The End is Near

This Friday I fly home to the states, landing in San Francisco just before midnight. It has been... quite a summer. This past weekend, a few friends and I went to Las Terrenas, Samaná for our last hurrah in the country before parting ways. All the sentimentality has left me feeling rather numb this week, although the minor cold I've developed may also have something to do with it :(. At some point I hope to write a longer summary of all that I've seen, done, and learned this summer, but I'm afraid I'm not quite in the right state of mind for it right now.

On the upside, I am very excited to head back home and then up to Berkeley, to see all the people I've been missing quite a bit. I'll probably have a few more postings before this blog goes dormant, but I figure I'll just take the opportunity now to thank everyone for reading. Trying to write anything worth reading is hard; hopefully I didn't bore anyone too severely ;)

Jarabacoa

(the view from the guest house we stayed in at a boarding school in Jarabacoa)

I am back from a very long weekend spent traveling, meeting new friends, hanging out, cooking, hiking, rappelling down waterfalls, jumping down waterfalls, wading down rivers, saying goodbye to some who have become old friends, and soaking in still more of the country that has been my home this summer before my abrupt departure next Friday.

After flying home late next Friday, I will spend Saturday packing and will drive up to Berkeley on Sunday to start class the following Wednesday! It is all happening too fast to be believed.

Last Thursday I made my way to Santo Domingo to spend the evening hanging out with fellow interns and staff members there, a couple of whom were leaving the next day. Notable among these was Maira, an amazing fellow intern of mine who was my close coworker here in the San Pedro office. Maira had been here for roughly a month before I arrived, and did so much to help me get settled when I first started working. This aside, Maira is simply an epitome of awesomeness. All of the interns, and I especially, were very sad to see her go.

Thursday night I slept on the floor of my coworkers who lives in Santo Domingo. On Friday, Anne and I went out and explored the Colonial District of the city. Gringos walking around that part of the city are ceaselessly accosted by Dominicans (mostly men) eager to sell us something, drive us somewhere, or give us a tour. In these situations, I find myself feeling a peculiar mix of righteous indignation and guilt. Indignation because “I just want to wander the city on my own accord, so leave me in peace!”, and guilt because, well, I’m a guest in their country, and they’re just doing their damndest to get by. It can be very frustrating sometimes; living in this country, you come to the realization that many people see your skin color and think “opporunity”.

Anyway, Anne and I wandered around, caught up on the going-ons of our respective stations, and lounged in very old, very air-conditioned churches (hmmm... are we really that interested in history? You decide ;). We eventually had to tear ourselves from the AC, as the church was closing and we had other friends to meet who were arriving in the city.

Because I am lazy, I am going to borrow from Anne’s blog a bit here:

“Prying ourselves from heavenly air conditioning, Jon and I joined up with two other interns and a girl (now old friend) who’s doing an independent research project in conjunction with Esperanza and her home university. We headed out to dinner at one of our favorite locales and then checked out a colmado that, in previous experience, had been quite the dance spot. The colmado was much tamer this night and we just ended up enjoying drinks and conversations. While we were chatting and relaxing, I looked over to the left and spotted the front sign of the university that Pedro Julio (my neighbor) attends; he’s taking night classes to obtain his degree in architecture. I gave him a call to see if he wanted to join, but, as it turns out, he was already at home. While that would have been an interesting mix of my two worlds here, it might be for the best that they remained separate.

We made plans to head back to the hotel and freshen up a bit before heading out for some dancing. Tess was definitely leading the pack in the let’s-go-have-fun venture. After we girls had tidied up, we went to fetch the boys. They were watching a movie and we decided to join them for a bit before officially hitting the dance floor. Ironically enough, Tess (our fearless leader) drifted off quickly followed by an apparently tired Anne (another strong supporter of dance adventure) and so we decided to postpone dancing until the next day.

...

The next morning, we checked out of La Res and, while walking to the bus stop, grabbed some fresh fruit for breakfast--I had piña y papaya! At the bus stop, we met up with another intern (David), his friend, and his sister to travel up to Jarabacoa where David attended high school. Staying in the guesthouse of the boarding school, we had access to warm water, bunk beds, and a full kitchen.”

OK, I’m back. The two other interns we were joined by were Tess, who Anne mentioned above, and Nate, an intern who I've traveled with almost every weekend and who I now count as a good friend. The independent researcher is Danielle, who has been doing research in Hato Mayor with Tess. She goes to Northeastern in Boston, and very quickly made herself a beloved member of the group. As an aside, David and his sister are both super-awesome. David is an intern I’ve become quite good friends with over the course of the summer and with whom I have quite a lot in common, despite the fact that the courses of our lives up to now could not have been more different. David goes to a super-small Christian college in Indiana (that he describes as “cultish”) and spent two years of his high school career living in Jarabacoa, as mentioned above. His sister, Emily, goes to Azusa Pacific in LA, and is tons of fun to hang out with. David and Emily have an enviably close sibling relationship, and seem to have a really good time with each other.

When we got in to Jarabacoa, we immediately shopped for groceries to make dinner that night. David is a wicked-good cook, and with help from the rest of us made a wonderful dinner of marinated chicken, vegetable curry, and cucumber salad. One of the things I’ve learned that group activities such as this are really a fantastic form of bonding and getting to know other people. Knowing this, I’m looking forward to having friends over and cooking more frequently during this upcoming school year in Berkeley. I’m really hoping to improve my cooking skillz.

On Saturday night, we went out to a dance club in Jarabacoa. At first they played a good amount of salsa and merengue, which I had a very good time dancing to, before they started playing endless loops of the same five or six annoying, repetetive Reggaeton songs (basically a Caribbean form of rap). Some of the Dominicans in the club took this music as an excuse to start dry humping in all kinds of interesting positions (there was one guy we nicknamed Crazy Sexual Dance Man).
(Emily and David in front, and the always awesome Nate Sooter in the back. On the way to dancing)

(Tess, Anne, and Danielle, at the ice cream shop before dancing. Anne's expression is classic)

The next day several of us went Canyoning. Canyoning involves wading and hiking down a river wearing a harness and, when the time comes, rappelling down waterfalls. It was scary at times, but still very safe (hi Mom!), and was one of the most fun things I’ve done here.

Sunday night was a much simpler dinner, cooking hot dogs over a wood fire and later making s’mores. Normally, I only want one s’more (a “s’no-more”), but this time I must have had about four, I think because we used these round cookie/cracker things that actually worked much better than graham crackers.

(Nate and I chopping wood with a machete)

The next day, Monday (we took a bit of an extra-long weekend), we traveled up to Imbert to do the legendary “27 Waterfalls”. This involved hiking down a river and jumping off of a bunch of waterfalls into pools below (we had to wear helmets and life jackets, so also quite safe, Mom). Some of the jumps were higher than anything I’d done before, and required a little bit of psyching up before leaping. It was another super fun day doing a incredibly unique activity.
(I'm fairly sure I was stretching here, not dancing)



Tuesday was a long day of travel back to Santo Domingo. Not wanting to go back to San Pedro quite yet, I hung out with David and Emily that day. Emily’s passport expired the day after she arrived, so we had to go to the consulate to see if she could get a new one. The walk from the Esperanza office to the consulate turned out to be much longer than expected, and soon after setting out it started pouring. By the time we got to the consulate, all three of us were soaked to the bone. Once there, an ornery woman informed us that Emily had to make an appointment online to get a new passport and the next available appointment was late September. That, clearly, would not work.

We spent that evening hanging out at the apartment where several of our coworkers live. For dinner, we had an excellent vegetable curry. David and his sister made caramel, which we then poured over oreos for a delicious, if somewhat hard to eat, desert. I slept on their floor that night and was back in San Pedro early Wednesday morning.

At Long Last...

...I am being hit on by hot Dominicanas. I was at a repayment meeting earlier today, and near the end of the meeting, one of the associates inquired with Alejandro, the loan officer I was with, about my relationship status. Alejandro, always eager to put me in awkward situations, quickly told her that I would be happy to be her boyfriend.

She then turned to me and (to paraphrase) said "he said you will be my boyfriend. Let me give you my number." A bit flustered, I replied that I didn't really think that would work out. "Why? Am I ugly?" was her reply.

"No, you're very pretty," I assured her. And she was. Very.

"Are you engaged?" she then asked me.

"No. I'm just leaving the country in two weeks!"

"I can wait!" she happily replied. "Alejandro has my number," indicating I should ask him if I want it.

And so it was. I guess I appreciated the compliment. The female Esperanza interns have to beat away local boys with a stick; generally speaking, no self-respecting Dominicano can hold his head up high to his buddies if he didn't at least try to hit on a rubia (literally means 'blonde', but is applied to pretty much any white woman) when the opportunity arises. But up until this morning, I hadn't noticed any similar interest from Dominican women directed towards gringos like me. In the interest of equity between genders, all I can say is: about damn time.

Caberete

I spent this past weekend with a bunch of the Fellows up in and around Caberete, on the DR's north coast. We had the immense privilege of staying in an apartment owned by one of Esperanza's major donors, a really sweet place right on the ocean. On Saturday several of us rented surfboards and tried to surf. I for one failed miserably; the waves broke so frequently that it was next to impossible for me to even paddle out far enough to catch waves. I basically just made myself really tired and inhaled a whole bunch of saltwater. Fun. It was still a really good time, though! We all went out and got pizza that night, and then enjoyed mojitos at a bar on Cabarete Beach.
On Saturday night, we went to a bar in Puerto Plata where there was a, ahem, John Mayer cover band playing. The house band that opened for them was really good, but the cover band that then played was, ummm, decidedly unremarkable. We all got really bored fairly quickly, and soon were ready to leave.
Still, only a minor disappointment in what was otherwise a very fun weekend.

Cap-Haitien, Haiti: Part II

I've been busy here in the office but I'm back now to tell more about my crazy adventures in Haiti.

I'll start where I left off, Friday evening I believe...

After exploring the community in Trou-du-Nord, all of us piled back into the truck to head back to Cap-Haitien. The car rides were not fun. By some combination of road conditions and traffic conditions I felt as if I were inhaling 50% smoke, 50% dust in every breath.

Once back in our room, we all eagerly showered and changed clothes before pulling some furniture out onto the porch to enjoy the night. We had a dinner of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches, washed down with a Prestige, Haiti's beer, which I actually prefer to the DR's Presidente. We spent the evening just hanging out outside, talking about life, development, family, friendship, love, all of the things that sound cliché when written out but remain the most absorbing sources of late-night conversation among a group of people who have grown to trust each other. It is, as fellow intern David once said about a similar occasion, "raw life", and it is an incredible thing to feel.

Saturday was sight-seeing day! We woke up, piled in the car, and after another unpleasant ride over bad roads arrived at the Sans-Souci Palace, built by King Henri Christophe to rival Versailles. The palace was ruined in an earthquake, and still maintains a sort of exotic beauty as the remnants of walls and pillars mix with the surrounding natural environment.
From the palace, there was a stone road winding uphill for several miles before arriving at the Citadelle Laferriere, probably the most spectacular site in all of Haiti. The hike up there is long, and it is hot. Tourists like us are dogged at the heels by Haitians with horses, just waiting for us to give up and hire a horse to ride to the top. Not long after starting, members of our group began dropping off and hiring a horse, and soon David and I were the only ones left on foot. Fueled by little more than the obstinate determination not to give in to the horsemen who persisted to follow us most of the way to the top.

The Citadelle was pretty epic. See for yourself:



Saturday night, well... Nate has already written a good account of what transpired, so I'll borrow his words:

Saturday night, the whole hotel situation hits the fan. What happened is this: Some random employee had said that it’s $120/night between the 5 of us at the hotel. He wasn’t the boss there, just some kid who quoted a number, and said the sorts of facilities they had. As I listed above, the facilities were terrible. Being experienced travelers, we figured the price should have been closer to $50 per night. When we approached the employee who had been around all week about this (via Obed translating), he said, “Ok, fine – I’ll just charge you $350 instead of the $360.” Our response: ARE YOU JOKING?, that’s $3/night off. Ridiculous. After allowing Obed to translate this, the kid called his boss to tell him to come.

This is when it gets real interesting. The boss enters, and doesn’t act anything like a reasonable owner of a hotel at all. Instead of acting as he should have (weighing our complaints about the hotel to figure out a fair price for us to pay), he was extremely aggressive. He entered and immediately began accusing us of being unjust customers, stating angrily “Who do you think you are, coming into MY hotel and telling ME what to charge you?”, and otherwise changing the subject from the faults of his hotel to show why we deserved to pay the $120/night. David, one of the other fellows, did a good job of attempting to keep the conversation focused on the issue at hand – we cannot and would not pay that much, for the very understandable reasons we laid out. We were misled into believing this hotel was of higher quality than it really is. Perhaps someday it’d be that valuable, for now, it was on the same level (if not lower) than a Motel 6.

At some point in the night, several of us started to pick up that we may have started to bring ourselves (or Obed), into physical danger by agitating this man. He certainly was very wealthy, and we assumed he had friends in high places who he could call to deal with the issue of five pesky Americans. We were finally offered $260 for the three nights, and accepted it. Though this price was too high, it seemed to us that we needed to get away from this man.

We went to withdraw extra money from the main Roi Cristophe hotel to give to this man. At the Roi Cristophe, we learn an amazing fact: we had been part of an employee who was committing fraud. The man at the desk on Thursday who said that it was “full” was a friend of our not-so-friendly manager, and would send potentially wealthy people (i.e. anyone white) to the other hotel, which was no where near the same quality. In fact – the other hotel wasn’t even related! It was all a ploy to make us think we were somehow going to a legit place, which wasn’t legit at all.

In the end, the Roi Cristophe offered us rooms to stay the night at their hotel that night as a recompense for dealing with the fraud. We gladly accepted and quickly packed up from the other hotel and moved into a (MUCH) nicer and safer hotel for the last night.

Yep, that's pretty much how things went. The whole ride home all I could think about was the psychology of the owner we dealt with. In a society like Haiti, if you're an ambitious person, as this guy clearly was, it seems to me you probably look at your options in life and find that the honest routes to get ahead are basically closed to you, and so you start thinking OK, I guess I have to be dishonest. This is not to excuse in any way what he did. It was wrong. He took advantage of us, and that infuriates me. But I think it's difficult for us in the developed world to wrap our heads around how much greater the incentives for dishonesty are for people in places like Haiti. Now the specific guy we dealt with probably no longer needed to be dishonest to do okay for himself, but I imagine he had been involved in some decidedly illegal practices to get there, and he no longer cared about the morality of it. I can imagine him looking at people like me and my friends and thinking What are you complaining about? Do you know where I came from? You have no f***ing clue, you sheltered American children. Now shut up and pay.

Whether or not this was his actual thought process, I cannot say. But all-in-all it was an extremely eye-opening experience on many fronts.

Cap-Haitien, Haiti: Part I

I have returned from an extended weekend in Haiti with several of my fellow Fellows, wonderful folks each one. Their names are David, Madeleine, Nate, and Maira. There is much to tell. I suppose I will start from the beginning.

Last Wednesday I came home from work here in San Pedro, showered, packed my things, and hopped on a bus to Santo Domingo. The plan was to wake up early Thursday morning and catch the charter bus going from SD to Cap-Haitien, Haiti's second-largest city. I got into Santo Domingo and met my friends at an apartment where several of Esperanza's long-term interns and American staff live. We ordered pizza, drank some Presidentes, and had a fun time just hanging out together. Later, the five of us going to Haiti convened to discuss our plans for getting to the bus station and buying our tickets. We eventually decided to walk to the bus station that night to see if they were still open so we could buy our tickets early. Maira, one of the interns going to Haiti, mentioned something about needing our passports to get the tickets.

Passport. Hmmm... passport.

S***.

Mine, of course, was still next to my bed in San Pedro. Remarkably, it had not once occurred to me that I might need my passport to go to Haiti. Half an hour later, I'm on a bus going back to San Pedro, where I will retrieve my passport and hop on an early bus back to Santo Domingo in the morning.

All of this, luckily, goes more or less according to plan. I get my passport and am back in SD before 8am on Thursday morning. There is one near-disaster: when I get off the bus in Santo Domingo, I walk a few steps before realizing that the front pocket of my backpack is wide open, and my wallet is missing. I almost go into cardiac arrest, but luckily the cobrador from the bus (a guy who collects fares and gets people on the bus) had chased after me, my wallet in hand. I thank him profusely and check to make sure everything's there. It is. Phew. Crisis averted.

I walk to meet my friends at the Caribe Tours bus station. Buying a ticket to Haiti takes forever. In protest, an intern who shall remain nameless decides to steal the inflated Air France plane hanging from the ceiling. He/She unhooks it from the ceiling, deflates it, and shoves it in his/her backpack. The people at the desk don't seem to notice.

And on the bus we go! We stop briefly in Santiago to change buses. Crossing the border takes a long, long time. All of us stay on the bus as the attendant handles getting passports stamped. We arrive in Cap-Haitien after roughly nine hours of sitting in buses. Driving through Cap-Haitien is a surreal experience. We see an endless line of tin shacks lining the sides of a muddy river. We see rows and rows of pick-up trucks converted into public cars, packed with people. We pass a UN armored vehicle next to a UN base garrisoned with Chilean peacekeepers. The place is dirty, chaotic, and unsightly in a way that I haven't seen in the DR. It makes Santo Domingo and San Pedro looked like the developed world.


Getting off the bus, we are immediately greeted by Obed, Esperanza's only intern stationed in Haiti. Obed spent several years of his childhood in Haiti, and as such speaks fluent Creole. He informs us that something had gone wrong with the reservation he had originally made at a hotel in town, and that we had been referred to a "partner" hotel because the hotel we thought we had a reservation at was full.

No problem, we'll just go to the other hotel. When we get there, we find that the place is still under construction. It isn't a hotel so much as a three -story building with partially furnished rooms. The beds are terrible, the shower has no faucet, instead spewing water out of a pipe. Service is non-existent. There is no railing on the balcony outside so someone could quite easily fall off and impale themselves on the rebar sticking out of the unfinished retaining wall below.

Understand, none of this by itself is a problem. We volunteers are fine with staying in cheap hotels. The problem arose in the fact that this place was not cheap. We were informed by the "manager", some guy who met us there and gave us our keys, that it cost $120/night. When we first got there, we were not fully aware of the situation and thought whatever, we'll deal with it later. Mistake #1. The manager leaves, we go out with Obed for food, and return later that night, tired and wanting to go to bed. The manager is there briefly, but we have no way to communicate with him because Obed is not staying with us.

More on that later. On Friday morning Obed picked us up at the hotel with a couple of his local friends who he hired to drive us around for the weekend. Eight of us pack into a small, beat-up suv that has consistent trouble starting and head to Esperanza's office in Trou-du-Nord.

We hang out in the office for awhile while Obed takes care of some business. Later we are taken to the office director's house for a Haitian lunch. The director is out of town, but his wife had made an amazing meal for us. See for yourself:
After eating, Maira and I took the opportunity to go out and meet a couple of the associates with Obed, in my opinion one of the highlights of the trip. We first visited a woman with a small colmado-like store in a road-side shack, stocked with drinks, snacks, and common convenience goods. She wass rather shy, and Maira and I stood around while Obed interviewed her for a story. We got the chance to ask her a couple questions through Obed, and then left, Obed buying a soda from her as thanks.

We then went to meet another small-business owner nearby, who also had something of a general store. This man was remarkable. After Obed talked with him for awhile, Maira and I again had the opportunity to ask questions and take a few pictures. Maira told him that she was planning on going to business school soon, and asked what advice he could give her on running a business. Obed translated, and the man paused thoughtfully before diving into a detailed answer. The gist of what he said is as follows: "Business is about principles," he said. "I form good relationships with my customers because I value them and want them to come back. They come back here because they know I have good prices and because they like me and know I appreciate their business."

I'm paraphrasing Obed's translation, but that's about what he said. What was so remarkable was what I could learn about this man without knowing what he was saying. Despite having a small business in a poor neighborhood, he dressed nicely, wearing slacks, a collared shirt, and dress shoes. He stood up straight and spoke clearly and deliberately, with a evenly measured rhythm. I could tell simply from how he spoke that this was an honest, stand-up guy; a man who knows his business, knows his clientele, and acts professionally despite his humble circumstances. It was truly a privilege to see his business and have the chance to talk with him.
(Obed, right, with the business-owner we talked to)

Whew, I'm thinking there may be too much for just one post. Stay tuned for Part II of our Haitian aventura.

Trip to Haiti

I, along with several other interns, will be heading to Haiti tomorrow to see the Esperanza office in Trou-du-Nord (just outside of Cap-Haitien) and see some of the sites in general. There is one intern in Haiti, Obed, who was born in Haiti but grew up an graduated from college in the States. The rest of us will surely be relying on him quite heavily as he is the only one among us who can speak Creole. On Saturday we will be going to see the Citadelle, a fortress built by leaders of the Haitian slave rebellion. Apparently it's one of the most spectacular sites in all of Haiti, so I'm quite excited to see it. I'll be sure to take pictures.