Week You Can't Hide in a One Road Village

Joining the Peace Corps holds the promise of learning life lessons while experiencing a new culture in complete immersion. On billboards these lessons look like solving the youth of Africa’s problems while herding goats in your Teva’s. My life lesson billboard would be me hiding in my bedroom holding a cell phone with a look of serious analysis.

I’ve always had a big problem with social procrastination. Why answer your phone today when you could wait until tomorrow and avoid the invitation? In big cities this has some repercussions, showing up at a bar talking on your phone and running into someone you have been avoiding calls from, and I believe the amount of times things like this happened to me was statistically significantly high, but never enough to force me to answer my phone. I would rather write “Call Bill” on my to-do list everyday for weeks than pick up a phone call when I didn’t know what I was going to be asked.

My one road village (there are technically 4 roads but they all merge to become one before reaching my apartment) is teaching me the problems of my ways early and often. You can hear my phone ring inside my apartment from the road. Everyone driving or walking past can see if any lights in my apartment are on. Walking down the road I meet about 80% (all of the statistics in this post were created sans data based exclusively on feelings) of the people whose phone calls I have ignored. Even if said person lives in another village. If you don’t meet the person you meet his/her grandmother, cousin, or sister’s baby daddy who inquires about why I am not answering my phone.

I’m finally learning the lesson that the world has been teaching me over and over again; just answer the phone. Dominica adds a special incentive to the mix because only the caller is charged on cell phone calls. If I don’t pick up my phone (during the several calls in a row) then I have to spend money to call back (religious stereotype jokes should be sent directly to my email).

It’s still hard for me to pick up the phone when I don’t recognize the phone number or when I’m enjoying the British Law & Order, which is on all the time here, but I am getting better at it and spend less time staring at my cell phone debating whether to answer it. Knowing that I will see the person before the day is over and the questions/reasons for calling are never as dire as my imagination leads me to believe has done wonders for overcoming this hurtle.

Also I’m much better at killing mosquitoes.

Sundry:

I was walking with two Grade 1 girls today when one of the girls told me that their teacher told them not to make fun of people because G-d doesn’t like it. The other girl said, “She said don’t tease people with HIV which is good because I have never done that.”

I was shopping in town at a variety store, there are many of these new stores that are owned by Chinese immigrants and called “Chiney shops” by the Dominicans, when I found a display of Tim Hortons mugs on sale. (See below) I now own two Tim Hortons mugs. (For those of you not in the know- Tim Hortons is the best doughnut/coffee shop that originated in Western New York/Southern Ontario, about 70% of my teenage memories involve a Tim Hortons.)

These are pictures from Scottshead, the southern tip of the island where the Caribbean meets the Atlantic. How amazing?

Week 16

Just in case there is a 2011 Buffalo Bills season I made sure to turn my Bills Backers International Chapter Registration Form now that I have an enthusiastic member list full of die-hard Buffalo Bills fans.

We’ve been working hard at our Buffalo Bills spirit. Thus far we’re having a little trouble with “the Bills make me want to shout” which comes out more as “da bills” and with a calypso beat (the calypso beat is probably my fault as singing was never my forte). But we’re doing great with “yous guys”, “Squish the Fish”, and “We’re not scared of the Patriots, Tom Brady has long girly hair!”

My hopefully soon-to-be (when I get up the nerve to ask him) mentor was singing “A few of my favorite things” while cooking the other day. It made me think of some of my favorite Dominican things:

1. There is a bar right next to my bus stop in town. Sometimes while waiting in the bus for it to fill up someone on the bus will offer to buy the bus driver a beer. The bus driver usually accepts the offer.

2. Dominicans don’t use voicemail. They answer their phones all the time. If you are leading a meeting and in the middle of a sentence your phone rings you answer your phone and say “I’m in a meeting, can I call you back” and continue on. If you don’t answer your phone and it is important the caller keeps calling until you answer your phone (sometimes he/she keeps calling even when it is not important). When I’m in the shower I always know if it is another Peace Corps because he/she only calls once.

3. Lots of trucks have writing on the front windshield. My favorite one in Salisbury says, “Bad names don’t kill rats.” Your guess is as good as mine.

4. There is a big difference between a store and a shop. A shop sells food, booze and toilet paper a store sells anything else. This lead to grave confusion when I wrote that my address was above Ma Clem’s store, Upper Salisbury; there are no stores in Upper Salisbury, only shops.

5. I spent this morning making fresh passion fruit juice and peeling sugar cane to make homemade mints.

6. Guys ask me where I live all the time. Because of “Stranger Danger” (a curriculum in elementary school that taught us not to wear clothing with our names on it because then a bad stranger would call us by our name and we would be confused about whether we knew this person and would get into a scary van with him/her and end up with our face on a milk carton) I try to be coy and say “Upper Salisbury” instead of my exact location. They usually respond with “Upstairs from Ma Clem’s shop, right?” Then the gentleman will probably ask, “Do you live alone?” I’m never sure what to say- he clearly already knows, as he knows exactly where I live, but the last time I answered that “I live alone” the guy told me to not tell anyone that because they will get the wrong idea. Stranger Danger did not prepare me for the Peace Corps.

I don’t know quite how I would fit those into a song but perhaps during the rainy season I’ll get a chance to work on it.

All my best!

Erin

P.S. For those of you who know John Sozanski- this Thursday I will be conducting a class on table manners for the Beauty Pageant contestants. I will be immortalizing Mr. Sozanski’s “elbows off the table”, “sit up straight”, “don’t talk with your mouth full” in Dominica. I’m not sure how to approach the rules about answering your phone at the dinner table (never ever do it) and answering your phone “Sozanski residence, Erin speaking.”

Week 15

This past week taught me that I am a Democrat. I’ve always suspected this, and taken many online quizzes to confirm it, but last Friday it was substantiated.

There are two cell phone companies in Dominica: Lime and Digicel. When I arrived here all the older volunteers had Lime phones with free Lime-to-Lime calling so I also bought a Lime phone and purchased the same plan. Most plans are prepaid here and adding money to your account is called topping up. You can top up in most stores or with someone in your village who has a top up phone. The problem with topping up is that you have no idea what things actually cost. At no point do you see an itemized bill. Short of calling customer service after each call or text there is no way of knowing what services cost (some prices are published online but in a fairly inaccessible location).

Most people in my village either have two phones, both a Lime phone and a Digicel phone or just a Digicel phone. I was told that it is expensive to call from a Lime phone to a Digicel phone and vice versa but I assumed that because I can barely understand what people are saying on the phone I would probably not be talking that much.

Well I’ve made friends now and consequently I used a $30EC top up (the majority of my phone budget for the month) in about 2 days.* So I got myself onto the interwebs to find out how this was possible. It costs 80 cents a minute to call from a Lime phone to a Digicel phone (this is all within Dominica). It costs 90 cents a minute to call the US (and on Digicel after 5 minutes of calling the US the rest of the call is free). Most of Digicel’s rates are not published anywhere. So on Friday I went to purchase a Digicel phone in addition to the Lime phone I own. I now walk around with two almost identical phones. Before I take anyone’s number I find out what kind of phone he/she has and which phone he/she generally tops up more so I can determine which phone to save his/her phone number in. For some people I have a different number in each phone for him/her. Does this sound ridiculous? It is.

I assume that this is a failed attempt at gaining a monopoly. It’s not working. Riding back from town with my second phone I was vexed. This is when I decided that I like big government. Regulate everything.**

Integration news: Last night my host sister spent the night at my apartment***. I went to bed at 10:30 and let her stay up late (she’s 12-years-old) watching TV. At around 11:30 she woke me up in a panic because someone was knocking at my door. I yelled through the door to find out who was waking me up. It was a guy (Matthew) who had come to sell me vegetables before: was this a vegetable selling emergency? Apparently he desperately wanted to sell me some provisions. I didn’t open the door. When I told my landlady’s grandson about this he responded that people will think we are involved if he comes by that late; it is apparently irrelevant that he is about 30 years my senior, maybe homeless and has a very partial set of teeth. On my walk this evening I handled the situation, like a Dominican. I was talking to a young man when Matthew passed. I yelled at him to “come awhile” and then asked if it was him “passing minutes to 12 selling me dasheen, for true?” Then I told him not to “check me past dark again."

Happy Bay to Breakers to everyone from SF! Happy Graduation to everyone graduating! And happy good news to those who shared some exciting news this week!

*When you run out of top up the call gets cut off and the caller is notified that there is an insufficient balance but the receiver just gets hung up on.

**As previously stated this does not represent the view of the Peace Corps. They are not vexed. Just I am.

***As usual I had not understood our conversation and did not know she was planning on spending the night until I saw her wrapping her toothbrush up in aluminum foil.

Hanging out on a banana farm in Calibishie. I'll take you there.

Week 14

Last week I was tutoring the little boy on the left. He was drawing a picture of his Easter vacation with some crayons I had taken out of the free box at the Peace Corps office. As he was getting ready to leave he asked me in a tiny voice, reminiscent of Oliver Twist, "Miss, can I have three crayons?" My heart broke.

What Dominicans have, cabbage, plaintains, mangoes, papaya, peppers, soursop, grapefruits, they are incredibly generous with. I’ve had fresh produce brought to me every day since I moved in on my own. (quick side note: Black and yellow bugs the size of my pinkie have moved into my apartment. I’ve already killed two of them and I saw a third tonight. I knocked it off my curtain and hit it about a dozen times with my shoe and left it on the floor to go finish cooking. I came back to write some more and saw another one on my wall. I looked down and realized that it was the same one I just killed. It survived my brutal force and climbed back up the wall. I got up to kill it again and hit it another dozen or so times and now I am watching it slowly come back to life. I think I’m just going to let it live and tell all the children there is a demon bug living in my apartment.) But they are caught in rift between having access to American technology and therefore being subject to American commercials while imports from America are prohibitively costly to most Dominicans. Many of the things they want I think they are better off without, although I haven’t figured out a way to explain this to kids; its like telling 13-year-olds that they will appreciate their time spent in Israeli Dance class when they are older. Kids should have an inalienable right to things like crayons, books, paper, pencils, and glitter glue though. When kids ask for these things it breaks my heart that I can’t shower them in art supplies and stories. (There is one bookstore on the island and it doesn’t sell children’s books at all. There are no craft stores.) I realize that what I actually want is for them to know that they can make beautiful things, that they are important and deserve everything they want and hopefully I can do that without importing an arts and crafts store.

Tonight was my first English Language class for adult Haitian immigrants (the tutoring program for the children I started during training is going very well). I was terrified to begin. When my mom reminded me that in the US you need a Master’s Degree to teach ELL with text books and classes capped at 20 students my chalkboard in front of 50 students who range from entirely illiterate to fluent in Spanish and Creole, and training as a Sunday School teacher in 1999 seemed menacing. (There is another bug now on what appears to be on a very loud kamikaze mission targeted at my light.) The class turned out to be fantastic. The pastor who asked me to start the class and my host mom helped and together we taught introductions (“My name is ___”, “It’s nice to meet you”, etc) and the alphabet. I had the students do some role playing and I couldn’t get them to leave after class ended because they all wanted to continue the practicing their introductions. I felt like an ugly American though because not 5 weeks ago I was complaining about having to perform role plays in Creole class which was taught by the premier Creole teacher in Dominica to 10 of us with text books and an Ipod app. Their energy inspired me so much that I agreed to teach a second night a week (I have no idea how to fit this in with my actual Peace Corps assignment but I assume the government can’t get mad at me for teaching a group of people who are discriminated against in a developing nation to speak English). On Wednesday we are going to begin learning questions which should be entertaining as a lot of the Dominicans don’t raise their voice at the end of questions, I wonder if Haitians do?

(This post took me almost 30 minutes to write and the bug is still moving. He seems to be gaining strength.)

The students lined up for Big Sports Day outside the school in their sports uniforms.

Week 13

The Peace Corps’ three goals are: Helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women, Helping promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served*, Helping promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

I have one additional, personal goal: fame. My aspiration is that any white person who enters my village will be asked if he/she knows me and then directed to my home. This week I surpassed my goal.

I was already well on my way; whenever Peace Corps volunteers come to visit people stop them and ask them if they are going to see Miss Air-een and a couple weeks ago I watched a group of Grade 6 boys stop a European couple hiking up the road to inquire if they knew Miss Air-een. The couple, obviously befuddled, tried to ask who Miss Air-een is which ended in complete confusion.

My omnipresence reached a high this week though. I ran into a 7-year-old boy, one of my closest friends here, with his grandmother one afternoon and she started telling me about how Shael is “not easy”**. When his grandmother took him to the capital city that morning, where all the cruise ships dock, Shael stopped white people at the bank, at the cell phone store, on the street and in the grocery store to ask people if they are friends with Miss Air-een. One of the people was in fact a Peace Corps. Hopefully this provided the right amount of positive feedback for Shael to approach every white person anywhere to ask if he/she is my friend.

On Wednesday I was asked to deliver the “thank you remarks” for our Media Launch and to be interviewed about my thoughts on Salisbury’s 2011 Reunion. Dominica is rather formal in regard to public speaking; every person of rank, title or distinction needs to be acknowledged at the beginning of each speech. My thank you remarks paled in comparison to the list of people I had to acknowledge for being present. Both segments were aired on the news stations here and all around the island people have stopped me to tell me they saw me on the news.

I’ve been helping at the “Jams” my organization puts on for the last two weekends. As the bar is much too scary for me, it involves a lot of marriage proposals, some screaming and an uncertainty for alcohol serving laws in Dominica, I tend to stay in the food area. I’ve taken to frying bakes, a small fried bread that is absolutely delicious. I have two mentors that have taught me well how to pull and fry a bake. This weekend my counterpart came to tell my mentors and me that while riding on the bus He overheard a long conversation about how the white girl can really fry a bake and then a discussion on my approach and form complete with miming how I pull a bake.

Hopefully when you come to visit you’ll be asked if you know Miss Air-een before you even land in Dominica.

For true,

Erin

*This blog is my goal two.

** I’m still not exactly sure what “not easy” means.