Benvenidos a Bombita

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My flights from SFO to Miami then to Santo Domingo run late but without a hitch as does my transfer from the airport to where the bus will leave for Barahona. On my way out of the capital I glimps street stalls selling baseball hats, flashy sandals and sneakers, and sunglasses under the shade of an overpass. There are large, fancy buildings with corporate signs, concrete strip malls, and men hawking cell phone chargers strolling between lanes of traffic. These give way to pastel bungalows with grill enclosed patios, then small hills covered in shanties of corrugated tin and brightly painted boards, then finally cane fields backed by palms and blue hued mountains.

The trip by guagua (a kind of bus, see photo) is supposed to take 3 hours and we have already stopped at the roadside Parador Hong Kong to use the bathrooms and buy Dominican or Chinese fried snacks. We have also pulled to the side when a passenger in the back yells up requesting to buy roasted ears of corn from the boys running beside the windows. The guagua is still full of the smell of butter and corn when we slow to get the news that a Presidente beer truck has overturned ahead. We pull off to an unpaved road next to cactus-fenced fields and bump along into a forest of short, thorny tree whose branches screech along the sides of the bus. We continue slowly for nearly 45 minutes before we see the highway just over an impassible trench and a dangerously sandy stretch of road. After several attempts to fill the trench with branches enough to cross, the driver gives up and we make a painfully slow retreat backwards to the highway.

I finally arrive in Barahona and am met by COPA staff. I eat dinner with Connie, the director, Verona, the education advisor in Bombita, and the 5 girls from the UK volunteering on their gap year. I’m fairly sure the plate ordered for me is horrible but I am so hungry I wolf it down between answering questions. Verona, 2 of “the girls” and I drive back to Bombita where I am shown my little 2 bedroom house on the school compound. It is strange to be alone but the crazy old watchman talks to his dogs outside and I can hear music and voices from the village just beyond my window as I drift off to sleep.