Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live (Part 1)

Welcome!
I must first of all thank everyone on my trip, they all brought something very special to the group that made 10 strangers feel close to family almost instantly. I am quite sure that although I could have gotten along with anyone on this trip, the particular group of people that came contributed greatly to making it the fantastic voyage it turned out to be. Also not all of the pictures I have posted in my journal are my own, many were taken from others on the trip and so I must give credit where credit is due. If anyone is really upset about me stealing there pictures let me know and when i become a famous blogger I will certainly send you some royalties. As for the trip it was amazing in every sense of the word, I recommend to anyone of any age to just do it, find a week or 2 or a month or 6 and go to the Dominican and live in el rifle. It is simply amazing. I have posted this journal for a few reasons. First and foremost for myself, I just felt taking the time to sort through my random journal scribbling and put them into the somewhat comprehensible form below was a good way to reflect on what I have experienced. Secondly I know a great many people have sent me donations in money or clothing or supplies to take down. Whether you filled suitcases with clothes and toys, or you came out to fundraisers or even took an interest in my trip in any way, I wanted to be able to give you some idea of what you were contributing too. I am in no sense of the word a writer and the accounts are crude at best but combined with pictures I hope they leave you with some sense what my experience was like. Thank you, thank you, thank you, to everyone who contributed and supported me and most of all to my parents, without whom I would never have been able to be where I am in my life to do something like this, or have been able to contribute as much to this project as I did. Your support is far from unappreciated.

Enjoy the journal you can click on the pictures to see larger versions of them and feel free to comment on the blog or send me an email at sunderani@gmail.com

Anticipation and Frustration Lead to Salvation.

I am packing my bags double checking and triple checking everything. It has become clear I am excited to go, but the gravity of what I am doing has not really got a hold of me yet. I wonder what I will learn on this trip about life, the universe and everything, more importantly, I wonder what I will learn about myself. With only 6 hours left before we board the bus to Buffalo, we have just learned the airline will allow us each to take another bag to check in. I threw one together by cleaning out my closet but it does not hold a candle to the amount of work people went through to send me donations I had to discard at the Salvation Army bin. I suppose it’s not the end of the world.

Insert Bad Comedy Routine Here
Friday 4:50 AM

Luggage = Checked
Stomach = Vengeful
Amigos = Mostly Sleeping

At the moment writing is much more something to do in order to fight off boredom. The really is nothing to write about in an airport that everyone doesn't already know. It is always the same, sit and wait until its time to stand in line and wait until its time to watch the check in lady type and wait until its time remove shoes, coins and wallets and wait until you can walk somewhere else to wait to board the plane so you can sit on it and wait for it to take off. I am quite sure the worlds most mundane and boring literature was conjured up in airports. They are where good ideas come to commit suicide, and if I do not stop writing soon I will no doubt end up a stand up comedian.

Dawn from the plane

Hello Dominican, Goodbye Luggage

I will not go into any great detail about flights, flights are flights, having said that Dominican is Dominican and I will certainly go into detail about that. We landed tired, but with high spirits to discover that 5 of the 10 suitcases we packed at the packing party were missing. Not due to anyone Dominican but of course due to the Americans when we went from Buffalo to JFK. Thanks Guys. I have been informed one of the missing bags is our liquids bag, (if you are not yet aware due to terrorists being smarter than we are, it is not longer permitted for anyone to bring liquids or gels in a carry on when boarding a plane.) in which was my toothpaste, toothbrush, anti bacterial hand sanitizer, soap, shampoo, and deodorant. The good news is there is no water here clean enough to put on you or in your mouth so I am really only missing deodorant. After filing the proper paperwork for missing bags we called our contact in the mountain, to find out when our ride would be at the airport to pick us up, only to discover that they had no news of our arrival and there was no one coming to get us. Luckily Candis recognized a truck driver throwing bags onto a truck and we were able to hitch hike a ride to the city with a group of nurses who were more than happy to add ten people and bags to their already full bus for a short 3 hour ride.Hitching a ride with an already full bus of nurses

Dominicans Drive Me Round the Bend

Driving in the Dominican is not like it is in Canada, cars do not follow signs or lights because there are none ten minutes away from the airport. You cannot help notice a moped will have no problem overtaking a car which is having no problem overtaking a truck all in a shoulder round a bend up a hill while the traffic in the oncoming lane is doing the exact same thing. Another thing you cannot help notice is the insane number of motorcycles, and not just motorcycles within the population of motorcyclers there is a large number of small children on laps.... this surprised me as I think it will you and so I will repeat it. In the Dominican there are a lot of people who drive motorcycles with infants sitting on their laps. Also no one seems to have a problem with four or five, thirteen year old boys all buzzing around on the same motorcycle or with 13 year olds driving trucks with large 1980's speaker systems on the back blaring music. All the cars drift in and out of lanes to make room for passing cars and motorcycles, and everything just sort of weaves through everything else as if the notion of crashing was simply absurd. And in the midst of all this mania I did not see or hear of one accident. I have a theory that the laws of physics and perhaps common sense are too shocked by these events to do anything about them. "My god is that a baby on a motorcycle!?" they will say, "It can't be, that is just too insane, which means I must be hallucinating again, I had better go about my business." and the mother and child will just continue cruising along on their moped accident free.


"What Stop Signs Are For”

Viva La Resistance

Late Friday afternoon we checked into a hotel that was surprisingly nice, 3 rooms sheltered ten of us. Sometimes there is electricity and running water and other times there are cockroaches. I asked Jenna if it was safe to leave our things locked in our room, she informed me it was as safe as it was going to be, which was nice but did not really answer my question. After a rather nice dinner downstairs we headed over to a pool bar for some beer and pool playing. The place was almost empty and I could not figure out why until some sirens went off. Children started to pour out of everywhere and run down the street, then a caravan went by with sirens blaring off followed by trucks blaring music and a slew of motorcycles. People in the street were waiving flags and photos throwing their hands in the air making an “L” with their thumb and index finger.


We learned afterwards it was a political march, to support the president as head of his party again. There was an election the next day. I was convinced it was a revolution and there would be gunfire as I walked wearily through the crowd. We left the revolution, stopped for pizza on the way home, and with little difficulty went to sleep.



Vamos A La Playa
Arriving before the weekend meant that we had the entire weekend in San Jose De Ocoa before we went to work in the mountain, I am told that work is simply not done on weekends and as we were still weary from a long flight no one objected to a day at the beach. We met up with another group from McMaster and headed over. Where we sandcastled, swam, lay in the sun ate and more or less vacationed. I certainly enjoyed it but I could not shake the feeling that it was not what we were there for and felt almost guilty for not working. In any case there are some interesting pictures I took and so it seems a waste not to post them and tell at least one story of the beach. So....

Pictures:
This lady roamed the beach trying to sell us coconuts and sugarcane, despite the fact that she only had a few teeth, was holding a large machete, and wearing expensive puma shoes the reason we did not purchase from her was because we were worried about the water she washed the sugarcane in not being bottled.

Sandcastling... thank god Chris is an engineer

Beachside view


Another Beach Picture

A local girl being burried in the sand.

Garbage at the beach. I decided to include this because there really is a lot of garbage everywhere and it is not uncommon to see a huge pile of it anywhere sometimes on fire.


Story:
Going to the bathroom proved adventure for myself, “Donde es Bano” it turns out will only get you half way there, and you are sort of on your own after that. I arrived at a wall with two options left or right. On the wall were two symbols neither of which resembled anything I would associate with gender, and so I sort of stood staring at them for a minute or so before coming to the conclusion that I had a coin flip chance of making the right choice and since I was only risking some mild embarrassment I did not really have much to loose. I took a deep breath, held it and made a choice. It was the right one… or atleast on the right.


I see a blob and a blob that kind of looks like elvis... I chose elvis

Later during lunch time Alberto asked me where the lavatories, so I explained to him it where they were and about the confusing symbols and my adventure. “It is back there” I said, “Men’s is the sign that says….. ummmm… let me think… cabritos.” After laughing for a good 30 seconds Alberto explained to me that cabritos meant small goats, and the word I was probably looking for was caballeros which translates to gentlemen. We all laughed and Cabrito became one of my soon to be many nicknames.



Go Tell It On The Mountain
Monday Morning

Today we finally left for the mountain work site: El Rifle, the weekend has been more of a vacation than a volunteer trip, we have sat around eating and drinking beer, we even went to the beach one day. I am glad to be heading up the mountain to do some real work, but I cannot say the weekend has been uneventful. So far I have seen a political rally, a 13 year old driving round town with a huge 1980’s stereo strapped to his truck blasting music, more stray dogs than you would be wise to shake a stick at, a man who sells odd shoes (not strange shoes, singles shoes that do not match all the other shoes there), a bus with over a dozen chickens tied to the front bumper, some very young very pregnant women without maternity clothes, children of all ages playing at all hours of day and night unsupervised throughout the city, men pulling donkeys in the street, an election, and a whole slew of things that have just boggled my mind.


We threw all our suitcases (including our 5 no longer missing ones) onto a pick up truck and climbed aboard. 9 of us sitting atop a pile of luggage driving through the mountains on a worn gravel road, rather I wish it was worn because then it would be smooth and I would not have to hold on for dear life bouncing round corners with cliff sides taunting me playfully. The drive out of the city was a lot to take in, and you could see it on everyone’s faces. The houses sit atop of mountain sides they have a road for a front yard and a 200 foot drop for a back yard, and a structure no bigger than a student dorm houses a small family. Most of the people are sitting out on their step waving and blowing kisses to us as we pass by. I remember feeling as though our trip had really just begun, and although we have gotten close over the past few days our joking around is peppered with long silences where we all just sit and watch the world go by as if we had never seen it before.

The view, for lack of a better cliché, is breathtaking. Mountains climb high into the clouds, rolling hills are home to farm crops, I have a few pictures that much better describe it.


A view of San Jose De Ocoa from the mountain

The city we left behind way in the distance

It is certainly a strange feeling driving past all this incredible beauty when your focus switches and you see the obscene poverty right in front of you. Dilapidated houses with missing doors or windows, rusty tin roofs, single toilet towns, which is then further contrasted by seeing so many people happily smile at you as you pass them on the way to el rifle. Switching back and forth from unmatched beauty to heart breaking poverty makes you dizzy. And so it goes until we arrived in el Rifle. A small town with about two dozen homes spread out that we will call home for the rest of the week. We hop off the truck and the people who have been before are delighted to see familiar faces, the Dominicans are delighted we made it and rush to help us with our bags, and I am delighted to not be at the bottom of a cliff with a pickup truck on top of me so I smile and walk into a small house with some bags.

Public Toilet

Welcome To El Rifle…. It takes 15 Minutes to cross the road.
We unload, similar rooming situation as the hotel, only now we each have our own bunk bed. There are 2 rooms with 4 girls in 1 and 4 in the other, and then 1 room for the remaining two boys. WE also have an extra bedroom for our cook and her daughter, a kitchen, and in the small bedroom there is a bathroom.


After unpacking we head to the community centre to play some games with the children, it is a small empty stone structure with light fixtures but no lights or switches put in yet. Across from our house is an unfinished home behind a barbed wire fence. Andrew and I try to ask our new friend Franchesca if it is the house we are going to be working on and if we can go see it. Our mastery of Spanish allows this simple pair of questions to be extended for a time of about 15 minutes, but we finally do go across the street and see the house. We immediately learn it is the house we are going to be working (over an extended period of time we learned it was not the house we were going to be working on). We inspect the house and head off for dinner.

The Community Centre

A half built dreams home… we hoped to make it this far… we didn’t

Leftovers from the house that stood here a week ago


We be burnin
During the first night we sat around a bonfire reflecting what we had seen, instead of wood the children run into the brush and come back with eucalyptus branches that they pile high on the fire, they don’t burn for very long but this is less than a problem because the children are more than happy to run back into the brush and come back with more eucalyptus branches every 10 or 15 minutes as needed. Chris and I came to the ironic realization that these are the leaves used in cough medicine but that burning them and breathing in the smoke was probably a futile exercise. And so the night went on we played with the children talked to the people, sat talked and laughed. Oh and of course there are still motorcycles here, they go down the mountain in neutral in the dark with no lights on, so are only noisy half the usual time. Bed was as inviting as ever I think it is safe to say we were all excited to get to work the next day.

The children could not get enough of sparklers and I wish we brought fire works but I am not sure it would be legal.

Andrew and I with the children of el Rifle

Are you wondering how high the fire was? Look closely at the person sitting in the chair behind it.


Lazy Canadians
This morning we awoke early, had a wonderful breakfast, and headed down the road (not across it) to our work site. We arrived at a cement base about 14 by 20 feet, next to which are a few picks, a few shovels and a single wheel barrow. We (our group and about as many Dominicans) broke the concrete, levelled the ground, chalked the outline for the walls, and dug the trenches for the foundation. We did about 25 percent of the work and the Dominicans (and Haitians) did the ret. The Haitians especially are much harder workers than we are. In the time it took me working as hard as I could to pick a layer of dirt off the short side of the foundation, the Haitian behind me finished a short side a long side and then my side for me. At one point a group of people driving by stopped, jumped out of their trucks took all of our shovels and picks and blew through our work. After which they boasted they could do all the work we did all morning in 3 minutes. We drank water, they didn’t, we stopped for lunch, they didn’t, when it rained we ran for cover, when it rained they also ran for cover…. Point Canada.


it starts

hard at work... except for the guy taking pictures

Medium Double Double
The trenches were dug and building supplies had not arrived leaving us with the rest of the day to ourselves. Candis said she wanted to go for a walk, and since she was a 7 year veteran of the trip I thought it wise to go with her, I was anything but disappointed. We came across some friends of Candis who were pounding coffee by hand. They invited us to sit and drink coffee with them, it was fantastic and I don’t even like coffee. A man showed us his parrot and we talked about pets, cats mostly, and I got many laughs when I described my fat long haired cat to the Dominican.



We finished our coffee and carried on admiring the view and some children ran down to greet us. They made me take about 10 pictures of them until their father came down on a motorcycle with a large sack. When I asked him what it was he proceeded to open it with his machete and show me with great pride the sack full of peas. He then asked his daughter to go inside, and get a bucket which he then filled and made me and Candis take back to our group to eat, I could not believe it how generous he was. Later Candis informed me some of the women were saying that only a man would give such a gift because only a man would not know how much work it is to prepare the peas. Magic Beans in hand we went back to the group and a slew of children followed us down the road coming to play with us and the rest of the group.

Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live (Part 2)

College Humor Eat Your Heart Out
After our first day of work, I felt an instant connection with everyone in el Rifle, when the sun went down we headed down the mountain on foot to the local bar which was just open for us. A slab of concrete chairs some small tables a roof and a small room filled with beer and snacks was apparently our local pub. We danced, drank and chatted with everyone there, and after an hour or so Dan came up with the brilliant idea of starting a make shift improvisational game of beer pong. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_pong) It was without a doubt the best team building exercise I have ever encountered and when we started our second with Dominicans vs Canadians I made sure to immerse myself in the culture and be on the Dominican Team, where I immediately used my newly acquired Spanish skills to become the team cheerleader and lead chants against team Canada. Stating mostly that we were men and they were little goats.


Pressure is on Mike

Team Dominican


Hombres

Dance Dance

I came looking for poverty and found none.
The days so far had a huge impact on my thinking, already I felt I had experienced so much, after beer pong people were dancing and chatting again and I found myself with our team leaders Jenna and Liz, engaged in discussion about what we had seen. I remember telling them that nothing is what I expected it to be. I expected to come to the country and see poverty and suffering and sadness. I recall being told that it is a huge shock for some people and some are too sensitive to handle the whole experience. My feelings were the complete opposite. This is not a third world country; this is what a first world country should be. The sense of community is unparalleled, people are as far as I can tell very happy. Instead of worrying about things like what swimsuit they should get this summer, and when the newest version of such and such a video game is coming out, they focus on their family and friends. They derive pleasure from simple things, and I really don’t sense there is much missing from their lives. All the things we have convinced ourselves to be important in the so called first world just vaporize as soon as you get there. And, I have also become aware that I am certainly missing the rich range of interactions and relationships that exist only as a result of a much simpler way of life. A simple example I can think of is if you are sitting having coffee or a beer on a patio, or eating a sandwich in the student center at school, or even just out for a walk. If you see someone you know, in Canada how simple it is for them to say “I can’t stop to talk, I have to be at such and such a place” and it is not in anyway rude it just is what it is. Whereas in Dominican the complete opposite happens if you see someone you have not seen in a while, and they see you, you must stop sit down and spend some time with them either with coffee or a meal or whatever it is. John (a retired teacher who spends 4 months a year in the country helping to organize groups like our own) told me going anywhere becomes a huge ordeal. He is constantly late for everything because no matter how early he sets out to go anywhere he sees people he knows on the way and has to stop to have coffee or a meal, or come in to meet so and so's grandmother and 15 minute walks end up taking an hour. Another example that is probably easier to grasp is if you want to contact someone in Canada you call them, or email them, or msn them, or facebook them, or txt them. In Dominican if you want someone for something, you go and find them, or do without them, and just the simple act of having to invest the time and energy to physically be with someone to tell them something makes a huge difference from being able to just quickly communicate electronically. Getting to know people instead of digital people leaves you with a sense of something that I can barely even get my head around because growing up in an age of phones and internet I never realized there was a difference before I realized there were people who communicated without electronics. I can say honestly, I did not miss phones, internet, or any electronic communications one bit, and feel the only reason I use them is because everyone else I know uses them. It is much more of a forced convenience than it is anything else. This has turned into a long ramble as it did in my conversation with Jenna and Liz, but the point im getting at is even though we are supposed to have so much more from all this technological improvement to our lives, we have certainly lost something important along the way.

Our house, in the middle of our street

Once the trenches were dug, we had to create the foundation. We created a ladder like structure out of something called rebar which was just pieces of metal about as thick as your thumb lashed together with pieces of metal resembling thin coat hangers. Once that was made and laid down came the concrete mixed by hand. The first experience we had making concrete was interesting. We had a pile of rocks and dirt which we would pick up in shovels and throw at a screen. Whatever went through we would then mix by hand with a back of cement and water to make the concrete for laying bricks on a house we did not spend a lot of time working on. The rest of concrete making was easier, we had a truck bring the gravel and all we had to do was mix cement and water and then throw it into buckets pass it down a line of people around the house and pour it in the trenches. During the mixing I had a linguistic experience I am very proud of. I was mixing the concrete and one of the workers said to me in Spanish something that I could never reproduce. I instantly understood that he wanted me to let the water pool longer before I started mixing, and when Alberto (Alberto is Colombian and speaks Spanish fluently if I have not mentioned this already) asked me if I knew what he said I told him and he said I had understood perfectly. It was incredibly rewarding to comprehend my first Spanish sentence that was not “hello”, “what is your name”, or “the bathroom is over there”. Once we had laid the concrete we simply had to unload blocks from a truck spread them out and proceed to lay them down. The foreman did all the brick laying and we would just help by filling caps in with cement and, well, making more cement. That is as far as we got, and although it was a lot of work we probably could have gotten it all done in about 2 full days. However, things in the Dominican run on their own time, one day it was raining to hard to get the trucks up the mountain and so the building was delayed, materials that were supposed to show up Monday were not there until Wednesday and we really just had to make do. It was strange to do something extremely rewarding only to want more and be left feeling extremely frustrated, but C'est la vie.


Jenna put it best: "High tech sorting device"


Dan on a pile of soon to be concrete

Mixed Concrete Going Down the Line

unloading bricks

the last of the concrete being mixed

A layer of bricks goes down


my shoes after mixing... jennas were worse i think she threw them out where as i still wear mine to ramshead.


it might not seem like much but scroll back up to what it was when we started.

Dirty but still smiling after a hard days work

The Haitian and the Axe
Alberto told me a story today about a Haitian, before I tell it I should say something about Haitians in Dominican. Due to the abject poverty of Haiti its people are fleeing their country illegally to seek work and better lives in the Dominican. The general opinion towards them, in the Dominican, is that they are second class citizens. They live in smaller houses, make less money, and are often not allowed to come into bars. Haitians never sit in the front of a truck with Dominicans, they sit in the bed with whatever else is there, even if there is an open seat.

Inside a Haitian House

A Haitian house shared by 8 people, they have this bed and one other small room with nothing in it.

Alberto was talking to a man with an axe and the man was showing Alberto a chip in the blade. The story goes that a Haitian was working with the axe that belonged to another Dominican man, and as he was working he put a chip in the axe which made its owner very angry. The man who owned the axe wanted to kill the Haitian over this. The man Alberto was talking to was there and said he would trade the other man his chipped axe for a new one and in exchanged the Haitian would be left alive. The man agreed and the Haitian was allowed to live.

Where is Heavy?
The children here have nothing to play with and being children are perfectly content with that. No matter how little a child has they will always find someway to make a game of it. Every toy we brought they went crazy over. Sparklers, cards, stickers, glow sticks, pogs, and especially anything to do with baseball. The boys are baseball fanatics and more than talented at the game, I am quite sure that any group of children in Dominican could beat any group of my friends 10 years older than them at baseball. It was very sobering to see children really appreciate what little they have, in juxtaposition to so many children here and their attitudes towards things.
"Who are these gringos watching us?"

A baseball game in San Jose De Ocoa, the children have only a few gloves and bats but they share everything.

Elian the chicken catcher
Baby Gordita
Sticker fight?
I explained pog to the kids and tried telling them that the metal slammer was best because it was heavy. They thought that it was called heavy and everytime they slammed it down and it went flying there would be a frantic cry "Donde es Heavy". I gave up trying to explain that it was heavy not called Heavy and just helped them look for Heavy instead. Also I brought pogs over with pictures of disney characters on them, such as lion king and hunchback, but they have no idea what any of the pictures on the pogs were, even if they were wearing clothes with the same characters on them. It surprised me at first but made perfect sense once I thought about it. The materialistic value of the pogs have no meaning to them, they are just toys, and might as well be decorated with anything, or perhaps not at all.