The Dominican Republic Faith and Justice Experience 2007: Day Seven

Day Seven was intended to be spent in the mountains, but as a result of our premature descent, there was little else to do than prepare for the next day. On Day Eight, we were to embark to cities and villages all across the Dominican Republic to spend a week and a half with Dominican families and communities. After a group exercise we all went off to do our own thing, write in journals, sit around in the sun, pack, play cards, etc.
Five of us, however, drove to the Canadian Embassy in Santo Domingo, so we could cast our vote for the upcoming PEI Provincial Election. Now anyone who knows what a geek I am would somewhat understand how pumped I would be to go to a Canadian Embassy in a foreign country. I didn't even care that it was a small-ish building, an English/French bilingual service sign, a Canadian flag, a recruiting poster for the RCMP; I was home.
To back up a little, our ride into the city was quite different from any other previous. Usually as a group we would travel in a 15-passenger, air-conditioned van, but today, we had a 4-passenger truck, meaning 2 of us travelled in the back of the truck. The heat and sun are the first obvious differences to riding outside a vehicle in the Dominican, as are the whistles, waves, and above all, the lingering stares from the thousands of people we passed. After one week in this foreign country some of the different or once shocking things were already fading into the background: the sight and smell of pollution, the scores of street vendors at every intersection, horses in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic, live chickens on the backs of mopeds and motor cycles. But I continued to be constantly reminded of cultural cleavages that existed both between social classes, and between this country and our own. As we headed back to the centre we stopped at a gas station; arguably THE symbol of Western power, and while walking through the air-conditioned, security-protected store therein, I could see in the distance the shacks and sheds of a poor barrio crowded on the side of a mountain. No better analogy could illustrate the the contrast between the first and third world than in this physical proximity between wealth and poverty.
That night we were asked to think about the trip thus far and to write down a few things that we were touched by thus far. I'm not usually big on soul-searching exercises, but as I sat down to think up some acceptable answers, it was evident that we had seen a lot more positive initiatives than I had anticipated. Micro-credits helping out the empoverished in poor barrios, youth teaching their peers about HIV/AIDS, the building of schools in the batays, community re-investment by the coffee assocation, the youth street home getting kids off the street and on their feet. As we were given our marching orders for the next and told about where we would be living for the next ten days in various locations around the country, it honestly seemed like we had been there for far longer and learned far more than I had expected to over the course of the entire experience. I don't remember what time I got to bed that night, but I know that by the end of the next day, culture shock had me in bed by 9:00pm. Stay tuned.