With the Provincial Leaders' Debate that I helped coordinate at UPEI over with at about 9:00pm on Tuesday May 15th, I headed home to pack and prepare for our three-week trip to the Dominican. It was a rather daunting task, but with an incredibly busy week under my belt, I was more concerned that I was about to embark on a 15-hour journey to San Cristobel, Dominican Republic, having only had about 6 hours of sleep in the previous three days.
Leading up to this experience, I was not sure what to tell people, and was reluctant to call this trip a 'mission,' because everyone I met expected us to be building houses or churches or schools or to be working somewhere for the duration of our stay. Instead, our group would be attending info sessions, visiting NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations), and living with Dominican families for a portion of our stay. Frankly, I was not entirely sure that this was the most fulfilling way to spend three-weeks in a third world country, but as I came to know, and hopefully as you will understand through this series of blog entries, our trip was one wherein we learned that the Dominican people are not in need of our pity and charity. Nor do they need me to go down and build houses; they can build houses much better than I will ever be able to. As we were told many times, the challenge is to understand what the obstacles are for individuals in impoverished countries; to hear their stories and as Westerners, to work in whatever capacity we are able to ensure that the injustices of our own culture, in our own communities and around the world are not propagated in the future.
So with these and more questions in mind, I packed my clothes, along with some toys and gifts for the people I would meet, while my roomies cooked me my final Canadian dinner for 21 days. Shortly before midnight Gillis picked me up and we headed to the Charlottetown Diocesan Centre, from where our group assembled, some friends came to say goodbye, and we departed via van for Halifax Airport. After 15 hours of travel, we had been through three provinces, three airports, and three countries, and were on our way through Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic (also the landing site of Christopher Columbus and the oldest Eurpoean settlement in the Americas) on our way to San Cristobel.
The traffic in the DR is almost beyond explanation. In a city of about 2.2 million people, I would guess that maybe 3 of them have read the actual traffic laws of the city. Rush hour consists of thousands of cars weaving in and out of lines at high speed with inches to spare, and with apparently no notice whatsoever of the lines on the road, nor of the hundreds of motorbikes, mopeds and scooters that zip in between the already volatile lines of cars. Being from PEI, where honking your horn is either used to greet someone on the street or as the equivalent of telling someone off, the constant symphony of blasting horns was a bit over-whelming. Several times I caught myself looking to see the honker, fully expecting someone I knew or someone waving at us. After awhile the honking would meld into the other thousands of sounds in this incredibly loud country. One will also notice once they leave the Santo Domingo airport that many vans and trucks have bars mounter on the front and rear of the vehicle. After scoffing at these seemingly unnecessary accessories, after being hit or hitting other vehicles on three separate occasions within our first week we soon discovered that their are two types of vehicles in the Dominican; those that have these bars, and those that are severely dented or missing parts.
Seatbelts are, however, little more than an accesory in these vehicles. In a country where a full Public Car (Dominican version of the Taxi) is anywhere between 5 and 10 people, motor bikes often have 4+ passengers, and the beds of trucks are additional passenger space, seatbelts are few and far between. Our group was driven around in a very nice air-conditioned van by an unreal driver/body guard names Anez. Within my individual community, however, I had little choice but to abide by the 'When in Rome...' adage, as my choices consisted of accepting a certain degree of risk, or being left wherever I was, alone in a city I didn't fully understand, and in a country where my 6'2" frame and freakishly pale white skin made me stand out like a Conservative in the new PEI Legislature, thus attracting the stares of pretty much everyone I came with a half mile of.
By 9:30pm on May 16th, I was exhausted, and as I laid in bed trying to overcome the heat, I thought of how different a world I was in than the one I had left only that morning. Somewhere between imagining how I could single-handedly fix a broken world and going over Spanish phrases in my head, I drifted off to sleep. And there was evening, and there was morning. The first day.
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