Wholy Holy

On Holy Thursday, in preparation for Good Friday, a PCV friend of mine was going to go with some friends of hers from her town to get fish at the beach town near mine. She stopped through my town on the way to get me and her neighbors ended up knowing quite a few of my neighbors and we stopped by to say hi to quite a few people from my world. It’s always interesting and even a little bit weird for people from my life in my town to meet people from my PC life, but this topped all of that because it was Dominicans from another PCVs town who knew people in my town even before we each got to our towns. So we sat and talked a bit in English as they sat and talked in Spanish.

The fish at the beach was incredibly delicious! My favorite meal here, without a doubt is fried fish with fried sweet potatoes (but not the ones we have in the US) with a cold beer or a cold coke, depending on what time it is/sort of mood you’re in. My friend and I sat and visited with her neighbors and their friends at the beach as well as with two volunteers who live at the beach. Because it was Holy Week it was incredibly noisy with all of the traffic coming through to go to the beach.

I went back to visit with those two neighbors again the following afternoon and spent the night. I went to see the one volunteer’s library the following morning which was great because I’d been so focused on stoves for so long and realized, with her help, that I’m going to need to devote a lot of time to the library as well. I bought some materials to get more organized after my meeting with her and have been sporadically organizing the books to get them library-ready. Kids have been by to help and to read, and they mostly like books that have lots of pictures of different things like Spanish-English vocabularly books, books about the human body, and atlases. It has been really interesting to see which books they enjoy and which they leave on the shelves.
I successfully avoided eating the big Holy Week treat which is called “habicuelas con dulce,” which roughly translates to beans with sugar or sugar beans. Believe me; they are in no way jelly beans! It’s a dish a lot like a pudding, which is typically served cold consisting of beans, sweet water that cooked the beans, and little, round, soaked sweet crackers. I had it last year and a few times before and since then and decided to avoid it at all costs in the future. Anything “con dulce” is likely to be something that I don’t enjoy.

On Saturday we executed a talent show to raise money for the library. The idea was inspired in large part by a talent show which took place at the Escojo regional conference the weekend prior, which of all of the PC conference talent shows was definitely the best. It was so good that I even decided to participate in ours and formed a dance to the song “Nuna Nuna.” Me and 3 kids performed and won 3rd place (out of about 6 acts) which made me realize, you’ve got to give a prize to the PC volunteer who organized the event! Still, it was exciting. The 2 acts that placed better than mine were also dances, one consisting of one guy and 6 or 8 girls dancing appropriately, and one of 3 girls dancing quite inappropriately, even though they are all very self-respecting girls. During the time I was setting up for it (which you can probably imagine was a bit stressful) I was being introduced to a child from New York who is here visiting his dad’s family. He is eight and he lives in Brooklyn and his dad brought him over to the house to present him to me. (Dominican parents tend to be incredibly proud of their bilingual children, and rightfully so, especially at eight years!) The boy could not be cuter and talking with him about life and the talent show in particular was really fun. I forgot how many questions little American kids ask and he was full of them that night. Even though I was busy I was happy to answer them (which made me wonder yet again why I shouldn’t be an elementary teacher, and why I shouldn’t move to Nueva Yol to work with Dominican populations). He decided to perform a few jokes which he practiced with me: are you smart or are you a slave? (Then you say you’re smart.) Count to three. (And then when you do it proves you’re a slave.) I was a little bit distracted when it was his turn to go on and it took me a second to realize he was just standing there. He turned around to find me and asked me to come out on the stage. He told me he’d forgotten what it was he was supposed to say, so I reminded him, and then he told me he forgot the Spanish words, so I reminded him. The audience wasn’t perhaps as forgiving as an American audience might be so they needed a little encouragement to laugh and clap, but I think he still felt pretty good at the end. It was an interesting night to say the least.

And I haven’t even mentioned the most interesting part about it: it was also a coming-out party! I had believed an adult neighbor of mine to be homosexual just based on the fact that he was single in his 30s (which really only happens here when the guy is mentally ill or gay) and that his job was as a housekeeper, which seems like it would be the last thing a Dominican man would do. I asked him early on about his being single and his response further confirmed my belief. He’d been missing for a while, off in the “town,” and the city. He came back for Holy Week and on the night of our talent show he put on quite a performance. In some down time we had before we were able to get the music system to work, people got restless. All of the sudden he had taken the stage in nothing but a pair of shorts. He started thrusting his body around very sexually, making everyone laugh hysterically. I was glad for the distraction from the fact that we weren’t ready on time. Later on in the show, during another period of downtime he came back. This time he had on a pair of silky, purple (and even though I hate using this word, it’s really the only word to describe what they were) panties, a see-through silky robe, a long wig, and a pair of platform heels. The who ensemble, I figured, probably wasn’t procured from his mom’s closet, but even if I could convince myself that it was, there was no way his shoes came from anyone else. They fit him perfectly and he knew how to move in them. My understanding of the lives of homosexual males in this country is that they sometimes (or always) dress in drag and don’t tend to stay in the campo. I took his performance to mean that he lives a separate life outside of our town and that this was his coming out party.

Easter Sunday was a little bit sad. I bought some eggs to hard boil and a coke to spoil myself with. Later my friend came to be ready to learn how to make a stove Monday morning. The stove making went well and that afternoon we went to the beach with a number of kids who ditched school that afternoon. The beach was so much cleaner than I’d thought it would be which was such a delightful surprise. We played in the sand and took pictures with Lina and, once again, ate some fish.