deep and summon all my courage and motivation to lead in a situation like this. I don’t have a medical background, Spanish is my second language, and a part of me kept nagging my subconscious, wtf am I doing here? The only answer I can come up with is that someone had to do it. And in emergencies, it’s not those in charge that tend to lead, it’s those who are there. But let me tell you, when I finally dragged my ass into bed at 4am, I let loose and cried harder than I’ve cried in recent memory. Life is unfair.

Finally, I was very affected on an emotional level (better word might be crushed) because it was Enmanuel and Yunior up on those stretchers. Two boys who I’ve taught and learned from, cared about and motivated. Sending condolences, my best friend and fellow teacher, Emily, texted me to say, “I believe (in all my 24 years of wisdom) that the closest approximation to the loss of your own child is the loss of your student. Maybe I’m naïve, but all I know is that for a period of time, they are your children. I am so sorry.” It hit me so hard when she texted, it made perfect sense, of course that’s why I feel like I just got crushed with a cinderblock, because they were my loving, living, learning students.

Reeling from aftermath of this accident, I have seen a strange combination of reactions from townsfolk. Some people are sad and although they didn’t know the families, they grieve as if they did. Tragedy struck, let’s all shed tears together. But then there are some that just want to get pictures of the accident and have been going around town in a perverted hunt for images of the night. Then they WhatsApp then en masse to others. The fact that a someone from New York, a cousin of a Manzanillo friend knew about the accident before she did, is proof (sometimes social media is too effective). And then there are those who act like I’m losing it for being upset two days later. But Bea, it wasn’t your fault, get over it already. Well of course it wasn’t my fault, but it is still an awful burden to bear. “Let me feel what I need to feel,” I want to yell, “Let me be alone when I need to, or with you when I don’t. Let me eat ice cream and dance in your kitchen to take my mind off it. Let me clean my house from top to bottom just to not have to think about it all. Let me nap at 4pm. Let me cry. But please, just hug me when I tell you to.”  

Yes, today was better, every day it's getting better, it’s been three days. I don’t know what tomorrow brings, but I’ll be okay, humans are resilient, especially in the face of tragedy, we all just need our time, there's no one right way to grieve. We were a community before, but we’ve come together now, and will emerge stronger. We have to, for Enmanuel and Yunior, we will. I hope the visions and nightmares of that night go away, but there are some sights that cannot be unseen. Instead I’ll try to remember their smiling faces, tiguere spirits and raucous laughter because that’s what they deserve. May they rest in peace.

On Dominicanisms

For those of you who haven’t spent any or much time in the DR, my friend Lauren and I have compiled a list of things that are just straight up Dominican. You'll notice most of these upon touchdown!  

1. People name their babies with couple names (aka a mom named Gisel and a dad named Dawry name their child Gisaury).

2. You can send any child to do any favor for you at any hour of the day.

3. Twelve year olds can buy their parents cigarettes and beer.

4. The fact that Jeffery is spelled Yefri.

5. Putting your hair in rollers and going out in public.

6. Styrofoam....for everything.

7. Putting hot coffee in plastic cups (BPA warnings!?)

8. Responding “ok” to someone saying “thank you.”

9. Wearing white lyrca with red underwear.

10. WhatsApping Jesus quotes and prayers to everyone in your contact list.

11. Littering.

12. Having two cellphones from different carriers to get the best rates...but never actually making phonecalls.

13. Having a wife and a girlfriend.

14. Spaghetti as an acceptable side to rice and beans for lunch. Or fried eggs, fried cheese and fried salami with mushed up plantains for breakfast. 

15. Saying hello and “God Bless” to a bus full of strangers every time you get on one.

16. Blessing someone’s straight hair. Que Dios lo bendiga. 

17. Telling a party full of people you have diarrhea.

18. Sharing cups with strangers.

19. Scrunching your nose up and down to say "WHAT?"

20. Hissting to get someone's attention, call someone's name, order at a restaurant, cat call and more...

21. Offering whatever you’re eating to anyone and everyone in the vicinity no matter where or what it is.

22. Selfie compilations for social media. 

23. This flow. 

24. Styling kids hair in the cutest little twists and braids. 

25. Beaches like this that real Dominicans won't go to because they don't like the sun.

Cayo Tuna, Montecristi

26. Pick-up trucks with more people than should be legal. 

27. Fitting 5 people on a motorcycle. 

28. Clapping raucously when landing in Santo Domingo! (It must be that everyone's so excited to be in this beautiful country!)

On my "daughter" Gisaury

I don't like children. When my brother had friends over when we were younger, I looked for any excuse to leave the house. Babies make me cringe and I don't have patience to teach the alphabet. All that changed with Gisaury.

The first child I have ever truly loved beside my much younger biological brother, is Gisaury, my five-year-old neighbor. I don’t remember the first time we met or what event was the glue that sealed our fate, but six months after arriving, if she wasn't right beside me, running errands with me, on the back of my bike pedaling through town, helping me do laundry or coloring in my house, everyone asked me where my shadow was. One year and ten months later, they ask me where my daughter is.*

Gisaury lives with her paternal grandma, Nena. Nena is a wonderful woman, but has health problems and can’t keep up with the needs of her grandkids. Gisaury's 30-year-old father sleeps in the house but that's about the only time she sees him, for fifteen minutes at night. Gisaury's aunt Ada also lives in the house, but she's mostly concerned with the well-being of her own daughter, 4-year-old Haydee. Haydee is much cuter than Gisaury and has a bright, loud, sassy and magnetic personality. Haydee dances on queue, dresses in bright colors and never stops talking - all things generally respected and sought-after in Dominican culture. Gisaury on the other hand is quieter, struggles in school, bossy (err, I mean, has executive leadership skills?), and is tragically starved for love and attention. Gisaury’s 19-year-old mother (14 when she gave birth) recently eloped to the capital with some businessman she met on the internet. Gisel rarely sees her daughters (the other daughter lives with her maternal grandma in another part of town) and is very much absent from the lives of her daughters - both her daughters are being raised by their grandmothers. I guess I understand this because she is essentially a child herself. Gisaury’s life resembles the plot line of Cinderella or another similarly tragic tale. 

It would be wrong of me to say that I’ve adopted her, but I have taken an active interest in her life, reading to her, teaching her the colors, to count and to do well in school. When Nena let her stay home from school for a week because she had a rash and didn’t want her walking in the sun, I convinced Nena to buy an umbrella and send her to school. I brush her hair, paint her nails and let her sit in my lap even though its 95 degrees. I introduce her as mi'ja (my daughter) to the confused looks of townsfolk who aren't sure if I'm telling the truth. "She might as well be," I say to them, "I take her everywhere I go."  

I’m not the perfect substitute, nor do I actually know anything about being a mother, but if the love I feel for her is even a fraction of what a mother feels for a daughter, I have only now come to realize what a very powerful and beautiful bond it is. Gisaury truly does feel like a part of me. I sometimes do mental exercises and entertain the thought of how even just by reading to her, hugging her or calling her my daughter, I do a better job of parenting than her own mother does (not to mention I'm four years older than her own mother). It crushes me, the weight of the knowledge that she will never be loved as I was by my own mother, that her mom isn’t there to teach her to read, dress up in dresses, or throw her birthday parties. She didn't get a birthday party last year because she was sick, but also because no one had planned anything. And they have already been planning Haydee's birthday in July while nothing has been said about Gisuary’s on June 24th. 

So what would any mother looking to outdo any other mother in the birthday party department do? Plan a blowout! I am currently planning her sixth birthday party, Little Mermaid themed, to be held on the beach. With the wonderful execution skills of my scheming American mother, we're going to throw Gisaury a birthday bash. Taina expedited the party supplies from an American dollar store to friends heading down next week, and with a little help from Amazon prime, I’ll have Ariel invitations and wall decorations here by next week. Apart from that, I’ll order a cake, pop some popcorn, throw some candies in a bag and blow up balloons for 20 neighborhood children. It’s simple, but she deserves it. She's the one that has changed my entire outlook on children, shown me a love more powerful than I’ve ever known, and assured me that I am meant to be exactly where I am. June 24th is her day and I will make sure she knows it!

_____

* In Dominican culture, most people have 3-4 madrinas/padrinos (godparents) and every time they see them (aka first thing in the morning, after a long trip, when getting back from the grocery store), or an aunt, mother or father, it is custom to say “Cion madrina” which is a request for a blessing. The mother/father, godparent, uncle/aunt will say “God bless you.” It’s the sign of a truly special and deep bond reserved for close relationships. The other day, when I got home, Gisaury ran to me and for the first time she said “Cion mami.” It was one my proudest, most heartbreaking (in that she calls me mother because hers is so largely absent), and precious (that I can make an impact on someone so tiny and young) moments here.

On my moral compass

I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on what my expectations of Peace Corps were and how that played out during my service. Maybe it’s related to my moral compass and where it sways after 22 months in a foreign land. With the explicit goal of sending Americans to random villages with random people in far off lands presents an enormous set of personal challenges for the PCV and one that since Peace Corps’ beginning in 1961, has attracted “do-gooders.” But why? It can’t be all altruistic. On the reg, I stay up at night, or wake up in the morning thinking: am I still even a good person, what life lessons have I learned, how have I grown, what is my new place in the world?

We can never actually be as “poor” as them.

Even after two years and total integration, we will never truly be Dominican campesinos (country-folk). Why? Because we get to leave. We can leave at any time – because we want to, we hate it, we’re tired, sick, angry, in danger, etc. We will always have the “escape” factor. Which makes it seem sometimes like we’re playing a monopoly game with the money we make (more than the average working person makes here). So what does that mean for the idea that many have of "dropping everything for two years to live like the rest of the world does?" Well, for most Americans, we can't. Even though we may not have physical money, the majority of us are afforded a financial security beyond anything our community members will ever or can ever know. The majority of my community members do not have a bank account, debit card, or half the time even know where their next meal comes from. By pretending that we're "poor" for these two years feels slightly off to me. A double life. 

Our relationships have an expiration date. 

Some volunteers end up marrying their campo sweethearts, sending away for a visa, and taking them back to the United States. It does happen. But, probably more abundant are the volunteers who are with campesinos as a pasa tiempo (way to pass time). Makes sense on one hand? Two years is a long time to be celibate. But on the other hand, we make a habit of not taking the relationship too seriously. But why? Because sometimes it’s hard to take an in-love-machismo-Dominican-tiguere seriously. Example: My friend here was with a guy for a little less than two months. She knew the relationship was going nowhere – he hasn’t finished high school, can’t read, picks yucca occasionally and wears down vests in the summer – but he was nice to her, she was bored and who can blame her? One afternoon, he walks into her house with the top of a tattoo peaking out of his tank top. She gasps, what is that? He pulls down his shirt and there it is – a large tattoo of her name with six varying shaped stars outlining it. When she got upset and broke up with him on the spot, he looked confused. But I thought this would show you my love? No, she said, that’s insane.

Another example: A volunteer starts dating this guy and they hang out twice before he starts complaining about money, saying he doesn’t have the fare to make it to the university (but hey, points for studying!!). He doesn’t come out with it right away and she’s avoiding it because she knows he’s asking for money, which in Dominican culture is really embarrassing for a man to ask of a woman, typically a man will give a percentage of his paycheck to the woman to buy clothes and do her hair weekly. When she calls him out on it, he just yells at her saying “How could you think I’m only using you because you’re American?” It goes both ways though, was she using him because he was a Dominican pasa tiempo? Where does the moral line lie?

Why are we actually doing this?

I think as Volunteers, we like to think of ourselves as morally superior in many ways, especially when friends say “I could never do what you’re doing.” But the honest truth is, they could. And they’d probably be just as miserable as we are a lot of time. I often ask myself why we put ourselves through this ridiculously long emotional roller coaster ride. I think this quote explains it.

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.  The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.  The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”  — letter from Chris McCandless to Ronald Franz, Into the Wild

There are the moments in the campo, village, etc where we are miserable and lonely and feel like we haven’t accomplished anything and will never be productive again, but we took active steps to leave that life of conformity, the life we knew and felt comfortable with back in America. That counts for something, right? But then those days thinking "what have I really done and why am I here?" sneak up o you and sometimes I can’t answer that until I’ve sat on it for a few days. Sometimes, I pretend like I’m a big deal, altruistic do-gooder, but I know that can’t really be it.

Maybe this is why:

“I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence.  I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love.  I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.” – Leo Tolstoy

Or this:

“If you don’t now where you are going, any road will take you there.” — George Harrison

After 23 months it can be hard to see why we are here, who we are helping and what good we’ve done. Thankfully, I feel happy with my projects, excited and content, but it wasn’t always like this. Hindsight is 20/20, reflecting helps you analyze the struggles, but it doesn’t mean they don’t happen. I haven't come up with anything to say with 100% certainty that I am better person now that I was before or that a community in the northwest of the Dominican Republic benefited immensely from my presence. I think it's all true, but I'll never totally be able to prove it. Regardless of whether or not that answer is yes, I will have helped myself and a community in the process of figuring it all out and that counts for a lot.