Strange Phenomena of the DR

January 3, 2009

I got back to my site late this evening from the capital, and it is chilly here, like winter. I had to wait a long time in the cruce because there are never any motoconchos after about 6pm here, making transportation difficult if not impossible. I couldn’t get ahold of my friend who was supposed to pick me up and ended up calling everyone I had in my phone, and he finally showed up. His explanation was that he was in another community that doesn’t have any cell phone service. Which is a good excuse, but I’m still not sure how we was expecting that I get ahold of him. Cell phones are the bane of my existence in this country. Signal is spotty at best, and chances are the person you are calling doesn’t have signal either, or their phone is dead because the electricity has been gone so long, and guaranteed they will not be able to call you back because they definitely won’t have any minutes. Then there are the phone cards I buy that mysteriously don’t work because the codes have been “robbed” and used by someone else. Everyone has cells phones here, but sometimes I wonder why.

Anyway, on the way up to my site on the motor, my friend informed me that there was a serious motor accident in my tiny community today, involving one of my youth and this very friendly grandpa who is always around with a bottle of rum in his hand at all hours, and that the grandpa is probably going to die. I was shocked. And then I thought about whether I would ever stop being shocked by things like this. I have been told by other volunteers that this is one of the hardest things—to come to terms with the fact that bad things happen in this country. Life is just less controllable, and you have to learn to accept it and expect that the unexpected will happen. It is not that bad things do not happen back home in the U.S., it just seems that the occurrence of freak accidents and unfortunate circumstances is much much higher, or maybe it is just that one single event can affect so many people because people live so communally. I remember thinking about this when I first arrived, that chances are that someone in my community would probably die during my two years, and I would certainly know the person. I know very few people who have died in my entire life, and already in my 2 months in site we have had two deaths. Death is also just very up close and personal here, in a way I have never witnessed it. And from a more selfish standpoint, I really don’t feel like going to any more lutos (funerals), at least for the time being. People here are also very superstitious. Every day during the mourning at Madelin's house visitors are always sharing new stories about weird things that happened to them the day before--apparent evidence that Madelin's ghost is around. Even the family members talk like this, and they are all terrified of muertos. There are also many people who claim to have seen dead people walking around, and others who are able to foresee death.

The other person involved in the crash was a kid in the youth group, who interestingly enough recently caused another gossip storm in the community for eloping with my 17-year old next door neighbor. Which brings me to a very unique phenomenon of Dominican culture, and that is campo marriage. People do not get married in the campo, at least not in any way that we think of as marriage. The way it usually happens is that the novios (couple) leave together during the night to spend the night in a hotel or somewhere in another pueblo or city. When the mother realizes that her daughter has not come home (which happens fairly early, by about midnight since girls here to not have freedom to be out late) she immediately says “ella se caso” and begins wailing and soon the entire community is talking. It is still really hard for me to believe that there couldn’t be any other explanation for a girl not coming home by bedtime, but no, here the only reasonable explanation is that she must have decided to get married. Anyway, tradition has it that the couple stays away for a week, with the boy being able to visit his family but the girl not, and then on the 8th day they return home to live together with one of their families. Apparently the time away is for the parents to get over their grief so that they will be able to welcome the couple back. But really they have no choice to accept the marriage, because once the girl has been somewhere overnight with her boyfriend, with everyone knowing about it, there is no going back. This is also not a new phenomenon—there are lots of viejos who were married in exactly the same way. The reason the couple has to sneak off during the night is usually because the parents don’t approve of the match, and also because there is really no other way for the novios to be alone together. I have even heard that in extreme cases, if a girl is out with her boyfriend and he brings her back to her house late, like at 11pm, the parents will say “llevatela, no aceptamos mujeres en nuestra casa” meaning “take her, we don’t accept women (non-virgins) in this house.” So basically, if you want to be able to spend time alone with your novia or novio or not have to be home by 10, the only choice is to get married. Which unfortunately leads to lot of young marriages and marriages under the influence of alcohol, and bad pairings too, because chances are the couple don’t have a lot of experience being a couple since their entire relationship has probably taken place in the presence of one of their families, sitting in plastic chairs on the porch. It is hard for me to reconcile this somewhat archaic view of dating with the very permissive sexuality in this culture. But I think that the permissiveness, being that this is a very machista culture, is one-sided. Boys are allowed to go out and stay out as late as they want, and no one cares what they are doing. The reason girls are so restricted is that no parent wanst a pregnant, unmarried daughter living in their house, whose baby they will then have to support.

There are a few who have weddings, like my project partner last weekend, and everyone is aware that there is this type of formal marriage, but somehow they still equate novios spending a night together as marriage rather than just spending a night together. There are also some obvious legal consequences to this type of union, as “wives” have no legal rights to money or property if they “divorce”, and most women do not work and would thus have no means of supporting themselves if husband were to leave them. The amount of women who stay with cheating husbands or even end up raising their husband’s “children of the calle” (from his other women) is shocking but definitely understandable considering this. Machismo is alive and strong.