On "The Grind"

This week, I was giving a presentation on chronic and respiratory illnesses including malaria, dengue, the common flu, and pneumonia. A major “treatment” of these illnesses is to rest, drink lots of fluids, eat a balanced diet, and maintain hygiene. As I am telling the women that they need to rest when they are sick, the looked at me like I was crazy. “Bea mi’ja, quien tiene tiempo pa’ descansar?” “Bea, who has time to rest?” I looked a little shocked and I continued. “I know you are all very busy caring for your families, but you can’t help your children if you prepare their food with a cough and poor hygiene. You also can’t help your children if you are too weak to get them ready for school.”

That afternoon, I realized that I had answered them rather curtly because in the back of my mind I was thinking, “I just got off the phone with my 23-year old best friend who works from 8am to 10pm many days a month and probably couldn’t tell you what “work-life balance” even means anymore. Another friend loves her job in “The City” but is always putting in extra hours on the polio or malaria account she works on regularly leaving the office at 7pm or later. And another is has been traveling all over the country for work and can’t seem to catch a much-needed break from the “grind.” But I should have withheld my judgment because here, even in a collectivist country, people are exhausted. Not to mention the added element of extreme heat they face while hand-scrubbing laundry, cooking outside on a three-stone fire, and running around after their kids. Life here is difficult, too, just in very different ways.

This is not a capitalist country, it’s a country where most people work in the informal sector, selling clothes or beauty products from magazines, painting nails for a profit on their front porch, asking neighbors for support, or finding American men to support them and their families. But even here, they perceive that they can’t catch a break. The capitalism grind we are so used to in America leaves us little time for rest, but so too, does the informal work sector that many Dominicans rely on. We all need a break and time to rest or these chronic illnesses I’m trying hard to prevent are gonna eat us all up!