Awoken by a melody of crowing roosters, barking dogs, and passing street venders blaring their horns, I dragged myself out of my bunk, checked the floor for bugs before stepping down, and had my first of many cold showers.
One cultural nuance left me a bit amiss my whole time in the hot southern country, and that was everyone's tendency to always pants. On PEI, at the first sight of spring (any day after February that is above 3 degrees), people are done with pants until the cold winds of November. I therefore expected Dominicans, who endure temperatures in excess of 40 and 50 degrees to opt for shorts (or 'short pants', as my father calls them.) Instead, shorts are frowned upon, even strictly prohibited in many areas. Not wanting to die in the heat, Kurtiss and I, the only two guys on the trip, opted instead for 'manpris'. Laugh if you will, but would far rather be called metrosexual (as I was many times) then to slowly roast in jeans.
After a hearty Dominican breakfast, we headed off to Santo Domingo for the day, about 45 minutes to an hour from our Centre, depending on traffic. I need not repeat the state of traffic as covered in my initial post, but our first foray into morning traffic gave us a whole new respect for the car horn. Our first couple experiences of crossing multiple lines of on-coming traffic made for a few nervous passengers and generated a fair number of yelps, mostly out of Christine.
Our day consisted of touring some areas of the city where more wealthy residents lived, impressive houses that rival anything here on the Island, several guarded by an assortment of attack dogs and men carrying massive shot guns. This was starkly contrasted by the heaps of houses crowded onto the hillsides that we would visit later that afternoon.
In the late a.m. we had a walking tour of the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo. The Zone is a designated UNESCO World Heritage site, and for good reason. As the landing point of Christopher Columbus in the New World in 1492, and established in 1496, it is the oldest European city in the Americas. It is also heavily steeped in history, starting from the Spanish conquering and decimation of the aboriginal population, the enslavement of Africans, and the military involvement of several conquering nations, from Spain to France, Britain, to the United States.
Our afternoon included visiting an NGO that works with poorer entrepreneurs and small business owners, primarily women, in helping them get back on their feet by means of low interest loans, educational seminars, and support. After speaking with some workers within this organization, we went for a tour of a poor barrio (community) to visit some of the entrepreneurs they had aided. This walk-through was our first immersion into the poverty on the streets. It was tempting to focus on the children who were incredibly cute and very excited at the novelty of having white people in their community, but there was a lot more to mentally process in this single experience.
The houses were built on a steep incline, sometimes a 45-degree angle, and were of simple construction; mostly cinder blocks and corrugated metal roofs. The narrow streets and stairways were filled with people, and though there was a lot of garbage, filth, and poverty surrounding us, another presence was clearly evident, and that was the sheer vibrancy of this community. Though they had very little, the people we visited were fiercely proud of their accomplishments and their homes. It was slightly humbling; these weren't people that wanted us to come build their houses, indeed, they had built their own houses and businesses from the ground up, brick-by-brick, wall-by-wall. They wanted only to share their story of successes, the pride in their families, and their hopes for the future. It was also light years away from our Island home, only about 6 hours away as the jumbo jet flies, where people were no doubt going about their lives a usual in our suburban, fenced-in lives of isolationist luxury. On the way back to the Centre I realized that in this, my first day in the DR, I had discovered many of the things I expected: poverty and an extreme shortage of what we would call essential services, but also something I did not expect, an aspect of society within that poor barrio that I envied: true community.
It had been an exhausting and ridiculously hot day. By 10:00pm I was snoring loudly from my bunk, much to the chagrin of Kurtiss, my roommate.
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