Some Stories

An Assortment of Stories from the Dominican Republic

I wasn’t sure what to theme my blog post this week, especially since I didn’t update last week and so much has happened in that time, but Becky suggested that I tell a few of the interesting stories that have happened to us since we arrived here.

Meeting Jorge

Within our first few days of arriving in La Hoya, we met our fair number of new people but I love the story of how we met Jorge the best. Becky and I were cleaning up Becky’s classroom, which had sat empty for the whole summer. While pulling rolls of paper out of her cupboard, we found a tarantula that had set up home at the end of one of her long rolls of paper.

I, being slightly braver when it comes to tarantulas (although not by much), grabbed the other end of the roll and made speedily for the classroom door. At the same time, Jorge, who had come by the classroom to meet the new volunteers, appeared in the doorway, only to have me rush past him, saying “permiso!” (excuse me), roll of purple paper complete with tarantula in hand. I threw the paper out of the room but the tarantula seemed to take this as an invitation and quickly scuttled back to the classroom door. I am not that brave and quickly jumped far out of the way. Jorge, knowing neither of us, literally leaped to our rescue but taking a typically Dominican approach to bugs: kill it. He jumped on the tarantula until it died and we left its corpse outside the classroom as a warning to other spiders. The ants ate it and we met Jorge because he jumped on a spider for us.

Dead Lizard Child

On a Friday morning, when I don’t have class, the helper (ayudante) in the pre-school failed to show up for work and I became the new substitute ayudante. The pre-school teacher was there, so my job was basically to supervise and try to keep the kids quiet (as much as Dominican children are ever quiet!).

After playtime, One child, who had been misbehaving all day, kept showing something in his pocket to his friends and giggling, putting it in his hand and keeping it, quite obviously, hidden from the teacher and I. With my best no-nonsense teacher face (which I’m having to perfect very quickly here!), I stuck out a piece of paper and told him to give me whatever he had.

“Da me lo!” (Give it to me!)

What fell out of his tiny pre-school hand? A dead lizard. Of course.

The lizard had probably been alive when he’d clumsily picked it up during playtime but by then it was quite clearly dead. Normal teachers confiscate mobile phones and other contraband. I confiscate dead lizards.

Motorcycle Accident

A few weeks ago, school was cancelled without warning when  two young men from the village were killed in a motorcycle accident the previous night.  Motorcycle accidents are common here; the roads are dangerous, badly lit and everyone drives motorcycles. To rub salt in the wound, the boys had been killed while racing on night when there wasn’t electricity, meaning the streets wouldn’t have been lit. To race, Dominican youth lie on their stomach on their motorcycles and hold on to the handlebars to stay on. It means they can barely see where they’re going and when the motorcycles collided during the race, they spun out of control. One boy was pushed into a ditch and died in the ambulance when on the way to the capital. (The capital has the only decent medical care.) The second boy hit a tree and was killed instantly. They were 16 and 17.

When someone dies in the village, especially COPA students or children who used to be students, the whole village shuts down. We didn’t have school and a lot of high school students wouldn’t have gone to school in Barahona. Everyone, including COPA volunteers, are expected to visit the house of the bereaved and take part in the visitation, where everyone sits around the house and wears white. The bodies are laid out in caskets and the family grieves for the day, before the funeral actual later in the day.  All of the COPA volunteers went into the village together and paid our respects as best as we could, though none of us actually knew the boys who died. It was a very present reminder of the dangers that come with living here.