Five Star Campo Accomodations coming at ya!


I didn't have a chance to mention previously that I relocated sleeping quarters about 400 meters down the way from my Doña's residence. I'm now shacking up in what was once a little colmado, town grocery, a two room flat set back from the road. The absentee owner, Ana Rosa, is a charming grandmother who recently left the island for Nueba Yol' (Dominican for New York). She left the house and the shack in the hands of her daughter who resides an hour away from Las Batatas in the city of Santiago. The place has become the family's campo get-away. They rarely visit except for holidays, and then of course on the off chance, to pick up a bunch of bananas or a sack of dried cacoa from the conuco (garden/orchard).

So I was actually living exclusively in the shack until my friend, Christi Holmes, decided to visit a week back. I explained to Ana Rosa's daughter my desire to accommodate my American guest who would be plenty overwhelmed after a few candlelit bucket baths, never mind sleeping on the floor without access to "flush facilities". With this in mind, they handed me the key to the house and its kitchen, bedroom and indoor bathroom (a real luxury). So in one fell swoop I went from camping in the sticks to relaxing in a resort. 'at a girl Christi!


Out in front of the house I've got the town sombrero, a giant Mata de 'Mendra, where my sheriff, his family, and all the town caballeros take pause under the branches to watch the world go by. The sheriff's son is the caretaker, watchiman, for Ana Rosa's house, so he and his campo wife (they are not wedded in the books, but who in the campo ever is?), sleep in a room abutting my kitchen. I serve them up sugary cafecitas every morning in exchange for their services as watchiman (security) when I'm away.


I had initially thought that moving into my own place, I'd find more privacy and Me-time to do work and also relax. While I am finding it is nice to call a place my own, I can't say that I am ever short on visitas. The kitchen is almost always bustling with muchachos and muchachas who like to swing by throughout the day, setting themselves up at the table to color with my crayons, hoping they'll receive some sort of brindis (treats). I've already made dozens of chocolate chip cookies and a batch of blueberry pancakes, I'm thinking about branching out to share the wonders of buttery french toast and banana bread.

So, if you've got a recipe or two, send 'em my way...

JUNE ARRIVED

Along with 540 PVC pipes.

Yes friends, we are ready to begin construction on the pipeline.


It seemed almost a lost cause after so many months of struggling to raise funds in what turned out to be a largely unsuccessful tug-of-war with local political candidates campaigning for the May 15th election. As it It turned out, the money for the water project arrived in the form of web donations to my Peace Corps Partnership (PCPP), a grant that permits Peace Corps volunteers to receive direct donations from family, friends, etc. I would like to take the opportunity now to thank and recognize all of you who donated to the fund. Gracias para todo!

The families of the community of Las Batatas are coming up for air following a long period of doubt and pessimism where they could hardly imagine we'd ever find the resources to build the water system. For a while there, I actually felt like they must see me as yet another corrupt politician, filling their heads with empty promises..."Vote Amy, #1 Gringa...segurara tu vaso de agua nunca se seca" (vote for Amy as number one Gringa...ensure your water glass never goes dry). However now with the money from the PCPP as well as support from the Comite de Yasiqueros, a group of Dominican families living in New York, I see a renewed enthusiasm among my Batatas neighbors.

We are ready to pick up the shovels and dig in!

The quest for Los Hobos...



Two hours scrambling up mud-slopped roads through a blur of raindrops.

A Dominican version of a blizzard.



And as always, when the trucks can´t make it, there are always the donkeys and foot soldiers (us) to lug all the clinic´s medical supplies up the mountain...

***

-a memory of just one of many a journey in the course of a Medical Mission executed by the Partners´for Rural Health in the Dominican Republic. This January, I jumped on board the traveling clinic for a week, translating for the nursing students and healthcare providers as they treated people in communities lacking easy access to quality medical services.


At Last! we arrive at the temple in the clouds...

We set up a day clinic in the church, working quickly from eleven to three, which leaves us just enough time to pack up and trek the two hours back to the base of the mountain, escaping the village before dark.

Dowley goes Dominican



and Campo Christmas starts in the Doña's kitchen









My Doña's son, Papolito, awaits his baptism on Christmas morning







Papolito and his pet fighting cock



Morning milk run

Roberto drying cacao beans



Agrimensura (pipeline survey for the water system)

The route of least resistance

Living has become easier in my little campo just as a new, cold bucketload of woes is dumped on my plate for the New Year. Yes, organizing a community and designing a locally sustained water system is a a bit of a project.

My primary assignment for the next two years is health intervention composed of three parts. First and foremost, I am the resident engineer in charge of the design and supervision of the construction of a small gravity fed water system. Secondly, I shall support and advice a community water committee to organize the system´s creation, the work brigades, the service quota, and the succeeding maintenance, operation, and supervision of the completed water system when I leave. Thirdly, I will organize and train hygeine promoters, a group of women in my community, in proper water usage and storage as well as other sanitary practices to ensure that the potable water that arrives at the house serves to improve the health of the community. Hopefully the project will go above and beyond making for a life more comfortable, relieving the woman and children of the trips taken each day to the rivers and streams to wash and bath and fetch water for cooking and cleaning.

Here and now, moving forward feels like I´m battling against the current. I am thus grateful for the first three month grace period of service dedicated solely to assessing the social and physical situation of the community and opening time to earn the confianza of my new neighbors, friends, and family. But at some points I feel like I´m putting a chainsaw in the hands of machete artists and offering raw pizza dough to Dona´s who cooked the Bandera Dominicana--arroz, habichuela, y carne--before they learned to walk.

For one, organizing the community.


The schedule of the campo is flojo, patterns of work and activity have a steady inconsistency that inhibits scheduling. I´ve felt pretty lucky to have substantial attendance at community meetings but its is frustrating that the attendance is heavily weighted on the women of the house. This is even after I accomodate for men´s work schedules. This wouldn´t be such a grave problem save for the fact that I will depend primarily on men´s labor for the many months of construction needed to complete the pipeline, tanks, spring box and distribution line. It is to the point where I am scheming to plant a circle of chairs in the middle of the pley (the baseball pitch) Sunday afternoon about 2pm just as the weekend game is about to begin, and announcing that they wont swing a bat until we get through this tarea de agua (water work). In terms of work day attendance, thusfar I´ve completed the pipeline survey with an abney level and have the opportunity to meet and work with a majority of the people from each house and have a sense of the challenges with punctuality, the motivation level, and intellect of many of the leaders in the community.

I´ve started with household interviews, each of which I am accompanied by one of 5 well-respected Doña´s in my community. The interviews include questions of family finances, health, domestic water use, as well as the organization of the project. I´m finding it interesting the fluidity and inconsistency of available work for men in the community as opposed to the relative monogonous schedule for the women-mothers of the community who day after day wake up to cook, wash the dishes, clean the house, care for the kids, cook lunch, wash the dishes, fetch water, wash clothes, care for the kids, cook again, organize cosas (things), and go to bed.

And I am finding that the interviews are actually one the best tools as far as educating houses about the project and the local organization of a water committee. I feel squelched at community meetings where no one can keep attention to follow a discussion or the confidence to contribute in a public setting, but in the gallery of each home I have a captive audience and people are prepared to listen and share. I hope slowly that I will appreciate the same level of communication in community meetings because I am certainly not equipped to organize a person at a time. I am awaiting anxiously for water committee elections in January when I feel that I can truly begin to work primarily with a select group of people that the community agrees to charge with the majority of the responsibilities included in as far as representation, organization, and education.


Una nota sobre desarolla


While there are different methods of community development and empowerment, for this type of project, the organization and support of community leaders is the best way to facilitate a successful intervention that continues to survive once the volunteer leaves. As demonstrated in the academic thesis of my Peace Corps technical trainer and as is true in the experience of many other community development projects, the key to the sustainability or the collapse of the local water system is based on the strength of the water committee. Yet in case after case, this key ¨soft¨ intervention fails to receive enough care and enough attention to properly create a permanent social institution. The ¨hard¨ technical aspect of the design, funding, and construction drive the project and are aportioned the majority of the time and energy of the volunteer. Every day I am in my community I feel the pressure to move forward with construction and even after many explanations about my role as an advisor, a teacher, and a helper, I have not broken the notion that I am the ¨jefa¨(boss, chief) of this project. The notion of community ownership is going to demand a great deal of reeducation of the true capacity of the people and families of Las Batatas to take agency of their own well-being and future.

Que mas...


Attempting to wrench local government resources from hands that are unaccustomed to feeding public service projects in poor campos...Trying print and copy papers when the nearby internet center in town rarely has ink and the next nearest center is an hour guagua (imagine a jalopy van filled with 14 people trundling down a washed out road...now imagine Sunday twilight hour and the driver pulling to the side of the road, not once, but three times, to allow front row passengers to buy President beers to share with the driver on the trip home from the city...la libertad Dominicana igual to live free and die young trying). No phone service and the impossibility of planning any activity last minute or arriving anywhere on time (but at the same time nothing starts on time). Planning to work around the fact that there is never silence or peace in the house. Waiting to make real friends.

A good day


So as far as planning for the unexpected, I met an engineer in Puerto Plato on the Malecon at a cafe along the beachwalk the other week. He, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon, along with his son, visiting from the states, and the dog, are enjoying a drink by the shore and watching the kite surfers carve with waves. Toni, notices the papers I am reading at the cafe bar and strikes up a conversation, noticing the Peace Corps emblem. Well, I got his card and he promised he´d try to help.

I took him up on the offer. Today he swung by in his flashy SUV up my little dirt road, navigating around the cows and kids lugging gallons of water, He was all rigged up with a GPS unit to help me cross-check my pipeline survey as well as provide consultance on the design and development of the project.

Incredible

Its like panning for gold


Hours of filtering through dirty sand, empty promises, road blocks, noncommunication, confusion, and then, a nugget. And you´ve struck it rich. Its these little tokens that continue to keep me optimistic and will keep me smiling through these two years.

So I had Toni advice my president on the importance of securing property rights for the pipeline route and Toni gave great tips on equipping my spring box to measure flow rates as well as designing my deposit tank to check inflow rate and consumption flow rate so my community plummers can secure that there are no breaks in the line and that no one illegally taps the line. Its these problems, such as illegal water capture and the greed of surrounding land owners that is a subject I have still yet to internalize and design for. Because such greed, corruption, the social hazard of immorality, runs deep. Even within the community, I know that we can jointly agree on the domestic use of water forbidding the use of system water for pigs and other livestock or crops. But when I take off its a given that the more well-to-do will have their way and use their water the way they wish. All will likely suffer as a result with low water pressure and potentially periods of no water those years where rains don´t arrive for months and months. Success can wash away as easily as sand castles.

Its this lack of, abuse of, usurpation of, public goods-services that is in large part what cripples the majority of people in this country. People work around and live around the discomfort rather than confronting it. Its a point of incredible frustration for a volunteer working from the bottom up, knowing full well that the top is building casinos over the pastures of the poor rather than planting seeds for tomorrow.

Nos vemos si dios quiere...

I feel like my spanish and my sweat glands are slowly aclimating to la vida Dominicana.

And I'm getting aquainted to the small wonders of campo life...the rats that knaw on the walls at night and sometimes find their way inside your mosquitero!...the excessive amounts of coffee, second suppers and second breakfasts at the ready...every activity happening ¨Dominican time¨, ahorrita, which does not translate to right right now on schedule, but rather, in an hour, or maybe more...bathing in a river every day... hand washing my clothes in a stream bed and then lugging up the 2 gallons of water that I'll need to wash my hands and face the rest of the day.

My Doña's kitchen is always filled lots of kids, lots of yelling, lots of chickens, and and lots of dogs. And the dirt road is not without its cow and donkey road blocks. I aprovechar (take advantage) of the infrequent bouts of luz in the house every other evening that allows for a few hours of entertainment and juice with ice.

And its wonderful.

The nights are filled with the enormous moons and the outlines of palm trees. And endless games of dominoes. Its orange season here in Las Batatas and every time I march off into el monte, the outback, with my ayudantes (volunteers) to survey, check the water system's spring source, or even just visit a neighbor, it is mandatory to go orange picking. My compañero scrambles up the tree to toss down 10 or 20 fruits. I tuck in my shirt and rapidly fill it like a potato sack. Pregnant with oranges, I wabble adelante (forward). We then proceed to peel the fruit and check if it is sweet for eating or sour to squeeze into juice later. If its dulce (sweet), the next kilometer of the hike finds us stumblling, as if drunk, our mouths full of juice, spitting the seeds and tossing the orange peels behind us to mark our route.


Scrambling up orange trees and diving fully clothed into pools of crystal clear spring water, its hard to imagine that its snowing somewhere. But I know that Christmas is approaching because the houses in my little campo have put up colorful lights that twinkle on the nights we are lucky and have electricity. And so I've started sharing traditional carols that I play for people on my computer. And I sing about snow in English.

Miss you, happy holidays.

At Las Batatas

So I just found out where i´ll be living the next 2 years of my life...

After a long formal day of introduction ceremonies and a 5 hour ride up from Santo Domingo, I arrive in the campo de campo on the back of a pickup with my fellow volunteer, Duncan, who´ll be living on the mountain above my site. The two of us are greeted by a bright yellow sign ¨Welcome Cuerpo de Paz to Las Batatas¨. The whole town, sitting in a giant circle of chairs on my project partner´s front lawn, stands up and begins to clap. Duncan and I are led to chairs in the center of the circle. My project partner puts his hand on my shoulder and begins a grand speech telling everyone that I am to be their sister, their neice, their daughter, their family and that the town is incredibly fortunate to have me. At this point I am beyond words...exhausted and overwhelmed and controlling my desire to burst out in nervous laughter over the scene playing out before me. I manage to just splutter out how fortunate I am to build a water system together with the community and that I can´t wait to meet everyone.

After my less than captivating oration, which involves a lot of smilling a graciases, I am ushered forcefully toward a pudgy, featureless fellow who I find out is the Sindico (senator dude whose gonna get me mad fundos to start construction) and commence in forced small talk about how I love to dance bachata and eat pico pollo. I can´t understand any of his slurred Northern drawl so instead I just answer questions that I think that he should be asking.

After this whole production, my Project Partner turns to Duncan, as an afterthought...oh, and he´s working up on the mountain.

Hilarious.

So its a town called the sweet potatoes, except that there aren´t really any sweet potatoes. the prices plunged a few years back and everyone just figured that milking cows is now a better bet. Four houses have luz part of the day, a failed project slapped together by some phony politician attempting to raise votes.

People ride to the big downtown of Yasica for groceries, drinks, and chisme (gossip) on horseback. I drink hot chocolate milk every morning and bath in the river every afternoon. I´m an hour from some of the most renowned resort areas (Sosua and Puerto Plato) in the country.

I´ve replaced the city´s dirty high rises for the pueblo´s grassy fincas, I´ve left behind the traffic jams and guaguas for cattle stampedes and horseback bolas (bola equals a hitch).



River on the way to the mystery noria (spring).



Cascada on the same trip to the mystery noria...my dedicated water committee

November 2
Day of the Dead...or Day of Naranjas...