Week 11

I try to go for a walk in my village everyday. They are rather slow walks generally, the elevation rises about 1,200 feet per mile, I get stopped about 15 times on a given day and I often get caught up trying to understand cricket at the nearby field. Each time I leave I prepare myself for the unknown, maybe I’ll spend the next three hours listening to country music and drinking rum and cokes with a retired couple, maybe someone will ask me if I’m with the CIA, perhaps I will get a two hour lecture by a Jew for Jesus about how the Christians ruined the bible, you never know.

Last week two older gentleman were sitting on their porch when I walked past. They called me over to chat and mentioned they had seen me before. I tried to introduce myself when the gentleman interrupted me to tell me I was looking “good and fat” and that the “Dominican food is doing a good job of fatting me up.” I laughed uncomfortably as they continued to talk amongst themselves about how fat I had gotten since arriving in Dominica. Now every time I pass they yell out to me “you gained weight Air-een!” (Luckily I have a scale in my apartment so their “compliments” shouldn’t give me body issues.)

Today on my walk I saw two boys from Grade 6 sitting next to an abandoned shack. I stopped to talk and one jumped up and ran around the back of the shed, I asked the other, who was still sitting where he had gone. He replied, “He went to make a poop in the bushes.” Normally I would have immediately laughed, assuming this was a joke, but on Sunday during our Palm Sunday processional to the church not one, not two but three boys stopped in the middle of the processional, walked to the side of the road and started peeing, as the rest of us slowly walked by, so I was doubting my ability to understand social norms. I walked away still unsure of how much I need to avoid bushes.

There’s only one thing that I can count on to happen every time I go out for a walk, being terrified that I will be beheaded. Through out the country and especially in farming communities (like Bawi) men and boys carry huge cutlasses with them (otherwise known as machetes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutlass). The cutlasses are completely unhindered by any form of casing or conventions that would force discretion upon them. Instead they are (fill in any imaginable emotion) swung about. Whenever I’m walking I pass at least one man sitting on the side of the road with a bottle of Red Cap Rum and a huge cutlass next to him. Usually I’ll pass another man waving his cutlass and casually cutting down anything along the roadside as he passes and my favorite, the small boys carrying the cutlasses to school. There are some rules, the cutlasses get left outside while the students are in class, and I’ve never seen a Grade K student with one but certainly no metal detectors.

I don’t have a cutlass yet but it is a top priority in things I need to purchase, especially after Sunday. I asked about where to meet for the Palm Sunday processional and what to bring (someone made the joke to me that every Sunday in the Caribbean is Palm Sunday which I tried at the Catholic Youth Rally and it failed big time). I was told to “walk with my knife.” So I left for mass on Sunday in my church clothes carrying a swiss army knife. I was laughed off the block trying to cut a palm with it.

Check in next week for Holy Week updates!