11/16
I’ve started the interviews. I’ve done 8. Only 92 to go. Some of the things that I’ve encountered already include, women who have had 9 pregnancies starting at age 15, have lost several children, have no source of income or make around 500 pesos per month ($14 US), and have only completed through the 3rd grade. Some of these are hard questions to ask, but everyone seems to be pretty open with me. And I’ve gotten some free fruit along the way.
On a sunnier note, let’s move on to making fun of how I rarely have any clue of what’s going on in my life. This morning my dona got a moto for me so that I could go to Monte Plata and attempt to mail those letters again (I’ve decided the Dominican postal “system” is essentially nonexistent and can not be referred to as a system at all, but anyways…). I figured the moto would take me to the guagua stop, I’d take the guagua to Monte Plata, take it back, etc. No, he took me all the way there on the moto – first among many moments in the day during which I had no idea what was going on. I get to the post office and the woman (who walked in off the street 2 minutes later and probably didn’t even work there knowing my luck) gave me an outrageous price to mail my love back to the states. I told her I could only mail half of the letters at that price, which totally pissed her off because I’m pretty sure she was just trying to rip this gringa off. We spent a good 10 minutes fighting about why I didn’t want to mail all of them. Anyhow, in the end, I only mailed 5 letters (How am I still too poor for stamps??), and I’m assuming they won’t even get to you guys. Sorry, the rest of you will get things around Christmas time that were written in September. I hope you understand that I obviously needed to save money to pay my way to the capital for our PC Thanksgiving celebration (good food takes priority, lo siento).
What else interesting has happened? Oh right, I marched in a graduation procession down the main road in my community. “Yesi, Yesi, don’t you want to get your camera and take pictures of this?” Umm considering I don’t know any of these people and was not a part of this class, no, not really. I mean, “yes, of course, I do!” It was an adult computer class of about 15. The two block march took 30 minutes (I was of course humming the tune of Pomp & Circumstance throughout), and the actual ceremony took 3 hours. In true Dominican style it all started an hour late, and absolutely every single person in the room had to speak at the ceremony. Near the end random people came through with salami for all of us and we called it a day.
Oh and lastly, I came home one day after a rough meeting with my project partner just to find about 5 fat dona’s on my front porch waiting to yell at me for running alone that morning, telling me that there are theives and people that will beat me up. Some intense finger waving at me was included. So now my mornings are reduced to power-walking (Note that I’m using the term power-walking loosely here) with random old women in their loafers and skirts, making small talk about the sugar cane and horses. Perfect.
Time for some more rice and beans, a siesta, followed by more interviews.
