My Walk to School

Today, I will be leading you on a tour of my neighborhood and, more specifically, the ten-minute-long walk to school I take every day.  While it is not necessarily the most scenic of routes, I believe it will be one of the things I miss most about the country.  It's just been so wonderful to get to know the same people and places by passing them every day for four months, to see how they've changed over time, and to always be surprised by new, random occurrences!

So, we'll start our tour here, by the front door of my apartment, with the small patch of shrubs that my host mom grows next to it.

After we leave the parking lot of my apartment building, this food stand is the first thing we pass.  It's closed for most of the day, but around six in the afternoon the people who run it start setting up shop by putting chickens to roast over charcoal in the red box and pulling plastic chairs alongside it to peel plantains for frying later on in the evening.


Grossly close to the food stand are these dumpsters (For perspective: I think I stood in exactly the same place for both the last picture and this one, just turning around to the other direction).  Sometimes, these dumpsters are emptied and the heap of overflow garbage is swept up and this looks like a normal sidewalk (albeit with a few more banana peels, shreds of old rags, and Oreo wrappers stuck to the ground than most).  But once or twice a week, the trash piles up for two or three days at a time and forms a mountain four feet tall and twenty feet long - from before the edge of the first dumpster to beyond the edge of the third one.  As this is a hot, humid country in the middle of the Caribbean, this is even grosser than it would be in, say, Minnesota, because the trash starts to rot and reek almost as soon as it's thrown on top of the heap.  On the plus side, I've gotten really good at holding my breath while striding very quickly past it, which I imagine must be great exercise for my lungs.


Next, we come to the motoconcho stand.  At any given moment, there are at least a few men under the red awning, sitting on their motorcycles or driving them around in circles, offering to drive you anywhere in the city for around 20 pesos (50 cents).  Since motoconcho are generally only safe in smaller towns, I have never taken one of them in Santiago.  I have, however, received numerous marriage proposals from the drivers, generally with such romantic and charming lines as "Oye, mujer!  Cásate conmigo y dame la visa!" ("Hey, woman!  Marry me and give me a visa!").  

Cultural note:  Lines like that are called piropos, and are a large part of, well, any experience any time any woman in the country leaves her house to go anywhere.  They're usually called out from a respectful distance and sometimes they're a little funny or sweet, but they do get old.  Examples of typical piropos include: "Psst!  Psst!"..."Hola, bonita! (Hello beautiful!)"...The classic cat-call whistle..."Que Dios te bendiga (God bless you)"..."Rubia rubia!/Morena morena!/Negrita negrita! (Girl with light/medium/dark skin, respectively)"...and, if you look like you speak English, "Baby, I love you!  I love you!" in the super thick accent of someone whose knowledge of that language consists only of that phrase.

Moving on, we come to the smiley and frequently tipsy man who sells the staple vegetables of the Dominican diet - plantains, yucca, potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers - off of a tarp on the sidewalk.

And, across the street, there is this woman selling cigarettes, candy (including the beloved Halls cough drops), and coffee.  While I have never bought anything here, I was once in a concho whose driver pulled up alongside the stand and asked the woman for a cup of coffee (served out of a large thermos into a tiny plastic cup, just barely bigger than the ones that come on the top of liquid medicines so you can measure your dosage) and one cigarette (which she pulled out of a brand-new pack for him, to sell the rest one at a time or all at once at a slightly reduced rate).

Moving along, we come to the newly built car repair/wash station.  When I got here, this was just a layer of concrete with a few holes in the ground - now, it's a fully functional auto tune-up place trying to drum up business with all kinds of deals, like a free car wash with every oil change.  So next time you're in town and need an oil change, you know where to go.

Next, we come to the bridge, a place I have very mixed feelings about.  We'll start with this side of the bridge, as it's the one I use most of the time.  As you can see, it's not the best-maintained.  Not only is there this graffiti, but, behind that yellow wall...

...there's a large, frequently smelly pile of plastic cups, napkins, and grocery bags.

Once you get past that, though, you get this incredible view of a valley, a river, and a set of bright green plantain trees.  Except for the gas station in the upper right corner, it looks like something out of National Geographic - and I get to walk past and admire it every single day.



There are also these plants, which I'm rather fond of.  I've only ever seen them grow under this pipe on this bridge, so I'm not sure what they're called, but they're quite unusual.  They're a grayish-purpleish color and are made of thick trunks with pointy leaves growing out in a circle.  These two are pretty straight, but some of them grow out to the side at weird angles.  Up until last week, there was one that was very low-to-the ground and grew almost horizontally, with a bend in the middle.  Every time I saw it out of the corner of my eye, my heart skipped for a second, thinking it was a snake.



The the other side of the street, even though it's technically the exact same bridge, is really different.  It, too, has a nice view from some angles - here, you can look out and see the huge monument that's the center of the city of Santiago.











But it also houses one of the city's poor barrios, filled with tiny one- or two-room cement shacks topped with tin roofs with holes in them.  The houses are built one next to the other wherever there's space, so there are sometimes nothing except foot paths leading up to them and, while a lot of them get electricity and water occasionally, those services are quite unreliable.  There also isn't a garbage pick up for that neighborhood, so, as you can see on the left, a lot of it just ends up getting thrown down the side of the hill.


This is the general store at the edge of the bridge, pieced together with a lot of tin, but selling a surprisingly wide variety of things, from tires to plastic kids toys.









Past the bridge comes a very different, solidly middle class area of town, with significantly less garbage on the streets and more far more chain stores.  Here, we see the signs for PriceSmart and Payless...

...and a little later we come to the nicely air conditioned strip mall with Cecomisa (the primer computer repair shop in the country) and at least three separate Dominican banks.








In between them is what is probably my favorite part of the walk - the fruit stand.  Every day, on the back of his pick-up, this man lays out huge piles of fruits: bananas, pineapples, oranges, papayas, and, now that they've just started to come into season, mangoes.  Because of all the citrus, it smells wonderful.  It's also one of the more happening parts of the walk - every morning, the vendor sets out six or seven plastic chairs on the sidewalk alongside his truck, so that after buying their fruit, people can sit down, eat it, chat with each other, and (of course) call out piropos to women passing by.

This is my second favorite part of the walk.  Every day, from eight in the morning to six at night, either the man in the white shirt and/or his brother are here, selling gorgeous flowers of all kinds - daisies, roses, birds of paradise - out of old paint buckets.  I think, at some point or another, I've walked past every single stage of the operation, from setting up the paint buckets in the early morning to trimming the bottoms of the stems at midday to pouring water over them to keep them looking fresh in the afternoon to moving the more sensitive types of flowers from one part of the sidewalk to another to keep them in the shade as the sun moves across the sky.

And, just a few yards past the flowers, we arrive at Puerta Dos (Gate 2) of my university, la Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra!  Were this a real walk, it's likely you now would have walked for fifteen minutes at a normal pace (ten at an "oh shoot I'm going to be late for class" one), would be feeling your shirt start to stick to your back with sweat, and would probably have gotten at least three piropos (if you're a woman).

Food: A Very Special Dessert Edition

Dominicans love sweet food.  There are vendors selling gum and candy on every street corner.  People put, on average, two to three heaping tablespoons of sugar in every half-full cup of coffee, drink fruit juices with plenty of added sweetener at every meal, and think we're crazy for drinking plain chamomile tea at night.  (My friend's host brother, in fact, once snuck some honey into her tea behind her back because he was so sure it'd be gross without it.)  Two of the most popular snacks are Oreos and their Dominican counterpart, Dinos.  One would think that this love of all things sweetened would translate into a delicious selection of Dominican desserts.  Let's test that hypothesis...

Higos

These are stewed figs.  (The photo is actually from Google, but the ones I ate looked just like this.)  This was the first dessert I had in this country, as it is the favorite food of my host brother who was visiting for Christmas and New Year's.  My host mom makes it by putting figs, water, and sugar together in a saucepan and simmering them until they get mushy and dense.

The verdict: This can only be described as sickly sweet.  When my host mom tried to make them again a few days later but burned them, she and Braulio were disappointed.  I tried to express my condolences tactfully, but, secretly, my taste buds were rejoicing that they would be sparred from having to eat any more of them to be polite.  

Dulce de Leche y Coco

This is a Dominican candy sold both in grocery stores and on street corners, wrapped in plastic, ready to be sliced and eaten.  This one is plain milk and coconut, but some of them come with a fruit-jelly-like filling.

The verdict: This is nothing like the caramel-like dulce de leche that comes from Argentina.  Instead, it has the consistency of a slightly drier, grainier fudge, and none of the deliciousness.  It's possibly the most bland candy I've ever eaten - it's not sickly sweet, but it's also not sweet, period.  Nor can I describe it as having any other flavor.  It doesn't even taste like coconut.

[As a side note, the other most popular options in the candy aisle of Dominican grocery stores are suckers (which are generally good), Halls cough drops (which are enormously popular and eaten as mints), gum (lots of Orbit and Trident), and circus peanuts (which, for some reason, seem to be the most popular kind of imported candy.  Every grocery store I've been to has had racks and racks of them for sale.).   

The verdict:  The most popular candies include cough drops and circus peanuts.  Enough said.]

Arroz con Leche

This is like a slightly more soupy version rice pudding - rice cooked with milk, sugar, vanilla, raisins, and a cinnamon stick, then sprinkled with a dash of powdered cinnamon.

The verdict:  Very, very tasty.  Probably the best dessert in the country. 

Bubble Tea

A few weeks ago, I was in a mall, walking around the food court, when I suddenly came face to face with a sign with a picture of bubble tea.  My heart soared.  Never, in my wildest dreams, had I imagined I would find bubble tea in Santiago.  (Although, fun fact:  The tapioca pearls in bubble tea are actually made out of...the starch of yuca, after it's been grated and had the liquid pressed out of it.)  I ordered one right away, and you can see the joy and excitement in my face as I wait for it.  There was a lot of joy and excitement.

The verdict: Heartbreak.  As Joe pointed out, I was a fool to suspect that Dominicans, who make stir fry with raisins, would make a good Asian drink.  The pearls were not the sweet, round, chewy delights from Tea Garden - they were a bitter, squishy mass of grossness.  The actual tea part was quite good, but I couldn't drink it without getting more of those bitter chunks of tapioca, so the drink as a whole was heartbreakingly awful.

Honeycomb

Someone gave my host mom this all-natural, straight-from-the-country honeycomb as a gift.  It was just a huge slab of wax dripping with fresh honey, and we kept it in our fridge for about a week.  Any time you wanted a little bit of something sweet, you could just cut yourself off a piece, chew it so the honey would ooze out, and spit out the wax that remained (kind of like those wax bottle candies).  

The verdict: I actually liked this a lot.  The honey was delicious.  The only bad part was that sometimes little pieces of crumbly wax would get stuck behind your teeth, like popcorn kernels.

Habichuelas con Dulce

You make this concoction by blending beans with milk, cinnamon, and sugar until it's a smooth, brownish liquid.  You then add some chopped up pieces of batatas (those blueish sweet potatoes) and let it simmer.  Yep.  It's a dessert whose main ingredients are sweet potatoes and beans.

The verdict: I think it's no coincidence that this is almost always made during Lent, the time of fasting and self-denial.

So, while I'm sure I'll end up missing some of the foods here, like passion fruit and mangú, I can't say I'll miss a lot in the way of Dominican sweets.

Santo Cerro

My study abroad program, being, perhaps, the best study abroad program in the history of study abroad programs, takes us on an extraordinary amount of field trips.  Partially, this is because travel is easier in the Dominican Republic than, say, Spain, so our tuition stretches farther, and partially, this is because our program directors like having an excuse to visit beautiful beaches and interesting historical sites, so they just arrange more excursions than the directors of, well, pretty much any other CIEE program.  These are a bit delayed as I am just now getting my pictures in order, but here is the first of several posts about the trips we've taken in the past month and a half...So, without further ado, I present our visit to the Santo Cerro (aka, the Holy Hill).

This hill, located about 30 minutes southeast of Santiago, was the site of the first large-scale battle between Europeans and American Indians.  Now, it houses the main street of a small town just a little way off the main highway connecting the country's major cities.  Most of the street looks like pretty much any other road in a small Dominican town - full of tiny, slightly run-down general stores, cafeterias, and houses, all with groups of people sitting around and shooting the breeze in front of them.  At the very end of the street, though, there is a pretty pastel church with a breathtaking view of the tree-covered slope of the hill and the gigantic green valley below.

Back in March 1495, the churchyard was the site of a newly-built Spanish fortress, and the valley was the site of the first major battle between American Indians and Europeans.  By that time, the Spaniards had explored a good deal of the island and were beginning to really anger the local people.  Not only were they making excessive demands for gold and food and causing a lot of trouble with the local women, but recently they'd made a few other especially pushy moves.

Columbus had, for example, tricked the Taíno chief who had killed the original 39 men he'd left on the island (see a few posts back) by telling him he wanted to negociate a truce, but actually handcuffing him and throwing him into jail until he could be brought to Spain for trial.  One of the Spanish generals had ordered his men to cut off the ears of a Taíno nobleman they'd accused of stealing their food.  This angered the Taínos a lot as, in the first place, the general had no authority in their eyes to punish anyone and, in the second place, they lived in a society where villages kept and shared all of their food in common, so they didn't understand what the man had supposedly done wrong.  Not to mention the fact that, you know, different groups of Spaniards had stolen plenty of food from various Taíno villages over the past few years.

After a while, though, things got so heated that Columbus decided he needed to show the Taínos who was boss.  He ordered a palisade to be built on the top of a hill overlooking a huge valley, close to one of the biggest and most rebellious Taíno towns.  Soon, both sides gathered for battle - about 220 Spaniards and 1,000 of their indigenous allies on top of the hill, about 30,000 of their indigenous enemies on the bottom of the hill.  The armored Spaniards, with their metal swords, crossbows, and hand cannons, believed that they were in decent shape against the naked Taíno's wooden lances and arrows with bone tips.  In reality, though, they were hopelessly outnumbered.  By the end of the day, the Taínos had beaten the Spanish all the way back up the hill and invaded their palisade.

Supposedly, the Taínos then tried three times to destroy the cross that the Spaniards had built inside their fortress - by burning it, pulling it down, and chopping it up - but were unable to hurt it.  Lynne, our program director and expert in this type of history, suspects something like that may have happened because the cross was made out of a live, green tree, not a piece of dead wood.  In any case, in the church where the palisade was, there is now a sign marking the spot where the cross had been.  Personally, I thought it was a bit creepy - I can't really imagine God being on the Spaniard's side that day, and it was weird to see a description of the battle that depicted it as deserved victory for the Europeans.  Kind of like the huge lighthouse built to honor Columbus near Santo Domingo.  Interesting public history choices.

In any case, though, eventually the Taínos left and the Spaniards were able to get back into their fortress, where they prayed for protection and prepared for the next day in battle.  At this point, all of their Taíno allies had been killed or left them, so they were alone - 200 of them against thousands of Taínos.  The next morning, they woke up, expecting another ferocious day in battle, looked out across the valley...and saw grass, trees, and nothing else.  Not a single Taíno had showed up to do battle.  The Spaniards thought it was a miracle.  They celebrated their win, they prayed in thanksgiving, they eventually went back to their settlements to continue their conquest. 

Where had the Taínos gone?  Home.  The Taínos rarely did battle and, when they did, they tried to avoid a lot of bloodshed.  They'd fight until one side clearly had the upper hand, then leave it at that.  The winners would get their way in the dispute, and the next day everyone would be back home with their families, going about their normal business.  So after the Taínos had backed their enemies all the way up the hill, they figured they'd won, so they left, assuming the Spanish would pack up their things and head back from whence they came.

Of course, as neither side thought it had been defeated, it wasn't long before they started fighting again.  But that is the story of the first big battle between Europeans and American Indians, in which both parties walked away thinking they'd won.

Food, Part Three

Here are a few more of the interesting things I've eaten lately...

Concón

This is concón, an extremely popular part of any rice-based meal.  When they cook rice, Dominicans always cook it a little bit longer than people in the rest of the world, so that the bottom layer gets crispy but the top is still white and fluffy.  They scoop the top part off and put it in a big bowl, then scrape the crispy stuff off the bottom and put it in a smaller bowl, where everyone shares it or fights over it, like the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey.  It's actually quite tasty - crunchy and flavorful, since the seasonings that were cooked along with the rice tend to get especially concentrated in the bottom and cooked into it.

Albóndigas 

This one is for Dad...Even though I don't think you'd have appreciated the avocado or lentils or rice, you would have liked the meatballs we sometimes have first as a side for lunch (left) and then inside toasted sandwiches for dinner (right).  The sauce looks a little weirdly colored in the picture, but it's actually a pretty good one with tomatoes and spices.  Not quite marinara sauce, but closer than what people use on pasta most of the time.

Comida China

This is the Dominican version of Chinese food, which, as far as I can tell, consists entirely of mixed vegetables and chicken stir-fried with soy sauce.  Sometimes it's pretty good - not quite the Chinese food I'm used to, but good enough salty vegetables.  The other day, though, we had mixed vegetables, soy sauce, and raisins stir-fried together.  Not so good.  In this picture, we have another, distinctly Dominican choice: deep-fried bananas as a side dish.

Batata

"Batata" translates to "sweet potato," and, while these are indeed things that resemble potatoes and are sweet, they're very different from the sweet potatoes in the Midwest.  They actually have a pretty similar taste - maybe a little less sweet - but, texture-wise, they're almost exactly like regular potatoes.  Also, they're a weird blueish-gray color.

Sancocho

This, along with mangú, is one of the staple foods of the DR.  It's somewhere between a soup and a stew, made up of plenty of broth with huge pieces of meat and roots.  The best kind of sancocho is the kind that's made out in the country over an open fire, with some combination of 7 different kinds of meats (such as pig, chicken, and goat) and 6 different kinds of potato-like plants (such as potatoes, yucca, and plantains), depending on what you happen to have on hand.  While I'm a little wary that I still haven't found out which seven animals, exactly, are the options for the soup, it is admittedly very tasty.

Mi Noche en la Clínica

I apologize for the delay in putting up new blog posts...the past week has been especially busy with getting ready for midterms, applying for a scholarship, and looking for an apartment for next year (and, to a lesser but much more enjoyable extent, swimming under waterfalls, lying on the beach, and dancing merengue).  And the week before that, I got so sick I ended up going to the hospital.  While that entire day involved far too much vomit and too many needles for my liking, I am feeling much better now and, at the very least, can add "spent the night in a hospital" to the list of aspects of Dominican life that I've experienced.

Consistent with my tendency to only get weird, short-lived, miserable illnesses like swine flu instead of normal ones like colds, until last week I hadn't had a single major stomach issue in the DR.  Then, quite suddenly one night, my stomach started to feel really weird.  Like I'd just eaten a meal so big I wanted to throw up.  As I hadn't just eaten for two hours, this seemed a little strange, but I just went to bed and hoped it'd be gone in the morning.

Nope.  The next day I threw up four times until finally, around two in the afternoon, my host mom said we should probably go to the hospital.  (In the DR, there are no clinics or urgent care centers, just two kinds of hospitals: hospitales, which are public and generally under-supplied and over-crowded, and clínicas, which are private and have much better conditions, as well as doctors who have studied in Europe or the U.S.)  Although I suspected it was just food poisoning, I decided it wouldn't hurt to go and rule out anything more serious, expecting that the process would only take a few hours (ha!).  My host mom called a taxi, and we went to the emergency room at Homs, the best-ranked clínica in Santiago.

Homs looks very much like a hospital in the U.S.: shiny white linoleum floors, pastel painted walls, nurses in scrubs, and doctors in lab coats.  We walked through the waiting room to the check-in counter, where my host mom explained what had been happening to the receptionist.  I showed them a copy of my passport and they sent us to the next room, filled with curtains hiding cots and metal chairs, and a nurse pointed us to the little stall where I should wait.  Overall, the process worked like a slower, slightly less organized version of an American doctor's office, except...

1.  Mercury thermometers.  To take my temperature, the nurse used a mercury thermometer, smacking it against her wrist, then sticking it under my armpit, something I can't remember ever seeing before in real life.  Even better, they gave me one to take home with me in case I started feeling sick again.  Here it is, to the right (since I didn't have my camera in the hospital, I have to stretch a little for pictures for this entry...)

2.  The doctor's questions.  Most of these weren't that strange - What did you eat last night?  Have you taken any medicine today? - but at one point, the doctor asked me, "Have you ever been sick before?"

"You mean with something like this?" I asked.

"With anything."

"You mean serious illness?"

"Any kind."

"Like, in my life?"

The doctor started to get impatient.  "Yes.  What have you been sick with before?"

I was still confused - did she expect me to remember every illness I've ever had?  How were things like the chicken pox at age three at all relevant to this? - so I shot a questioning look at my host mom, who nodded and told me to start listing all of the illness I've had. 

"If it helps, you can say them in English," the doctor offered.

I ended up just listing off a few - chicken pox, colds, the flu - thinking it would take far too long to explain things like "Well...to start with, last summer, one morning my cheek just started swelling up and hurting, and we're not quite sure, but it was probably an infected spit glad one day and, a few weeks before that, there was one day where I randomly felt so weak that all I did was sleep from Saturday night to Monday morning..." and being fairly certain that such illnesses had nothing to do with the bacteria that was almost certainly giving me food poisoning right then.

(Although, afterward, I started to worry that maybe my life is like one very long episode of House, with dozens of seemingly unrelated illness actually all being symptoms of some sort of rare virus or a bad reaction to laundry detergent that has been steadily building that only this doctor, seeing them written all together on a white board, would be able to understand).

3.  Patient privacy regulations.  In the US, I once asked my doctor if she could explain something to my mom over the phone, but she told me that, because I was over 18, she wasn't allowed to talk about my health with my parents on the phone, even if I was there with her and asking her to do it.  For my dad to tell his insurance company about a mistake in coding in a visit I'd had, we had to do a three-way call because the insurance company couldn't talk about it without my presence.

Here, my host mom did everything for me except sign a credit card receipt.  She checked me into the hospital, jumped in and answered half of the doctor's questions before I got the chance to, wandered around asking nurses what my lab results were, told the front desk I was going to stay the night and gave them my check card for the deposit, and talked over treatment options with my doctor when I was asleep.  It was very helpful, and I really appreciated it, especially after the medicine kicked in and made me so tired I could hardly stay awake, but it was certainly much different from the US.  (I am proud to report, however, that even under groggy, sick, weak conditions, I could understand everything the people around me were saying.)

4. Uses of gloves.  At Homs, plastic gloves were all over the place, serving a remarkable number of purposes - storing cotton balls, tying arms about to get blood drawn, acting as a mini garbage bag for band-aid wrappers and used iodine wipes.  I never, however, saw them protecting anyone's hands.  Even when drawing my blood, the nurses used their bare (hopefully clean) hands.

5. Lack of communication with the patient.  At no point after examining me did the doctor come back to explain that she thought I had a stomach bacteria and explain the different things she thought I should do.  After she left, I waited around for awhile, and eventually a nurse stopped by with a box of test tubes and needles (safely individually sealed in little glass-and-plastic containers), set it down on my bed, and started cleaning off my inner elbow.  No "We'd like to test your blood for x," no "Have you had blood drawn before?" just walking in and getting to work.  When my host mom asked, she wasn't even sure what they wanted to test it for.

The i.v. was the same thing.  My host mom understood what was going on and recognized the medicines they were giving me, so she didn't seem to think this was strange, but no one had told me they thought I should get and i.v. or asked if I wanted it or told me how much it would cost or if it was covered by insurance.  I was just lying there, half asleep, when another nurse bustled in with a pouch of a saline solution, hung it on a hook above my head, grabbed my hand, wiped it with alcohol, and drew some more blood out of it before connecting it to the i.v. line.  (Side note: When my host mom asked why they were drawing more blood, she was surprised and said, "Oh?  Someone already did that?" so I we can add lack of communication between nurses to this section, too.)

6. Getting yelled at by a doctor.  Continuing the theme of lack of communication, as the evening went on, someone told my host mom (not me) that the doctor wanted me to stay the night, so I didn't get dehydrated (since I hadn't drunk anything in over 24 hours and, even after taking the anti-nausea medicine they gave me, had thrown up juice).  My host mom thought it was a good idea, especially since it was already quite late.  I was concerned, wondering why I'd have to stay overnight for something as little as food poisoning, so I called my program's director, who reassured me that overnight stays at the hospital are more common in the DR than the US, and especially now, given all the worry about dehydration caused by cholera, doctors are being especially careful about preventing dehydration caused by other things, as well.  Reassured slightly, I agreed, and my host mom told the front desk before heading home to get the things she would need to stay the night with me.

There was some miscommunication, however, and the doctor still needed to talk to my mom about me staying there.  She came into my room to talk to her about ten minutes after my host parents had left, and when I explained they'd gone home to get a few things, she left.  When she came back about twenty minutes later, however, and found that my host parents still hadn't come back, she started yelling at me to call them because she needed to talk to them.  Actually yelling.  At a poor, sick, groggy girl alone in a foreign hospital, about to stay the night for the first time in her life.

Eww.  Just looking at it makes me feel sick.

7. The various theories about why I was sick.  One of the doctor's questions was what I'd eaten the night before.  It had been yucca, avocado, eggs with tomatoes, and a papaya smoothie - a meal so typical that I actually took a pictures of it as the perfect summary of Dominican dinners.

Of all of these things, the doctor did not suspect, as I did, that one of the eggs been bad or maybe not quite cooked enough...or that the avocado or tomatoes or papaya maybe weren't washed quite as thoroughly as usual...or that the eggs had been sitting out on the counter a little too long before I ate them.  The one that stuck out to her as the most likely suspect was yucca, a completely bland, tasteless, inoffensive plant that had been peeled and cooked through in boiling water that I have had about three times a weeks since I got here.  My host mom reassured her that I've eaten yucca many times before without problems.  Later, my host mom told me that the doctor thought it was probably a stomach bacteria, and I got a handful of medicines designed to kill what must be every bacteria, amoeba, and parasite in the country, just to cover my bases.

My host mom, however, didn't seem convinced.  She asked if I thought maybe it was the rice and beans I'd eaten at the preschool I volunteer at on Mondays.  I told her probably not, as I've been eating that for weeks without problems and had been completely fine for three days afterward.  She then thought about what I'd eaten that day again, and decided that it was probably not one food in particular, but just that I'd eaten too much, since I'd had two slices of cornbread in the afternoon and a larger-than-normal dinner.  The first time she mentioned this theory, I politely mentioned that thought it was probably just a bacteria since I was still throwing up things like a sip of water a good twelve hours after everything from dinner had left my system.

Days later, however, she was still musing at least twice a day, "You know, when I think about it, I really think you just ate too much on Wednesday night.  Remember?  You had all that rice for lunch, then that cornbread, and a big dinner.  I think it was just too much."  I started just starting nodding and saying, "Yep, that might have been it."  Even today, she keeps reminding me not to eat too much at night so I don't throw up again.  On the one hand, hearing at that at every meal, I can't help but think of goldfish and their inability to tell when they're full.  On the other hand, it does mean, instead of giving me large, Dominican-sized servings of everything, she's been letting me serve myself, which has been nice.

Designed to kill every amoeba known to man.

8. The pharmacy.  Before we left the hospital, the doctor gave us a list of the medicines I should take and how often I should take them.  To get them, my host mom just called up our neighborhood pharmacy and read off their names and how many pills we needed.  A few minutes later, one of the pharmacy workers brought them right to our door, two of them in little boxes and one of them just as a few sheets of pills with the name stamped on the back, no list of precautions or ingredients or anything.

Prescriptions here are also used for totally different things.  They're required for lab tests of any kind - for example, if you want to get a blood test for AIDS (which I only know because it's required to use the pool at my university, don't worry!), you need to go to the doctor, tell her you want one, get a prescription authorizing it, and go to a lab.  To get any type of medicine, however, you just call up the pharmacy, tell them what you need, and get it delivered to your door.

So there you have it - that's the Dominican private emergency room experience in a nutshell.  Not horrible, but here's to hoping I can get through the next month and a half without needing to visit it again!

Gold, Ghosts, and Dysentery

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to see the (few remaining) ruins of the earliest European settlement in the Western Hemisphere.  While not much remains of them, so I don't have many pictures to show you, our program director gave us a fascinating tour that included a more detailed history of Columbus's first two voyages than I'd ever heard before...as well as many juicy details that are left out of most history books.  I will do my best to pass the most interesting parts of both onto you.

To give you a bit of background, when Columbus and his crew happened upon the New World, they first docked the Niña and the Santa María in what is now Haiti (the Pinta had somehow wandered off, and Columbus wouldn't rejoin it until he was back in Europe).  In that port, they met a friendly group of Tainos who welcomed them hospitably.  They spent a few days with them, feasting and trading, until one night Columbus's men got carried away partying.  The man who was supposed to be on watch that night on the Santa María was too drunk to stay awake, so he delegated the task to the next man, who delegated it to the next man, and so on until, finally, the 12-year-old cabin boy was left in charge of the entire ship.  Unfortunately, as the 12-year-old cabin boy had no idea what he was doing, that night the boat drifted out too far into the bay and crashed against the coral reefs below.  While the men got out okay, the ship sank. 

The next morning, the Tainos saw what had happened and immediately began to help.  They piled into their canoes and rowed out into the bay, diving down under the water and pulling everything valuable out of the wreck and back to shore.  Columbus's men were touched by their help - in his journal, Columbus wrote something along the lines of "What wonderful people!  They didn't stop fishing our things out of the water until they'd recovered every last nail." (You can even see one of the nails in the museum.)

Even so, the ship was beyond repair.  When Columbus was ready to head back to Europe, seeing as he couldn't fit all of his crew into the Niña, he left 39 of them behind with the promise that he'd be back within a year.  While Columbus did indeed make it back almost exactly a year later...the men he'd left behind didn't last that long.  In Taino culture, there were no limits on coupling up until marriage, but once a person was married, adultery was a serious offense.  Columbus's men, however, didn't catch on to that distinction fast enough.  They seduced one too many married women and, infuriated, the chief ordered that they be killed and left their bodies to rot on the beach as a warning.  When Columbus made it back, he saw the 37 decomposing bodies, realized what they meant, turned around, and started looking for another place to dock his fleet.

Picture borrowed from ericlp at Google Maps

About a hundred miles to the east, he came upon a beautiful bay, sheltered enough to protect ships from big waves and with easy access to the mountains where he believed abundant gold was be found.  The men landed, unloaded their ships, and began building.  (The picture on the right gives you an idea, but it doesn't quite do the area justice - the mountains in the background look much more impressive in person, and the colors of everything are much more vivid.) 

La Isabela, however, didn't turn out to be a great spot to live.  There was very little fresh water or good land for growing food.  Because of that, Columbus's men soon ate up more than their fair share of the neighboring Taino's stockpiles and still didn't have enough.  Men were getting dysentary rapidly and, without water to rehydrate themselves, often died.  At the same time, the groups of men who set out to explore the island quickly discovered many places with far more gold and far better access to land and food.  Within four years, the settlement was abandoned.

What followed was an archeological tragedy.  For centuries, the ruins were more or less left alone.  They began to crumble, and neighboring farmers sometimes came to use the rocks in their own houses, but the foundations and bottom parts of the walls of most of the buildings remained intact.  Then, in the 1950s, a group of German researchers sent the dictator, Trujillo, a telegram asking if they could come and excavate the site if they paid all of the costs and trained Dominicans to help them.  Trujillo sent them a note back, giving them permission, then turned to one of his generals and said, "Go clean it up."

The general, not daring to ask questions or displease Trujillo, took off.  He got to the site, looked around, saw a bunch of crumbling buildings....and cleaned them up by bulldozing them into the sea.  When the German researchers got there, there was almost nothing left.

A few decades later, another group came through and was able to recover some things, including the bottom of Columbus's house.  Here's what's there now...

The Warehouse

None of the little walls here are original, but the outer ones outline where the original walls were and those squares on the inside were built to protect the surviving parts of the foundations of the columns that once held up the roof.  This warehouse is mainly important for being the site of numerous revolts over the very few years it was used.  

Columbus's crew on his second voyage was made up almost entirely of young noblemen who were middle or youngest children hoping to make their fortunes in the New World.  In Spain, the oldest son of every family received the entire family fortune, so in order to maintain the level of luxury they'd been brought up in, younger sons of nobles had to find their own way to get rich.  When Columbus came back to Europe, telling tales of the bountiful gold he'd found in the New World, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for them to have an adventure and come back to Europe wealthy.  

The reality, however, was disappointing.  The men had been expecting huge piles of gold on the beach and natives bedecked in solid gold.  While there was gold on the island, there was not nearly as much of it as Columbus had promised and most of it was buried away in mines.  The Tainos did have gold jewelry, but they made it by stretching the tiny pieces of gold they found on the surface very thinly over other materials - they'd never done the kind of metalworking or mining that the Europeans were familiar with.

Also, since so many noblemen had wanted to go with Columbus that there had been no room for servants, the nobles found themselves being forced to do hard labor for the first time in their lives.  They were not at all happy about it, especially as they were in, you know, the Caribbean, where it is too hot and humid to even walk ten minutes to class comfortably.  To add insult to injury, Columbus - the one ordering them around - wasn't even a noble himself and, back in Spain, would have had no right to treat them that way.

Moreover, as I mentioned before, la Isabela is not a good site for finding water and food, so there were often shortages of those very basic necessities.  And, while most of the deadly cross-continental exchange of diseases didn't happen until later, there was a massive outbreak of dysentery among the crew (which was, of course, made even worse by the fact that there was very little food and water).  It was so bad that, within the first four months, one-third of the crew had died.

All in all, good conditions for a revolt.  Or five.

The Admiral's House

This was, for four years, Columbus's home.  Because it's farther away from the main section of buildings, it was also one of the few things to survive the bulldozing, and those low walls are actually originals.  (The roof, however, is just there to protect it from the elements - back in the day, it was a solid stone building.)

Here's a picture of me and some of our group instead.

Columbus had a wonderful view, and I'm really sorry I couldn't find of a picture of it.  The house was near the edge of a small cliff that dropped sharply about four feet onto a little strip of sandy beach.  While standing on the few feet of grass and shrubs between his house and the drop, Columbus could look straight to see the calm bay and the vast dark blue ocean beyond it...to his right to see lush green palm trees stretching for miles and fading into the distance...and to his left to see the hazy outlines of the mountains that he believed held the immense goldmines that would make him rich and, more importantly, make his family's name known and respected across all of Europe.  Standing there centuries later, you still imagine the sense of wonder and promise he must have felt...and then some, because you (unlike him) know how significant of a moment that was in the history of the world.

The Graveyard

As the bodies in the graveyard were, obviously, below ground, they avoided getting bulldozed into the sea.  In the 1990s, however, they were exhumed and taken to museums to be studied.  (Most of them are now, in fact, sitting in storage in Santo Domingo.)  But, as the researchers exhumed them, they took careful note of where they found them, and afterward, they put up these crosses and stone rings to mark where each one came from.

This graveyard has a creepy historical ghost story attached to it...About twenty years after la Isabela was abandoned, most of the Spainards were living down by Santo Domingo where they had found more gold, water, and food.  Different groups of men were still exploring the country, however, and one group was sent back to la Isabela to see what the site looked like, if there was anything useful still in it, that sort of thing.  This story comes from the diary of their leader, a lieutenant. 

The group, knowing the site had been abandoned years ago, expected it to be empty.  As they approached, however, they were surprised to see two lines of about ten soldiers standing on either side of the road leading up to the settlement.  They were at attention and dressed formally, although their uniforms looked strangely out-of-date.  The lieutenant called out to the men and asked them who they were.  They saluted, but said nothing.  The group got a little closer, and the lieutenant called out again.  This time, he noticed that the men's mouths were moving, but he still couldn't hear what they were saying.  He looked at his men, agreed with them that this was strange, and decided that as their leader, he should be the one to investigate.  So he got off his horse and walked on foot towards the men.

"Hello!" he greeted them.  "Who are you, and what are you doing here?"

Their mouths kept moving, but he still couldn't make out what they were saying.

"Speak up!" he demanded.  "Who are you?"

He began to hear whispers, but they were so quiet he couldn't understand them, so he asked again, "Speak up!"

Then, very gradually, the whispers grew louder...and louder...and louder, until finally the soldiers were shouting: "I am hungry!  I am hungry!  I am hungry!"  They chanted those same words at him over and over, getting louder each time.  

Finally, the lieutenant yelled back, "I can hear you!  You are hungry!"

The men stopped.  They saluted him.  And they vanished into thin air.

So, believing he had happened upon the ghosts of Columbus's crew who died of starvation and dysentery, the lieutenant ran back to his group and, I believe, left the site without even stopping to investigate it.

And, on that creepy note, I wish you all a nice weekend!

Carnaval de la Vega

Last Sunday, I went to the Carnaval in La Vega, a city about 30 minutes outside of Santiago that is widely recognized as having the best Carnaval in the DR.  To be honest, though, I personally prefer Santiago's, for two reasons.  First of all, there was very little music in La Vega's parade, which seemed to change the entire focus of it.  In Santiago, because there was music, all of the lechones and other characters in the parade went along dancing and showing off their costumes, while everyone watching them clapped and sang along.  Sure, there were a few lechones who ran around smacking people with the vejias, but most of them were too busy bopping along in the parade. 

Diablos, looking way more menacing than lechones.

In La Vega, on the other hand, there was almost no music or dancing, which meant that the parade consisted mostly of diablos running around, swinging their vejias, trying to whack as many people in the butt as possible.  (In Santiago, the Carnaval devils are called lechones; in la Vega, they're just diablos.)  It was kind of like playing tag on an elementary school playground, but more painful and with way more people being it.  To protect ourselves, we tried to keep our butts against a fence or a wall whenever possible.  Whenever we did want to move, we had to plan it out carefully - looking all around to make sure there were no diablos coming, then dashing to the next open stretch of wall or squeezing our way into the center of a moving crowd so we were protected on all sides by a layer of non-diablos.  Despite our precautions, however, we all still got whacked on multiple occasions. 

Pretty, but not Robalagallina strange

Also, while in Santiago there are dozens of different characters besides lechones, in la Vega 95% of the parade consisted of diablos.  And, while the diablos' costumes really were beautiful, they just weren't as creative as the lechones'.  It was like everyone in La Vega had gone to Target to buy their Spiderman Halloween costume with matching accessories, while everyone in Santiago, they had raided Goodwill for old shirts to turn into Simpsons costumes.  La Vega's diablos looked better and more polished, while Santiago's characters were shabbier but more interesting.

Still, all grumbling aside, La Vega's Carnaval was fun to see and did have some stunning costumes.  I'll now so you some pictures, so you can enjoy them in the best way possible - out of the heat and humidity and protected from the vejias - and you can decide for yourself which set of costumes were better.

Here is a pretty standard diablo costume.  Most of the parade looked more or less like this, although with different colors. 

Here was one of the more creative floats - a huge rolling scorpion followed by diablos that looked like Ancient Egyptian gods.

I like how there is one diablo looking creepily at the camera.  It reminds me of something out of Pan's Labyrinth. 

Snakes play far too big a part in La Vega's Carnaval.  We saw at least five people walking around with snakes wrapped around their necks, waving them far too close to people (like me) who didn't particularly want to be near them and letting braver people (like Stefanie) take pictures with them on their shoulders.  This was a small snake, but most of them were at least five or six feet long.

I'm not sure when Stefanie noticed there was a snake on her...

...but she was a good sport about it.

A group of scantily-clad quasi-Taino women...












...and the group of men that was walking alongside them, highly interested.  In their historical accuracy, I'm sure.

A deceptively cute little girl diablo.  The younger diablos tend to be the most zealous about swing around their vejias and, at the same time, to have the worst aim.  One of them whacked my hand by accident so hard I had a bruise on my knuckle for three days! 

 Some neon green diablos who look like they could glow in the dark.

 I think he was actually just asking this man to get out of his way, but it looks like he's about to eat him.

A very colorful diablo, lifting up his mask to get some fresh, relatively cool air.

I'll close with everyone's favorite type of picture: one of food!  Here are Ryshona and Miranda with their hotdogs, cooked on sticks over a charcoal grill, with ketchup, mustard, mayo, and hot sauce squeezed on at your request.