January 16, 2009

When it rains here, it pours. After a couple-week-long drought it started raining last night, and hasn’t stopped since. Just yesterday I was carefully rationing a bucketful of water that had been carried from a neighbor’s well to cover my entire garden, and now just hours later we have way way too much water. Our tank that collects rain from the roof that was empty yesterday is now full and overflowing from the hole in the top. Our lechosa (papaya) tree also fell over during the night, because the ground is too saturated to hold it up. But my hortaliza is happy, and flooded, though luckily there are channels between the beds for drainage. I had made plans to meet up with two volunteers in Macoris today, but now it looks like I won’t be leaving. My street is already flooded, and when it rains the motoconchistas don’t work because they don’t want to get wet. And motores are the only way to get out of my community. Even if I were to make it out, I would still run the risk of not being able to get back, especially if the river has risen above the bridge, which happens fairly fast. So I am probably better off staying put. But it is a bummer.

Let’s see, what else is new? Yesterday a few notable things happened. First of all, my regional leader delivered my mail to my site, which included five packages! A few of which I had been waiting for for months. Llego la Navidad por fin! I got speakers for my computer/ipod, and now I am listening to my music as I write this. Yesterday I also went with three kids from the youth group to the first session of the ayuntamiento (like city hall) in Castillo. We arrived there and found out that the session had been “suspended.” Since we had already gone all the way to Castillo, we decided we may as well make the most of it and went directly to the house of the sindico (like the mayor, but of the region). Apparently it is okay to do this, completely unannounced, in this country. Luckily the sindico knows me, so it wasn’t that weird. The point of our visit was to ask for help in obtaining metal tanks to serve as garbage cans to put in front of the colmados. This was an idea I had the other day, when I was considering the huge problem of trash in the streets here and the fact that the National Day of Youth is coming up at the end of this month. So, at a recent youth group meeting I proposed that we do something about it. My suggestion was met by utter silence from the group. Which I was expecting, since this group never does anything, and the only leadership comes from two older women who are like the matriarchs. I still don’t know if their impotence is really because know one cares, or they are all lazy, or they are intimidated by it, or just shy, because no one ever says anything in the meetings. I don’t like to push them either, for one, because it is not my job to come in and take over the direction of their group, and two, because as I am the same age or younger than some of them, it feels uncomfortable to treat them like children like the two older women leaders do. Basically, I have trouble with the dynamics of the group. We spend the meetings being lectured by the two women about our bad behavior in the meetings, and how we don’t show enough initiative in the goings-on of the church, and lack values, etc., etc. It seems that the main purpose of the group, since it pertains to the church, is to involve more youth in the planning of the misas, oraciones, and the upkeep of the church. I’m not sure how my role fits into this, since social projects definitely seem like an afterthought. But they do all want to please me, which is at least one advantage I have, so with the help of the very vocal leaders, we assigned the task of going to the ayuntamiento to me and three other youth. I suggested that perhaps it would be easier, and more effective to raise the money ourselves, and thus make the community take ownership of the project. But this is also culturally unheard of, since the custom here is to ask for things from the government, and expect to be given them. This means that if someone is lacking, for example, a mosquito net, or a casket, or a latrine, or whatever, they just go to the sindico directly and ask for it. Which means that the community is dependent and not self-sufficient, nor do they support each other. There is definitely enough money in this community to support everyone, although it is not distributed very equally. (And it is not spent wisely. My don told me the other day that the banca, which sells lottery numbers, takes in more money each day than all the colmados in the community combined. And people buy everything at the colmados—food, phone cards, alcohol, household stuff. Which means that people spend more money playing the lottery than in all of their other daily expenditures combined. He told me that daily sales at the banca are around 30,000 pesos, or a little less than $1000, for a community of 800 or so people. A lot of people play, but there are few repeat offenders that make up the majority of these sales. I have just been informed by an anonymous source that my dona and one of the aforementioned youth group matriarchs are the two very biggest jugadoras in the community. Poorer communities just don’t have problems like this). The other problem with this practice of asking for everything is that it explains why people say that the sindico doesn’t do anything—he is probably too busy meeting with people who need sheets and mosquito nets to address bigger problems like the calle, or the bridge, or …..the trash.

Ah, the trash. Cuanta basura. Bringing up the issue of the trash in the streets in front of the colmados, which just sits there and then makes its way to the river when it rains, in the meeting made me realize that it is a much bigger and more complicated problem than I had first realized. Even if we were able to obtain the garbage cans, get people to use them and not steal them, and clean up the trash that is already in the streets, there is the issue of what we would do with the trash once the garbage cans got full. Which brings me to the bigger issue, which is that there is really nothing to do with any of the trash in the community, which is probably the reason it is all in the street. Waste management was one of the topics in the interviews I did of 50 households, so I know that the majority burn their trash or at least a portion of it, with the rest throwing it into a pile somewhere, usually, but unfortunately not always, on their own property. There are obvious drawbacks to both of these types of waste management—burning, especially of plastics makes the community smell horrible and gives people cancer, and piles of trash are unsanitary and probably breed all kinds of parasites. What’s more, the rains and the animals spread it around, and there are a lot of people who walk barefoot. There are not even many people who separate organics from nonorganics so that the organics can at least decompose. For example, in my backyard is a forest of cacao, with a thick layer of dead leaves and trees and all kinds of organic things on the ground. But under the leaves and all around are all kinds of non-organic things. I’ve found lots of shoes, dishes, a blender, a stereo, and lots and lots of plastics, all disposed of by a this household over the years. This stuff is never going to disappear. There are some people who seem to realize that trash should at least be contained and covered, and they dig holes in their yards to dispose of it. But really there is no very good solution. Or at least I don’t know enough about waste management to propose one. You would think that people who have to live so close to their own refuse would learn to consume less or reuse, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Plastic bags are especially problematic, as everyone buys all foodstuffs in tiny quantities for every meal at the colmado—and most things, being bulk, are measured into plastic bags, and then all the little bags are put into bigger bags. People seem to really like plastic bags here-- they are cheap and convenient and used for everything. And then they are burned. Most people cook on a fagon, which is a cement table-like platform with two holes for building fires to cook over. With this type of cooking, trash, including plastics, is often used as fuel. So, if I am not getting cancer from the burning piles of trash on my street, I am probably getting cancer from eating food that was cooked in burning plastic.

So, back to our meeting with the sindico… He listened very patiently as I explained the situation, and then told me I spoke perfect Spanish, which was nice to hear. He then told us that they were already waiting for approval of a donation of the metal tanks for the region, and if approved, could send a few of them to Rincon Hondo. I didn’t, however, ask him what I really wanted to which was, “what are we supposed to be doing with our trash and why haven’t you started any type of waste management???” because it seemed like too much to get into at the moment. But, getting trash put into trash cans seems like a good first step, and we have to start somewhere.