San Pedro de Macorís

First off: I only have internet when I’m in the office, so I won’t be able to update on the weekends, unless I find an internet café somewhere (working on it).

On Friday I was dropped off at my new home in San Pedro de Macorís, a city of roughly 270,000 or so inhabitants. Fun fact: San Pedro produces more major-league baseball players per-capita than any other city in the world. Despite this, the city is hardly a tourist destination. The province is one of the nation’s poorest. In the countryside outside the city are bateys, sugarcane plantations, where one can find some of the worst living and working conditions in the Western Hemisphere.

My living situation here in San Pedro was... not exactly what I was expecting. I thought I was going to be living occupying a room in a family’s house or apartment or something, and that breakfast and dinner would be included in my rent. The reality is quite different. I’m living in four-story building with apartments occupying the top three floors and a “colmado”, basically a small corner liquor store. The second-story apartment is the one I’m living in. It’s occupied by an elderly couple whose children and their respective families occupy the two upstairs flats. What I learned when I arrived here is that the elderly couple is in Houston with other family until December. Which means I have the entire flat to myself. Before you think “awesome!”, consider my situation. I am in an unfamiliar city whose people I can rarely understand despite speaking their language with some degree of competence. It can get a little lonely. Neither I nor my supervisor, who drove me to my place, were aware of this predicament before arriving.

In the end, however, everything turned out fine. I met the family who owns the building, and they told me that I was free to come hang out upstairs in their place whenever I liked. They live on the top floor, and have a beautiful, wide, shaded balcony with four comfortable rocking chairs (I spent hours this past weekend reading in them!). The family consists of a mother and father, a daughter, and a son. The daughter’s name is “Libny”. I’ve heard plenty of “Libby” in the past but that was definitely a new one. She is a med student at a nearby university. When she was young, she left her family for a few years to live with relatives in Houston. Consequently, she speaks perfect English. To me, this is both a blessing and a curse. It means I can communicate with perfect clarity if I need to, but it also means I have a crutch that I must try not to use unless absolutely necessary.

On Sunday, the mother and her niece, whose family lives on the third floor, took me with them to go shopping at a local supermarket. I was able to pick up some household items I had been needing, including hand soap, a hand towel, dish soap, a sponge, a cheap plastic bowel, and some sugar. Monday was my first day of work, which has already happened, but I’ll talk about it in another post!

Hasta luego!