El Batey

My first day Verona takes me to visit the school where pre-kinder through grade 8 stand to chorus “buenas tardes” each time we enter a classroom to introduce me to the teachers. Some classes applaud when they hear I’ll work with them on letters to their sponsors and the little ones crowd me with hugs. Later we stroll through the dirt paths of the village lined with brightly painted leaning wooden houses and a few equally bright concrete ones. People are equally warm here, inviting me to come anytime into their small front rooms cramped with sets of plastic covered formal furniture. Spanish is mixed with kreyol as nearly everyone here is of Haitian decent though many have been in the Dominican for generations. Because we are not officially hooked up to the power lines, electricity comes in 6 hour bursts which are sometimes (but not always) predictable I am told. Cows, chickens, goats, dogs and a horse are joined in the street by kids who have school in the morning shift playing in oversized t-shirts and men in plastic chairs playing dominos.

(My yard/barnyard)

Saturday is independence day as well as carnival but the festivities are tempered as there have been 3 tragic deaths in the last week. There are however, assemblies at school on Friday, so I attend the one in Bombita in the morning and then visit La Hoya, where COPA has its other school in the afternoon. La Hoya look more like other Dominican towns with mostly concrete houses set back from the road. Here too the mood is sedated because there has been an accident while paving the roads that injured a man.

(My little house)

Saturday is the COPA staff day to shop in Barahona but before picking up vegetables in the market we stop by a refugee center where Haitians too ill to return to Haiti yet stay as they recover from treatment in Dominican hospitals. Many have casts of some kind on one or more limbs but seem in good enough spirits, especially as we help a girl who has been paralyzed from the waist down into a wheelchair for the first time. She has told me that she lost her immediate family and about how she practices English and how many hundreds of friends from around the world she has on Hi5 (a social networking website).

After an intense hour we drive into Barahona for our groceries then on to a small hotel on the beach where we eat lunch and then relax in the sun for the afternoon. Connie, the director who lives in La Hoya, and Verona nap while I take some time to get to know Amy, the health advisor who manages the clinics in both Bombita and La Hoya. At the end of the day Verona and I drop her and Connie in La Hoya and return to Bombita. We wander in the village a bit before turning in and I meet dozens more people whose names I will not remember. They all invite me to church on Sunday as that is the principal entertainment in the batey. There are 3 small churches, each with services nearly every night full of music and dancing.

On Sunday I do laundry and cook before joining Verona in a stroll into the village. We visit 2 girls who have had their tonsils out by a visiting medical team last week, watch silly video clips with the group of young guys who make up the church bands, then walk with them past people of all ages bathing in the canal and into the fields to cut some sugar cane. Walking back with our snack, I am made fun of for how slowly I chew through the long, sweet stick. Later we go to the joint church service where the children from all 3 churches perform dances to upbeat hymns.

Monday is my first day of work officially but it starts off with a scooter lesson. Guillermo, the maintenance guy who will be my right hand man sits behind me at first then lets me ride on my own as a bump up and down the length of the village avoiding roosters and naked children running across the road and practice shifting. A few more rounds and then I’ll be ready to ride on the highway!

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.

Quick Update

Since I did not do such a great job of publicizing my blog before leaving San Francisco last October, lets review: Last fall I visited the north coast of the Dominican Republic for 10 days before heading to India for an unspecified period of time. I traveled, made friends, took an internship with an awesome organization in Mumbai, began to understand things a little, then, after 3 months, made the difficult decision to leave. I took a job with COPA, an organization that runs a school and clinic in each of two villages near a Dominican town called Barahona. I will be living in Bombita, a batey (historically a settlement of plantation workers) where the organization also has a trade room. I’ll be in charge of the trade room programs, as well as the sponsorship program and overseeing the maintenance for both schools.

Back in Transition

The excitement of Uttarayan makes the following days seem lazy and uneventful. Tulsi has to work at her internship so I bop around on my own in Ahmadabad using my awkward Hindi/Gujarati to do errands and return time and time again to the Singapore Air office. In the evenings we zoom around with Tulsi's cousins on the back of their bikes. We eat a secession of snacks on the street, go for dinner, then ice cream, then paan, repeat.

My last day in Ahmadabad we visit the village of a friend of the family's who makes us amazing food and walks us through his fields. I annoy Tulsi by constantly asking agriculture related questions to be translated and thoroughly enjoy the outing. We return to the city to make a food-filled round with the cousins and meet the few other friends I have to say goodbye. We top the night off with a in-house dance party, blaring Hindi music in the sitting room before catching a few hours of sleep.

My flight to Mumbai, where I have been rerouted to fly home, is early in the morning, affording me a full day there before my midnight flight to Singapore. I stuff my luggage and myself into a rickshaw and head to Naina's place to relax with her before meeting up with Shivang. I convince them to accompany me in the search for a few elusive gift items. Chitra meets up with us, then waits with me until it is time to board the plane.

Once in Singapore I venture out from the cushy airport on the free bus that takes me to a shopping center complex. I try to walk from there to see more of the city but the freeway seems to be blocking me so I settle for some delicious noodles in the food court before returning to check in for my flight. We have a short layover in Hong Kong where I groggily peruse locally made artsy do-dads in a shop between dutyfrees. More sleep and airplane food until we land at SFO. I'll miss India but it is nice to be home.

I stay with Whitney and my sister, working few shifts at my sisters restaurant and trying to see friends as much as possible. My bags are split between temporary homes, my clothes are not yet all clean, and I'm still waiting for the visa to go through, but I'm starting to get excited about my next step into the unknown.

Uttarayan

Before leaving India for my job in the Dominican, I return to Gujarat for Uttarayan, the kite festival. The air is crisp and moving on a stiff breeze in Ahmedabad where people are flying kites from roofs, balconies, bridges, and the side of the road. Except for this, the streets Tulsi and I pass on the bus ride from Ahmadabad to Baroda are unusually quiet. The contrast is sharp with the holiday mood we enter at Tulsi’s oldest cousin’s house. The family and friends are gathered on the roof, taking turns launching kites in to the air and holding the attached reels of string. Shivang and his older brother have come up for the festival as well as cousins from Seattle. Bhavi, whose 13 birthday party I attended the first week I was in India, holds the reel as Tulsi dangles a kite into the breeze. Kids blow on paper horns and lean on mothers sitting on mats in the shade as they tie leads on stacks of paper kites.


We are finally cajoled down for lunch before heading into the old downtown area. It’s narrow lanes are nearly deserted. We climb to the terrace and see that the city has shifted to its roofs. The sky is filed with colorful, fluttering kites. Birds wheel away, displaced from their many customary ledges. Music is blasting from every fourth house and competitive shouts ring out as kites are cut. Fireworks and hot air balloons punctuate the scene. I join in, clumsily jerking kites into the air or taking over a high flying one when someone looses interest.


Everyone is involved in the festival: an elderly man sits with a grandchild patching kites, kids are pulling in the strings of downed kites, aunties emerge from the house bearing fried snacks. As the sun goes down the focus shifts away from kites (though there are still plenty in the air) and toward the dance parties and fireworks. We climb over a few neighboring terraces to join the roof with enormous speakers then head back down to eat the traditional meal. We sit around to listen to songs in Gujarati sung by a portly, joking uncle.


The next morning we eat breakfast and fly a few kites before catching the bus back to Ahmadabad with the Mumbai cousins. Here too the streets are relatively empty but the house is full of Tulsi’s grandpa’s siblings since he’s just come back from the US. They gather in the sitting room while Ankit (the cousin we’ve signed up at the marriage bureau) meets with a perspective bride and her mother in another room. Other cousins from Tulsi’s moms side come over as well and we head up to fly a kite with the rest of the neighborhood covering their roofs before dinner. The trees are blooming with multi-colored crepe paper and the streets are strewn with fuchsia and yellow strings. People compare the cuts inflicted on their hands as proud battle wounds.


The chaos subsides only slightly before it is midnight and I’m cutting my birthday cake, having frosting smeared on my face, and feeding a bite to each person. Then we head to cousins of Shivang’s place (to the roof of course) where a large, stable kite is launched. Once securely in the air, paper lanterns with flashing plastic lights are tied to the string and spun out into the night sky. It’s much later then most are flying lighted kites but we see one more with the traditional yellow light of a candle bobbing across the city. Once the cousins have turned to their paan masala flavored hookah, I hold the kite’s string and watch it turn and dip between me and the stars. I’ve had a beautiful birthday and am so lucky to lead the life I do. India has certainly been good to me and I will be sad to leave.

Hello 2010, Goodbye Bombay

Before I know it the 31st has hit us and I’m dipping out of the office to be packed 5 to the car with Shivang and his friends on what is supposed to be a 2.5 hour road trip to Daman, a town on the ocean, where we will meet others for a party. After we break free of the sluggish Bombay traffic and it begins to get dark we hit a stand still. The guys jump out and walk forward to discover the reason returning to report 20 km of backed up traffic. We join a dozen or so vehicles in bumping over the median to continue going the wrong direction in the opposite lane. When this too becomes jammed we have to pile out and fill a trench with stones in order to return to the proper side where traffic is moving again. We dodge chicken trucks and flatbeds, trundle along the shoulder of the road at high speeds, and zoom between cargo trucks until we are stopped again. The opposite lane is again clear so we test our luck and join other vehicles jumping the median for a quick shot ahead. When traffic slows here also we are hemmed in for frustrating 15 minutes before we can return to the proper side to again weave through heavy vehicles painted colorfully, a pickup with steel milk canisters stacked in the back, and cars stuffed full of passengers. After hours of sitting in traffic things finally start moving and we speed through the clear miles to arrive at the party just as fireworks signal midnight. We celebrate and dance to Hindi and English hits until 4am snacking on veg. appetizers and drinking a few mysteriously pink shots. A full meal is served before we crash out in hotel rooms. In the morning we eat a lazy breakfast by the beach before braving the traffic back to Mumbai.


I’m back to work with the goofy YV team getting revved up for the upcoming venture cycle. We take a two day retreat to a donor’s farm house where we revise curriculum and activities, do planning and have serious strategy discussions. We are fueled constantly by chai breaking only to walk to a nearby river where we wade and splash each other. My colleagues each have amazing stories and I’m lucky enough to hear some of them in the down time between meetings.


Back in Mumbai I sit in on a joint Seeds of Peace and YV event. Pakistani and Indian high school aged kids who have attended summer camp in Maine meet again in Mumbai and visit some of our Venturers. I join them to play with a soccer club for kids from Cuff Parade then struggle to follow the flow of conversation in Hindi where the Seeds answered kid’s questions about Pakistan and spoke about the importance of distinguishing between governments and people.

While I’ve been having all these amazing experiences I’ve also been trying to make a difficult decision as I’ve been offered a job with a small organization in the Dominican Republic called COPA. The run schools and clinics in villages on the south coast near Barahona and the offer of a management position doing direct field work is hard to pass up. Once the official offer is in I make the tough decision to leave India. I’ll go to Ahmadabad for the kite festival on January 13th as planned then fly back to San Francisco to get my visa for the DR.


My last week or so in Mumbai is a blur of export surplus shopping, dinner with friends at good Indian and horrible to middling continental restaurants, snacks on the street and evenings chatting with my roommates, little victories of train rides by myself and exchanges in Hindi with rickshaw drivers. These are the things that make it hardest to leave and make me sure I’ll want to return to India as soon as the opportunity presents itself.


I pack up at the PG and meet friends for a goodbye dinner. I catch a day train with Chitra’s mom who was visiting and now will return to Ahmadabad. My big suitcase and I are back in transition.

Christmas

My neighborhood is historically Christian so it has been lit up and decorated for the last week or so. For the rest of the city Christmas involves a party on the 24th and a long weekend but many hindus treat Jesus or Mother Mary as another god they can entreat to protect them. They believe in the power of a certain church and visit there as well as a temple. On Christmas Eve I go with Shivang and Naina to light a candle before we meet others for a party. Friday and Saturday are lazy days, I meet with friends for a meal here and there, go to see Three Idiots - snacking on samosas and sipping mango juice at intermission - and sleep a lot. Sunday I take the train to Thane where we have a Youth Venture outreach. At the end of the weekend I feel rested but have accomplished very little.