Some Days Just Come and Go

Some days just come and go, the highlight might be a few hours spent at a neighbor’s house playing dominoes or talking, or maybe I get some healthy fried chicken for dinner instead of fried pork. Other days have so much action packed into them that even thinking about writing it all in my journal is a daunting task that wears me out. And the most Peace-Corps-y thing about it is that you really never know what day is going to be which. Days of extreme boredom and days of extreme action cannot be planned. They are in no way premeditated. It’s about rolling with the punches.

Today was one such action-packed day. It started out slow, my first day of Christmas vacation. I completed a couple of long days of interviewing and was pleased that I had 50 (of 120) interviews completed in time for the break. The interview was really starting to get on my nerves. Really, why do I care after how many months it was that mothers started to give their children canned, powered or regular cow’s milk if it takes 20 minutes to describe to the women that I’m not interested in which kind of milk it was that they gave, rather at which time the giving took place. Perhaps you have to sit in on one such interview to truly grasp how frustrating that and some of my other questions might be. But the good news was that I was done, for now. So I spent a bulk of the morning reading. It’s called A Prayer for Owen Meany and I HIGHLY recommend it, especially during the holidays.

Pretty soon my friend who likes spoiling me almost as he likes drinking rum arrived and told me it was time to go to the beach. I was thrilled because I really wanted to meet up with my volunteer neighbor who lives there, speak English, be reminded that I’m not alone, and most importantly, compare medical issues. I wanted to show her what I believed to be a series of mosquito bites in a somewhat condensed area, resulting in a very scary, very bumpy, very vast piece of skin on the upper part of my leg where mosquitoes typically wouldn’t be able to have access. I’m pretty sure that’s what this weird protrusion was because my legs were covered in some very severe looking bites in other areas, and, I killed a mosquito in my bed net this morning when the teenagers came around chanting Christmas merengues at 4:30. I have no way of knowing how long said mosquito was in my net, and feel it’s safer to blame said (dead, haha) mosquito for the protrusion than some rash or other contaminable condition. Let me just tell you, it’s not fun to be scratching at something under your pant leg that feels just like all of your other mosquito bites only to be “quickly changing into your bathing suit” and find that it’s a new, very 3-dimentional abscess that’s bright red and painful.

We got to the beach and ate fried fish with tostones, perhaps my favorite Dominican food. It’s sliced of plantain fried in soy oil. With a little salt and a ton of catsup, it might even be more fulfilling that French fries. Now please don’t think that I’ve abandoned my love and appreciation for good American cooking by having said something even comes close to comparing with French fries… it’s just that because potatoes get such a bad rap for being a starch, and because I’m not sure if plantains count as a starch, and since I’m not sure, and because they remind me of bananas which are really good for you, I feel better about tostones as a healthy option than French fries. But believe me, if someone handed me a box of Arby’s curly fries and a plate of tostones, and told me I could only have one, the fries, even if I couldn’t have Arby’s sauce, would win. Hands down.

I did some swimming, and as I hope you will see, some photograph taking. If you find yourself wondering why I’ve taken so many pictures of the same beach (yes, they are all of the same beach) I assure you I’m in no way trying to persuade you to visit. The photographs are merely for my records. I want to remember what that beach, which you will remember I have described as the most lovely, beautiful beach I’ve ever been to, looked like at every moment I was able to be there and soak it up. The fact that you are (theoretically) seeing it so often is just a by-product of my record-keeping.

You might notice some odd pictures of a man sitting on the ground at the beach. I’m quite conflicted about these photos, as I am about something that took up the bulk of my thoughts today. You guessed it: the Haitian situation. I’d love to report that I haven’t felt uncomfortable again like I did that terrible night in front of my neighbor’s house when the police rolled through my community. Unfortunately, I saw something equally disturbing this morning. As we were driving to the beach, my friend slowed the car down and stopped next to a Dominican man and a Haitian boy who was probably 10 years old. The Dominican was very upset and there was a crowd of Dominicans and Haitians watching him. He had a rope, and was tying up the hands of the boy. As it did the other night, it took a moment for me to realize what was going on. As soon as I did, I realized that the other end of the rope was attached to the saddle of a horse and I started to get really scared. From what I could hear outside the car the boy had been caught stealing from the orchard of the Dominican man. He was furious and the boy looked scared to death. This particular Dominican man has rather light-skin so the scene looked like something out of Roots.

All I could think was please don’t whip that horse to make it start running! My friend tried to explain to me that the boy had been caught stealing lemons, a sack of which apparently costs around US$60. Okay, I thought, I can pay for the lemons, just let the little guy go! He’s a kid, but he’s a thief, my friend said, like all Haitians. But don’t worry, he told me, that man is just going to take him to the police to describe what happened, and the two of them will probably resolve it on the way there; he just wants to scare the kid.

So Dominicans are allowed to tie up Haitians? Are Haitians allowed to tie up Dominicans? Let’s insert any adjective that describes human beings and see if it makes any sense. I was, again, visibly disturbed so my friend, who up until this point I didn’t realize had such a crude sense of humor, said it used to be worse, like in the Old West where someone like that, who committed a crime, would be hanged from a tree. Not so crude except that he said this with quite a forceful laugh behind it. I didn’t find the reference to lynching as funny as he did.

I also didn’t find what happened to the man at the beach very funny. When we first arrived, a drunk Haitian was being pretty friendly to my friends and the people seated near us. I went for a swim and when I came back a while later, the man had gotten much drunker. Everyone was having a good laugh at his expense, especially my friends, although they weren’t much more sober, and then something happened that was hysterically funny, or incredibly demoralizing, depending on your point of view. The man attempted to sit down and fell into his plastic chair in a way which made the chair buckle beneath him, and he, and the broken pieces of plastic, fell to the ground. I’ve seen a great many broken plastic chairs in this country fastened together with wire or staples, so I wasn’t too concerned for the chair’s owner. The chair’s owner, however, was. He came rushing with such speed I didn’t think Dominican waiters could achieve. He dove into the pockets of the inebriated Haitian, now lying on the ground, presumably looking for money to pay for the plastic that was once a chair. After turning both pockets inside-out, the waiter picked up the broken leg of the chair, and began to hit the man on the head with it. The audience for the afternoon entertainment was about 5 Dominican men, myself, and some other foreign women. The Dominican men laughed at the spectacle. The man attempted to get up but fell over. His arm was covered in paint which I can only assume got on him when he leaned into a recently painted wooden post at the restaurant. A Dominican man came over to offer some help. A hand, perhaps, to help the man to his feet. No, but he did offer some sips of a much-needed non-alcoholic beverage, a 7up. This Dominican must have been feeling extra generous because instead of just some sips, he gave the Haitian so much soda that he couldn’t drink it all and the 7up poured over his mouth and down his face. The man, at this point, did not seem to be appreciating the help the Dominican had offered, and instead looked defeated. The Dominican offered more soda, this time apparently to refresh his scalp, because he poured the rest of the contents of the bottle on the Haitian’s head.

One of the foreign women approached the Haitian, still lying on the ground, and poured what appeared to be ocean water on his head and over his face. Unlike his reaction to the soda, the man appeared to welcome this shower, even turning to look at the woman who had given it to him. The sight of a foreigner cleaning the man was more than my friends, or the other Dominican men, could take. The laughter was more than it had ever been, and so the man retreated into his lap, still in the spot where he’d initially fallen.

And so I took a picture. I didn’t mean for my friends to laugh harder, I even looked at them to try to inquire to what they thought was so funny, to shame them into stopping. At the time I believe I was thinking that I wanted something to remember the humiliation I’d seen given to Haitians at the hands of their Dominican neighbors that day. The man at the beach did not just represent himself. To me, the humiliation he suffered represented the humiliation that the 10 year old boy suffered, as well as those men who got carried off by the police a few weeks ago. And it’s one thing to be humiliated by one group of people in such dramatic ways as have been going on here for some time, but I was there too. It wasn’t just that Dominicans were humiliating Haitians, there was an American there too, and she didn’t do anything. In fact, she was taking pictures.

What if it had been me that broke the chair? An American woman goes to the beach of a developing country over winter break, has one too many, and brakes a chair. I’m sure it’s happened before, probably at that beach, perhaps at that very same restaurant, and even while that same waiter was working. Would he hit her over the head with the chair leg? He was the only Haitian at the beach that day. I was the only American at the beach that day. So what made us so different?