July 9, 2005 Saturday

News from the barrio came in sketchily while I was away working in Massachusetts. Two of our plastic chairs disappeared from the galleria but Altagracia found one of them in front of a neighbor’s house and stole it back. Later that week Jhoanglish spotted the other one through an open door in the same house and when he went in to get it he got in a fight with the lady of the house and had to leave scratched up and empty handed. Since early May Jhoanglish has not worked. Herman, the snakey tiguere, finally shot and killed someone, I don’t know who, in a drug dispute and is on the run from the cops. Loma de Chivo is a little hotter in general and there have been several general busts by teams of police in SUVs and one often hears that the brother of so and so or the boyfriend of so and so has been locked up.

Chavela passed, or at least did not flame out as she put it, her final exams and Niningo has just finished taking the five day series of exams called the Nationals and is waiting for his scores to be posted on the internet and thinks he did well. The two of them are now getting ready to visit their grandmother in Elias Piña for a couple of weeks of vacation and to be with their dozens of cousins.

Kiki, as predicted, moved back into the marquisina a week or so after my departure in the Spring and has been in several disputes over drugs since. About three weeks ago he flipped out on cocaine and smashed the few remaining unbroken items that were breakable in the marquisina including Altagracia’s collection of little drawings and prints of various saints that she had arranged on a table for when she read taza. He punched out the glass in the ones that were framed and then begged Altagracia to look for money to take him to a hospital for his bleeding knuckles but she saw through the ruse; that is, once he saw money he would take it for drugs. He then took the pictures of the saints out to the patio and burned them; the scorch marks can still be seen low on the garden wall. Altagracia finally called the police and when they showed up Kiki took off running and she has not let him back since even when she heard that he often slept on the street and was losing even more weight. On my third day back he showed up around 10 in the morning with a big smile, eager to greet me (smelling money) but Altagracia stayed tough and told him to leave. He hung around outside for about an hour and then left. Jhoanglish says that Kiki occasionally earns 600 pesos a day as a diesel mechanic but drinks 500 of them.

Elias Piña

Since I can only be here for one week before having to return to work in the States, Altagracia took an unprecedented two days off in a row and on the first, Wednesday, we went to Elias Piña to visit her mother, Anna, to bring her some money and some snapshots from the rezo and one of Amado and Altagracia before his death. Anna became momentarily confused when she saw that picture saying that he looked like he was still alive and then cried when the photo was explained to her-- but other than that she seemed happy and relieved and, after all, she had only come back to him after their separation because he was sick with the thrombosis. While Altagracia and I wandered around the neighborhood greeting friend after friend and neighbor after neighbor we occasionally saw Anna in nearby patios doing the same thing and when we bumped into her walking along the dirt road she was striding along faster than we were walking. I had sort of figured that Anna was in her upper 70s but after some more figuring we decided that she must be only 53. Anna cooked chicken and made mangú (plantains mashed with oil, garlic and onion) for our lunch and we left after coffee to catch the last guagua back to the capital.

Pipina, one of Altagracia’s sisters has separated from Isidro. Isidro has been our main telephone contact in Elias Piña because he has a working cell phone and when Altagracia needs to speak with Anna we call Isidro and he goes and finds Anna and we then call him back and he hands her the phone. The grounds of the separation are murky. Isidro had been having their children taste his food before he ate because he suspected Pipina of trying to poison him. Pipina claimed that Isidro never gave her any money to buy food. Isidro says that Pipina has another man but Pipina says she doesn’t. The flares of Isidro’s nostrils were both dark red,as though densely colorede with red lipstick, with burst capillaries which he said was from a recent fever.

Altagracia owns a little house nestled within her family’s compound. It has three rooms separated by six foot tall partitions and is built of wood with a galvanized metal roof and is surrounded by a short wall about three courses high of cement blocks which eventually will be raised to enclose the wood house which would then be torn down and Kiki and Jhoanglish could be moved into it. On a visit last year we found that the tenants had not paid anybody any rent for 10 months and so Altagracia promptly burst in through the flimsy door and evicted the couple and the bachelor living there. She whipped the blanket off the sleeping man and pulled him out of bed and pushed him out the door. Weeks later when she found out that they never finished moving out she went back and completed the eviction process by tearing off the pieces of roof that had been over their beds. Now there are new tenants who don’t pay rent and the old ones have moved into an outbuilding in the same yard that is no bigger than 6 feet by 8 feet. When Altagracia heard this she only shrugged.

Nobody disputes that, at the moment, the little house belongs to Altagracia although the papers, somehow, are in the name of her deceased ex husband, Luis. We went to the house of the cousin who was storing the papers and helped her look for them by emptying out old pocket books and gym bags and paper sacks full of bank receipts, cancelled checks, scraps of paper with phone numbers written on them, grocery store and lumber yard receipts, old belts, socks and baseball hats. The cousin says that she will keep looking. Altagracia is afraid that if the papers fall into the hands of any of Luis’s other 31 children they might be able to steal the land and the little house although she claims that the laws of inheritance here state that only the youngest children inherit property and Luis’s youngest are Altagracia’s.

Bad Toe

About a week ago Altagracia tripped and fell on the stairs leading to the second floor of the pensión and stubbed her big toe badly although we do not think the bone is broken. It hurts so much that she wore flip flops to walk to Hipermercado Olé instead of the stylish, strapped, medium height heels she usually wears everwhere in public but which really hurt her toe. When she comes home from work we wind a handkerchief around the toe and I put her foot in my lap and pull on the ends of the handkerchief, hard, to reduce the swelling and you can see that it hurts so much that her fingernails are digging into the hard plastic chair seat where she is sitting but she never stops smiling although she cannot quite talk because of the pain. Afterwards she wiggles the toe and says it feels much better.

November 11, 2005

In August Altagracia and I returned to Elias Piña to try to finally resolve the paperwork for her house and land there by buying it again. We went to see Isidro, who, it turns out, is the Alcalde for that sector of the the town which is like a town clerk with some mayoral powers. The three of us sat down at Isidro’s kitchen table, he got out a blank unlined piece of paper and with a ballpoint pen drew up a purchase and sale agreement that included Altagracia and I as joint buyers of the property and listed the sellers as Altagracia’s dead ex-husband as well as the previous owner, just for good measure. Isidro was able to include everbody’s cedula numbers, which are supposed to be confidential in the same way as Social Security numbers, since he has all the town records at his disposal and so when we finally found the previous owner after traipsing through several muddy cornfields he signed the document for only 100 pesos. I understand that we could apply for an actual title to the property with this scrawled contract but hardly anyone does this in this small poor village that sits on the Haitian border where the land is not worth very much.

After closing our real estate deal we went to visit Altagracia’s mother, Anna, and to check on the property we had just purchased. When we went into Altagracia’s little house she noticed that one of the doors between two rooms was missing-- and she remembered the door well because it had taken her two months to save up the money to buy it years ago-- and some lumber that had been stored up on the collar ties was gone too but that didn’t bother her so much because you expect people to steal lumber but not a door from the inside of a house. She interrogated Anna and Momona and a passing brother or two but they all just shook their heads in bewilderment saying that they had not borrowed the door and did not even know it was missing. As the time approached to start walking to catch the last guagua for the grueling cramped four hour ride back to Villa Mella we walked back through the neighborhood-- all the time greeting old friends and neighbors and nieces and nephews and aunts and uncles of Altagracia-- and as we passed the house where Altagracia’s sister Pipina (still separated from Isidro) was living we saw Pipina outside taking laundry in off the line before it rained and so we went over to chat and Altagracia asked Pipina if she knew where her door was and Pipina said she had no idea and it started to rain so we went inside and as Altagracia pulled the door closed behind her she seemed to recognize the knob and looked more closely and saw that it was her door and looked at Pipina with a stare that might have seared her liver and I didn’t have to hold her back although I was ready to and as her voice raised more and more the veins in her neck stood out more and more and her eyes got bigger and bigger and I thought she might have a seizure and Pipina just shrank back into a corner protesting her innocence, although weakly, and a few passersbys collected outside the other door which was still open although it was raining hard now with rumbles of thunder in the distance and Altagracia gripped her umbrella so hard that she drove one of the spines into her hand and a thin trickle of blood ran down her wrist and I finally guided her out the door and through the rubberneckers and as we started down the road she still turned back yelling what she thought of sisters who steal from sisters and she whipped a couple of stones Pipina’s way who was now standing in the open doorway, but after she was out of range and the stones only one-hopped or rolled up to the house.

Altagracia slept on my shoulder most of the way home on the guagua and when we got off to buy some fried chicken at the rest stop at Ochoa she sleepily explained that when people stole doors it really made her mad.

Kiki’s House

In the middle of the summer Kiki landed in the prision at Najayo. I scarcely believe any of the story of what happened but here it is-- Kiki was reportedly walking to work to shovel sand in Haina with a young man who was wearing a suit and tie who went into a bank to cash a check, which was evidently so old and worn that Columbus’s signature on it would not have been surprising but the bank held the two of them until the police came. Somehow a car with four other men in it, one of whom was Lao, was waiting for them outside but drove away before the cops arrived. The mother of the man in the suit paid for his release that same night but Altagracia elected to let Kiki stay in for a while in an effort to teach him a lesson even though he happened to be in the same prison where the murderer of his father was being held, having finally been sentenced to only five years-- either because of an influential uncle or because the judge figured that the real payback would come after his release from some of Luis’s 35 angry offspring many of whom had attended the short trial. Altagracia brought food to Kiki once and Chavela and Niningo brought food once but neither of the women went in to see him because the precautionary frisking reportedly included “lifting the skirts“ as Altagracia delicately put it and not by female guards either and Niningo did not go in because he could not have cared less how Kiki was faring. After about two weeks Altagracia’s mother’s guilt became unbearable and she paid one of the lawyers who hang around outside the prison to spring Kiki and he did and after spending a few days recuperating in the marquisina wandered back to Pizarette to stay with Fermin at times and with an uncle at times.

A couple of weeks before my second visit of the summer word reached Altagracia that Kiki had picked out a little parcel of land on a mountain in Pizarette that had been his father’s and was now in disuse although assumed to be in the control of some assortment of the 31 other siblings, cleared it and begun to build a little shack to live in. He beseeched Altagracia for money to buy sheets of galvanized metal for the roof, which are simply called zinc here, and a door but she held off until I arrived and until we could see for ourselves that there were indeed the beginnings of something being built.

We got off the guagua at the turnoff for Pizarette and then hired two motorbikes to take us the rest of the way to Kiki’s house. We motored through the town and past all the colmados and hair salons and fingernail parlours and the kiosks that sell lotery tickets and fruit venders with Altagracia constantly waving and blowing kisses to old friends along the way and then we left the village and wound our way down dusty potholed roads through sugar cane fields and then turned through a barway and picked our way up a cowpath occasionally hopping off the backs of the motorbikes to walk the rougher stretches.

Kiki’s land was clear and high with a view of a wide rolling valley that went on for miles. He had built a framework of eight posts sunk in the ground and tied them together at the tops with more long poles nailed through at half lapped joints and the structure appeared ready for rafters. His mattress was folded up under a sheet of rusty zinc on the ground and the ashes from the cooking fire were still warm although Kiki, who had been supposed to meet us, was nowhere to be seen. The conchistas lit cigarettes and went to pee in the bushes and I took a few pictures and Altagracia walked around slowly with her hands on her hips saying how there was no water here, and no electricity and no neighbors nearby. But we agreed that it did seem to be the start of something positive and how else were we going to get him out of Villa Mella and so we got back on the motorbikes and had them take us back into town to a trusted ferreteria or lumberyard.

The ferreteria was closed when we got there but one of the conchistas went around back and got the owner to let us in and we sat at his kitchen table as he made out the receipt for five pounds of nails, 20 sheets of zinc and some lumber for rafters and he nodded knowingly when we told him where the materiales were to be delivered and that Kiki was to exchange none of them for cash.

When we got back home we found Kiki drunk on rum in front of the house having spent all the money I had given him for bus fare to meet us in Pizarette and so I did not let him sleep in the marquisina that night and I don’t know how he got back to Pizarette but he did and we got word the next day that he was elated with the building materiales.

Some weeks later, when I was back in Massachusetts working, Kiki informed Altagracia that about 10 sheets of zinc that were nailed onto the house had been stolen. This sounded fishy because even here few people steal zinc that is full of nail holes but we figured that it might have been stolen by some of his half brothers who did not like him living there but Altagracia arranged for more zinc to be delivered as before, as well as for a trusted carpenter to see that it got nailed on. So when I arrived last week we were thinking of going back for another visit to Kiki’s mountain to see what was left of the house but then Uncle Ramoncito called Altagracia at the Pensión to tell her that that morning when he was on his way to work earlier than usual he saw three men tearing zinc off of Kiki’s roof and he was certain that one of the men was Kiki himself.

That very same afternoon Altagracia, without precedent or reason, left work an hour early. She got off the guagua at the blue water tank at about three in the afternoon when rush hour traffic is just picking up and when that intersection is crowded with food venders and conchistas looking for fares and carros publicos letting passengers off and picking up new ones and she started walking toward home but, for no apparent reason, paused to look back at the intersection and happened to see Kiki, who now sports earrings in both ears and has diagonal stripes shaved in his eyebrows, just getting into a carro publico with a friend carrying a small package. She sprinted to the car and grabbed him by his belt before the car door closed and hauled him, dumbfounded, into the street and, yelling so hard her nose started bleeding, told him that she knew all about him selling the roof of zinc off his own house and that he was no son of hers and that he could drop dead right there for all she cared. He wrested himself away and dove back into the open car and it took off leaving Altagracia steaming on the sidewalk surrounded by a small circle of sympathetic onlookers. Kiki must believe that she learned about the zinc and then caught him at the busstop by supernatural means, sundering his perfect plan to eternally sell zinc as fast as we could replace it by day and as fast as he could strip it from his own roof by night and when it rained I suppose he reckoned ot be too full of rum and cocaine to care.

Jhoanglish Works

During the summer while I was away Jhoanglish was hired by a series of employers all of which, unfortunately for Jhoanglish, had instituted mandatory drug testing and so Jhoanglish was dismissed seriatim. By the time I arrived however Jhoanglish had somehow not smoked marijuana for two months and was hired as a fireman or bombero at the station where Avenida Mella connects with Parque Independencia where a cousin of his is one of the officers. I gather that he mostly guards doorways, washes the trucks and does errands but there is the possibility of more training. He works 24 hour shifts and so is not in the house much but, when he is, has been very pleasant to be around, does his own laundry and even mopped the floor once. He has been a bombero for about two weeks and will get his first paycheck next week and we will see after that whether he will stick to it.

November 12 or 13, 2005

Shooting

I have been back for two weeks and my street the Loma de Chivo is very quiet. It has been months since the shooting.

I was here in July when it happened. Although it was a warm evening we all happened to be inside; Chavela was blow drying and putting rollers in Altagracia’s hair, Niningo and I were watching baseball on television and Jhoanglish was in the kitchen standing in front of the open refrigerator when about 5 shots were fired right outside the house and because of the echo of the concrete walls I could feel the shots in my chest like the impact of loud fireworks and a few seconds later from slightly farther up the street came 3 or 4 more shots. We all rushed to the door but then all kept one another from going out onto the galleria until a few moments of silence had passed and then we heard wailing from the little evangelical meeting house up on the corner beyond La Rubia’s house and there was the sound of running footsteps and when they receded we went out on the galleria and the crying from the meeting house continued. A motorbike with a passemger carrying a child sped away.

A group of tigueres had gone to the Club de Billar, or billiard parlour, at the colmado next door looking for Herman, the snakey tiguere, because he had recently shot and killed one of their gang while he was dozing in a plastic chair in front of his mother’s house and when they did not find him they began shooting up and down the street. The meeting house, which is only three doors up, was packed with people who all immediately dove to the floor except for one six year old boy who stood up to run to his mother and was shot in the chest. Although the motorbike that took him to the hospital was going fast the blood spatters down the street were the size of saucers and were no more than six feet apart and he died before they made it and the street stayed blood-stained until the next hard rain.

Some of the tigueres had been recognized and although they could not be found right away two of their mothers were jailed by the police to try to lure them in and eventually all, or almost all, were arrested. The boy who was killed happened to be an only child whose father was a lieutenant in the police force and whose mother was a member of the National Guard and so the area has been patrolled much more than before and Herman has only been seen a few times here and not at all in the past month and is reported to be hiding in Guaricano, a neighboring barrio several miles away.

November 19th, 2005 Saturday

Avenida Bolivar is a respectable, heavily trafficked, tree lined street in Gascue which is where the pensión is where Altagracia works. The other morning while I was walking down Bolivar a tree limb 8 inches in diameter broke and the heavy butt end hit the sidewalk hard about 20 feet in front of me. I had to step out onto the street because the branches made the sidewalk impassable and a woman coming in the other direction had to do the same. I said to her in Spanish-- Wow, did you see that? and she, having picked up on my accent answered in English-- We are going to be lucky all the rest of the day now, that could have killed us! Anthony Richards, the old man who lives on the corner, as well as Jhoanglish, tell me that the branch fell because of the full moon and that it is common for large, healthy tree limbs to break off during full moons.

Kiki arrived suddenly last week and spent one night in the marquisina and Altagracia gave him bus fare to get him to Elias Piña to stay with Anna, his grandmother, and he left very early in the morning, because now he cannot live in Pizarette anymore because of Bebeleche and his gang. Bebeleche and his woman used to live next door to Altagracia when she lived in Pizarete with Luis and the four kids and there has been bad blood between Kiki and Bebeleche for years ever since Bebeleche’s woman fell briefly in love with Kiki and it was Bebeleche who shot Kiki in the face with a shotgun while Kiki was using a public phone in a colmado. Bebeleche is called Bebeleche, which means milk drinker, because he is crazy and when he doesn’t take his medication he attacks people, with or without provocation. So, last week Bebeleche and two friends ambushed Kiki on the road near his little house but Kiki was carrying a machete and cut Bebeleche’s cousin Sordín’s arm badly and somehow hit Bebeleche in the head with the handle of the machete and escaped running. Altagracia knows that tigueres might kill Kiki someday but she says that they will have to get him from behind or while he is sleeping to do it because he is just too ready, too strong and too fast otherwise. Elias Piña, being on the Haitian border, is full of border guards and various other military and police types and Altagracia realizes that Kiki will get locked up from time to time simply because he is new in town and also because it is nearly impossible to live in Elias Piña without smuggling something across the border either advertantly or inadvertantly even if it is only a pair of jeans or a couple of pounds of habichuelas, but that that is better than getting killed in Pizarette. Kiki did indeed arrive at Anna’s house and we sent her $15 by Western Union to pay for board.

November, 22 Tuesday

Self Defense include bottle fight, luis death? 1300 words as is

After witnessing a knife and bottle fight in front of the house and the shooting at the Evangelical Meeting house and after the house across the street was robbed (even though we think the burglar was Natty since he is familiar with the house having spent much time there sleeping with the wife of one of the tenants) I spent more time thinking about self defense. Many many people here in Santo Domingo carry some kind of weapon. Men with shirts untucked may have a pistol or knife concealed in their waistband and many of the early morning walkers that Altagracia and I see on our way to the bus stop at the blue water tank carry short clubs or broken broomsticks. Altagracia herself used to keep a big hat pin in her purse and during the holiday season last year I kept a pocket size canister of pepper spray with me until I finally turned it on myself out of curiosity one night while safely seated on the sofa and was disappointed, in a way, to find that it only broadcast a weak sputter of spicy juice potentially effective at a range of up to four inches.

Luis, Altagracia’s ex-husband, who was clubbed to death last year by a burglar, almost always owned a pistol handled shot gun and she suggests to me from time to time, after noting that if he still had had one that he might still be alive today, that I buy a gun for the house but I have resisted partly because of the cost which, including license and tips, comes to about $1000 but there is also the problem of publicity. If the local tigueres do not know that I am armed the probability of the house being broken into or me being attacked on the street is no lower than before and if they do suspect that I have a gun they would be more likely to break in or jump me to steal my gun and that is not what I want. I want to prevent these things.

Last summer when I was in the States, where mail order exists, I did purchase some weapons. The first were saps or palitos de plomo (lead sticks) as we call them here and which are composed of a lozenge shaped slab of lead attached to a flat spring steel handle covered with thick stiff black leather and are approximately pocket sized and I suppose they could be swung either the flat way or edgewise and cost less than $20 each. The first sap I ever recall noticing was being satisfyingly hefted by a beefy Irish policemen in a Bugs Bunny cartoon but saps also came recommended by a character in one of the Travis McGee private detective novels I read last year and by Nick Nolte in the movie Mulholland Falls where he wields his worn, breast pocket sized sap with such finesse that with just a gentle tap he can put the perpetrator to sleep instantly and seemingly painlessly until he awakes later with a pounding headache-- of course it could be applied more energetically. I bought a six ounce sap and a ten ounce sap, both with wrist straps which were advertised as providing “improved retention” and for about a week I kept the little one in my pocket on our daily walks to the water tank but I kept imagining a ladron picking my pocket and laying the thing up against the base of my own skull and how I might not survive even the embarrassment much less the concussion.

The other weapon I bought was an extendible police baton which, when collapsed, is the size of a slender pocket flashlight but which telescopes out to a length of 20 inches with a flick of the wrist and is made of aircraft aluminum and has a weighted knob on the far end. The baton opens with three quick, beautifully authoritative, metallic clicks and a ladron, hearing this sound after entering a dark house might even be tempted to back out the way he came in because it sounds like a pistol being cocked. When I had asked the police supply company which model they recommended-- there are many available-- they were concerned about someone without special training buying such a baton because it is considered a weapon of deadly force but it seems to me to be on a par with the two foot piece of 5/8 inch diameter iron re-rod that I could likely find myself up against so I ordered it anyway although it cost almost $50.

We have been attacked once, it was last year, and now, looking back, I could almost have predicted it. Altagracia and I had mistakenly dismounted from the guagua one stop too soon while going to Duarte, the hectic shopping district known for thievery, and so had to walk down a side street that was nearly deserted. Altagracia had forgotten to remove her cheap goldfil necklace. I had a head cold and was pulling a small piece of wheeled luggage with my left arm while Altagracia was on my right arm and we were walking uncertainly not being exactly sure we were going the right way. When I reached into a back pocket for my handkerchief a figure suddenly grabbed Altagracia from behind and tore the chain from her neck and released her by shoving her hard against me and then sprinted back for the corner. I dropped the suitcase and started after him although he was running like a punt returner and heard Altagracia yell-- ¡DANNY, QUÉ NO!-- and when I looked back I saw her standing in the middle of the street clutching her throat where her chain had been and the suitcase on its side where I had dropped it in the road and there were a couple of hyenas watching from doorways and so I turned back and we moved on. I had had just a glimpse of his crazed darkly stubbled face over her shoulder and he left a deep fingernail scrape on her neck that she washed and washed and washed when we got back home.

But, while I somehow enjoy having them, I now leave my two sleek black saps and my shiny extendible baton in its holster under our mattress and only Altagracia and Nininngo know where they are, or even that they exist, because, it seems to me after all that the best self defense is attitude and behavior. I walk the streets with a brisk but unhurried, purposeful, athletic stride and I am conscious of how I make eye contact with strangers. I keep what cash I might need in my shirt pocket so I do not have to take out my wallet in public and I do not wear my cell phone on my belt. My peripheral vision has improved and I listen for footsteps approaching too fast from behind, particularly at an angle. If a tiguere-type seems to be thinking of approaching, a relaxed smile and a casual acknowledgment shows that I am aware and not nervous or afraid. I could never have reacted quickly enough to hit the ladron in Duarte with any kind of stick or even pepper spray or mace him although if I had had a pistol I might have been able to shoot him in the back as he ran away. Before Altagracia and I left Duarte that afternoon we went to one of the Chinese jewelry stores below the park and replaced the chain for 80 pesos or $2.58 at today’s exchange rate.

Dec 2, 2005 Street Crossing in Guaricano

Because Niningo needed cleats for baseball, and Chavela needed two more pairs of tighter fitting jeans and Altagracia needed a dark skirt for work we all went to Duarte yesterday afternoon. I had been grocery shopping in our local Hipermercado Olé that morning so I should have known better because, being the first day of the month, nearly everyone who has a job had gotten paid plus it is that much closer to Christmas-- which is huge here--and so lines in banks and at check-outs were more unbearably long and slow than usual. I think new employees must start work on the firsts of months because both the incoming package check person and the cash register person were new and, therefore, very slow. But, in any case, in the afternoon when Niningo and Chavela got home from school they took quick showers and snacked and the three of us walked up to the water tank and caught a guagua for Gascue to meet Altagracia as she got off from work. We got off the guagua at the Supermercado Nacional and, while Niningo and Chavela went to meet Altagracia at the pensión I walked quickly down to my friend Domingo’s apartment on Independencia which is next to where we would re-meet to for transport to Duarte. Domingo, who is the Head Speleologist for the government and also a journalist and photographer, happened to be home so I was able to give him, in person, the small set of cardboard archeologist’s scales for including in photographs so one could figure out the size of the thing photographed that I happened to have extras of and that I had promised him. Even after after visiting I still got to the bus stop about fifteen minutes before the rest.

Duarte was teeming with people and construction crews were digging the street up to install new drop inlets to catch rainwater so there was mud and sand and cement dust and smoke everywhere and the street was trickier to cross than usual. But we crossed back and forth in-between eating Chinese food in a restaurant where a waitress brought menus to the table, and buying fingernail polish and rubber gloves in La Sirena and jeans in La Paloma and baseball cleats in the basement of Gran Via and when we were ready to leave it was already dark and the street venders were breaking down their kiosks and wheeling their juice stands and portable, makeshift gas grills and deep friers home for the night and there were horses pulling two wheeled carts and we heard a dog howling its death howl after being hit by a car down a side street. We snaked our way through plywood tables covered with apples and eggplants for sale and found a public taxi headed for the intersection of Ovando and Gomez and traffic was so thick that we got let off a block early on Ovando.

Ovando, like Duarte, is lined on both sides with street venders selling everything from used clothing to wind up alarm clocks to underwear to coconuts and as we worked our way toward Gomez we bought apples and gumdrops for the rest of the trip. Hundreds of people lined Maximo Gomez looking for a guagua or a taxi but there were hardly any because of a partial work stoppage by the taxistas to protest the new regulation that forced half of all the public cabs to paint their roofs yellow and the other half to paint theirs green and to work only on alternate days of the week. Another reason was to protest the construction of the new overhead train that will draw customers away from the taxis and besides, has already reduced Gomez to one lane in places. The first plan to reduce the traffic on Gomez during commuting hours was to dig a subway line from Villa Mella to Gascue but because nobody understood where the money was going to be borrowed from to even meet the unrealistically low estimate for the cost of the project, it was scrapped after only a few of the planned subway stations had been marked out with spray paint on the ground. Only a few days after the newspapers reported that the Senate had approved plans for the overhead train, giant holes that encroached on the left-hand lanes going in each direction were dug both by back hoes and by hand in the center of Gomez and then, two weeks later, prefabricated round towers twenty feet tall of reinforcing rod were dropped in the holes and hoisted into place using cranes as well as by men pulling on ropes and now are precariously guyed in place with nylon rope while they await the concrete forms and then the concrete to be poured in around them. In the meantime, and no one knows how long that will be, traffic is worse and sometimes Altagracia has to wait a half hour for a guagua or a taxi to take her to work.

The crowd waiting for busses became more restless and overflowed onto the street which cut off still another lane for traffic and so we walked slowly downstream hoping to find emptier busses. A man leaning out the door of a slowly passing garbage truck started calling out destinations as though it was a guagua and everybody laughed. We finally gave up waiting for a guagua to take us to the blue water tank and got on one heading for Guaricano which would let us off half way home and across the bridge and we figured it would be easier to change guaguas there. The guagua was so crowded there was hardly room for air. We were wedged in, standing, cheek to jowl to cheek and most of the windows had been replaced with plywood so we could not see out. The driver tired of waiting for traffic and so detoured and we lost track of the turns and we figured we must be winding our way through the MIrador del Norte park and we made a stop at a SuperMercado Nacional, and I was afraid it was the same one in Gascue and that we would have to start all over, but it was one I had never seen before. Nobody really knew where we were but at one intersection there was an extended discussion between the driver, the cobrador and maybe 10 of the 80 or so passengers about which way to go and the longest route was finally decided on. After an hour of riding this way the guagua finally came to a stop at the gas station in Guaricano where we would look for a guagua to take us home. All that remained was to cross the street.

The frustrated traffic was unyielding and it was not until fifteen of us had collected to cross that we had the courage to lurch like a drunken flock of sheep tied together across the two southbound lanes to the relative safety of the narrow concrete median. Traffic was moving faster in the next two lanes and I thought our little herd chose a bad time to start the crossing but we did anyway but then we got split by two motorcycles speeding between lanes and then all the group except for me and Altagracia made it across with room to spare in front of an oncoming OMSA, which is a bus the size of a NYC bus and looked like a huge wall moving toward us. When I saw that the OMSA was stopping to let us cross I took Altagracia’s arm and started but she heard someone on the other side yell, “It’s not stopping!” and she stepped back but the cars in the lane behind us were moving fast again and there was no room to wait between the lanes so I pulled her across with me in front of the OMSA and we made it to the curb but she thought I had tried to kill her and said that she was never going to cross the street with me again and solicited opinions from the rest of the disorderly flock, which had not yet dispersed, and opinion was divided although no one except for Niningo and Chavela (who saw the bus stopping) had really been paying attention. In the meantime a guagua going our way stopped and Niningo and Chavela got on and I started to get on but Altagracia turned and strode away, still gesticulating and opining wildly, and so I got off and Niningo and Chavela went on without us. When Altagracia refused to get in the next taxi that stopped I went on without her and eventually caught up with Niningo and Chavela at the bus stop and, as we were walking home, Altagracia sped past us on the back of a motor concho, and it is the next day now but she hasn’t yet spoken with any of us. The kids tell me to not worry and that she gets like this from time to time.

After coming home from work the following day she went straight to bed complaining of a splitting headache but she was seeming much more herself.

DR1 Daily News -- Tuesday, 22 November 2005

50% only reach 4th grade

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) annual report on the Dominican Republic makes somber reading, especially when it comes to educational statistics. As many as half the total number of students in primary education only reach 4th grade level. Just 22% of the total complete primary school and once they reach high school graduation level, only 10% of the original total remain. The DR chapter of the UNDP's Human Development Index for 2005 also highlights the inefficient use of funds spent on education, and the poor quality of teaching. It blames political patronage, deficient training and low salaries as the main factors.

Saturday Dec. 3

This morning I went with Niningo to watch him play baseball for the club where he is a member. To get there he led me through a section of the neighborhood where I had never been before down quiet little side streets and through a field and we came out on Ave. Charles DeGaulle on the other side of Olé and where there is a bus stop for the 5 peso OMSA. We waited a long time for the OMSA and finally gave up and squeezed into an overcrowded taxi van with no side door headed for Sabana Barrio

The ball field had grass in both the infield and the outfield although it was very uneven and patchy and there was a small concrete grandstand and a concrete dugout on each side. Both the pitcher’s rubber and homeplate looked like they were made from cement and the bases were not brought out and tossed in place until just before the first game started. Groups of boys from about age 12 to 18 were playing pepper, taking infield practice, jogging in the outfield and lounging on the bleachers and there were squads of peewee leaguers running around in the farthest, overgrown reaches of the outfield. Eventually the fifty or so older boys were divided into four teams and the first game started.

The umpire, who was usually one of the players waiting to play in the second game, called the game from just behind the pitcher and could often be seen giving the pitcher pointers or laughing uproariously at wild pitches or joking with the nearby baserunner on second base. There were many errors, both throwing and fielding, some of which could be attributed to the rough ground, but there were also many misjudged fly balls that fell in for extra base hits and nearly all the baserunners that reached first base quickly stole second and third-- home was stolen successfully five times. The final score must have been astronomical.

Niningo is touting himself as a pitcher because, as he figures, all he has to do is get his fastball up to 85MPH and he can sign with a Major League team and because every team needs more pitchers than any other position his odds are mathematically better. He does not bat because they use the designated hitter here, or practice fielding much but he looked very smooth and cool jogging in the outfield. He started the second game but had not warmed up his arm or stretched and so-- after the first two batters reached base on errors on weakly hit groundballs and he got one to ground out to short-- he got shelled and had to concentrate so much on each batter that all his baserunners stole their way around the bases to score and he was lifted after a half dozen runs because of shoulder pain and before he was able to record a second out. The relief pitcher got hit so hard that he was replaced by the hard throwing third baseman before recording any outs. Niningo and I left after the third inning and by the time we had walked from the field to the nearest bus stop he said that his arm was feeling a little better.

Friday December 9, 2005

Sometimes Altagracia has unpredictable moods and they might be started by anything. Last night after borrowing my cell phone Altagracia tossed it on the bed and it two-hopped off the mattress and hit the cement tile floor and skidded under the night stand. The phone turned out to be okay but I was a little annoyed and said something like, “Sheesh, could you be a little more careful,” and, “and you wonder where Chavela gets the habit of dropping plates and glasses in the kitchen from?” and Altagracia went into a little sulk saying that she would never borrow my cell phone again and so forth but when I grabbed her from behind and tickled her and blew in her ear she laughed so I figured things were okay. But she came to bed late and wouldn’t talk and after lying in the dark for a while I could feel her trembling and she was crying and still wouldn’t talk until she finally said, “I threw your phone,” and I said that it was nothing, that I was not annoyed anymore, that there was no damage done but she would not say anything more and she was just as quiet in the morning when she generally chatters happily on while we are drinking our coffee and she refused to bring her cell phone to work which meant that she did not want me to call her during the day.

Dentista

Chavela has been having toothaches and since Altagracia has been complaining about her fillings shifting and losing little pieces I took Chavela to Dr. Ingrid Lantigua who is the dentist up near the blue water tank. I was allowed in the room while she peered around in Chavela’s mouth counting cavities and appraising the damage of the two painful molars. She wrote out the estimate which included 8 cavities at 400-500 pesos (12-15$) and then went ahead and filled two and I was allowed to watch the process and even ask questions during. Because of the miracle of fluoridation in Massachusetts I have never had a cavity or seen one filled, so I was riveted although it didn’t seem much different than masonry work in miniature. I paid the 900 pesos and Chavela promised to visit one of the nearby locations that could x-ray the bad teeth and to bring them, the x-rays that is, with her on her next visit.

Daihatsu Minibus

I am a driver now in Santo Domingo. I bought a year 2000 Daihatsu minibus for about $4000 fresh off the boat from Japan. So far so good aside from nearly killing us on the first test drive when my foot got caught between the gas pedal and the brake-- which are inordinately close together-- and we were propelled into traffic prematurely. The woman driver who swerved to miss us yelled out her window that if she had a pistol she would have shot at us.

We have taken to calling it la guaguita and it has a 3 cylinder, 660cc displacement motor so it is like a 4 wheel motorcycle and reportedly will get around 50MPG. It is a little more than 11 feet long and is 5 feet wide-- about the same proportions as a lunch box. There is also a pickup truck version which is built on the same frame and, between the two models they must nearly outnumber Toyota Corollas on the streets of Santo Domingo. The pickups are often equipped with loudspeakers and, loaded with platanos, eggs, bananas, potatoes, onions, avocados, oranges, rolls of toilet paper, mops and brooms, slowly cruise the residential neighborhoods loudly announcing what they are selling and for how much. The minibuses are often used to deliver baked goods to colmados since the bread must be kept dry and they are also used by small contractors who need to keep parts and tools secure.

There are surprisingly few cars for sale privately in the classified section of newspapers-- many editions had no minibuses listed at all-- I assume this stems from a ‘drive’em till till they drop’ attitude-- so I searched the car plazas which are scattered all over the city which mostly sell used cars bought at auction and imported from Japan and the U.S. There is a customs regulation which prohibits the importation of any car older than 5 years old so there were many vehicles reputed to be year 2000 models to choose from and two or three plazas that specialized in the tiny Daihatsu. The plaza at the intersection of Carretera Mella and Avenida Charles DeGaulle (or La Charley, as it is usually called) was filled with vans and trucks in various stages of dis- and re-assembly. The floor was slick with motor oil and the air was filled with Bondo dust, fiberglass and resin hole and dent filler, and there were chunks of blue Bondo everywhere. The phrase chop shop came to mind. I left after I was told that the price was $170,000 pesos ($5,500) and no test driving was allowed.

About two miles down Gomez from the blue water tank was another used Daihatsu mecca, Moto Plaza, and it was there that I bought the guaguita. They were much friendlier and I was able test drive at will, accompanied by their mechanic, Felix, at every stage of the multiple after-purhcase tune-ups, which included a radiator flush and carburetor adjustment. Before we paid the down payment Altagracia noticed a long tear in the headliner and Moto Plaza agreed to fix it. When we picked it up a new headliner was installed but the wires that run above the headliner to supply electricity to the two dome lights had been carelessly left unattached and too far back to reach to reconnect so the entire headliner had to be removed, the wires reattached, and the headliner replaced.

Dec. 17

I am having a couple of slow days. Yesterday I felt tired all day and read in the hammock and today I have a chin of diarrhea and the blahs. I got dressed and had coffee with Altagracia and Jhoanglish, who spent the night after a day off from the bomberos yesterday, and, walked them, with Chloë up to the blue water tank but now I am lying in bed listening to the sounds of the street-- the horn announcing the arrival of the potable water truck which will fill your 5 gallon spring water jug with osmotically filtered pure water although Altagracia says, “¡Mentira, agua de cualquier rio!, or Bullshit, that’s water from the handiest river!; the dogs across the street barking at selected pedestrians or motorcycles and thankfully the young shaggy blond bitch is not in heat anymore-- she was very busy there for a while!; and Chavela moving around in the kitchen, putting habichuelas on the stove to simmer and there is the occasional shouted greeting to her from the street from friends and admirers. My lower back is a little sore and the back of my neck is warm and I think I might have a slight fever. I haven’s eaten anything I thought was risky recently and my intestinal trouble of last year has almost entirely subsided.

So I lie here slightly dazed and wonder what I am going to do. The excitement from the museum show is dying down although my big photos are still on exhibit and one of my images appeared on the cover of the, roughly annual, Journal of the Museum which is a classy publication. We are all still awaiting the finished catalog for the show, which I suspect has been forever derailed due to squandered or embezzled funding and so it would be tricky to ask the Foundation Garcia Arévalo for more money to continue photographing just yet.

In this first month and a half here this year I have spent more money than I had planned, unlike last year, and I am not sure I can stretch my saved summer earnings enough to last until May, although Kiki is still far away and Jhoanglish and Chavela are working. I like my daily rhythms -- I often cook the lunch and otherwise putter in the kitchen, now that the new countertop of cement and stone marmól is in place and the kitchen faucet now delivers water-- the internet is a 10 minute walk away, we take the guaguita on field trips every other day or so; I do most of the food shopping by myself which cuts down on spats with Altagracia since we have very different styles of shopping. My Spanish learning is on a long, nearly flat plateau so I have begun to read more and check more words and grammar in texts and online.

With the roof patched and painted and the kitchen sink remodelled the big projects for the year are out of the way and I can now scrape and paint inside at my leisure.

The neighborhood has changed since last year-- La Rubia has taken up with a new chulo and moved away with him (after borrowing a last 100 pesos from us) leaving her grown children to finally fend for themselves in the little pink wood house-- but nobody sells chicken anymore out front. Many tigueres including Herman, the snaky killer, Demonio and Britania of the knife and bottle fight, Nati the thief, Lao and various others (including Kiki) have all moved on. Guangu helped me apply a plato fino, or finish coat of cement on my leaking roof but otherwise is not around much since he has a new woman in another barrio and only occasionally sleeps in his house (reportedly in the same bed although far from Miguelina, his estranged wife). We have not been to a rezo in a long time although, sadly, Anahai’s 15 year old brother was hit by a SUV and killed last week while on the same motorcycle and crossing the highway at the same spot where their father was killed by a dump truck last year.

My environment now is less exotic than before. If I feel a little better I will wash the guaguita this afternoon.

Nobody here uses the future tense as much as I do and I think it is because they are less concerned about the future, or recognize better that it is not knowable-- Where I say, Tomorrow I will go somewhere; it is said here, Tomorrow, God willing, I go somewhere.

Are some lives constant adjustments to change while others are constant adjustments to stasis?

It is interesting that when I get a little sick, like I am today, that it tends to be when I didn’t have much to do anyway.

Dec. 18, Sunday

Man, can it be tough to shop with Altagracia! Yesterday afternoon after work she, Niningo and I went to La Sirena, a mammoth, crowded department and grocery store, mainly to buy something for Kiki since we will be seeing him in Elias Piña on Christmas Day which is also his birthday. Walking down the blue jean aisle which was neatly organized with the prices clearly posted above each column of shelves of jeans she asked constantly how much are those and how much are these and grabbed folded jeans off shelves and tossed them back roughly and would spend minutes minutely examining a pair with a 30 inch waist whereas Kiki wears 34 or 36. Niningo and I made a deal behind her back and attended her in shifts of 10 minutes so the other could wander off and take a break. The long selection process was particularly frustrating because I figure Kiki will probably sell the $15 jeans for 50 pesos ($1.75) before the dust on our way out of town has settled. After the jeans were finally selected, and the cart was full of $3 dolls for the neices in Elias Piña and an oven thermometer to replace the one I burned up somehow roasting a turkey on Thanksgiving, and a polo shirt for Niningo we got separated when Altagracia darted up a shoe aisle and I took the opportunity to sneak off to the perfume counter to buy her a vial of Café, which does not smell at all like coffee but is a heady floral scent that Altagracia is crazy for, which took longer than I thought. When I got back to Shoes Altagracia was nowhere to be found. The cellphone signal was weak inside the big store but I was finally able to call her and we met near the front doors and Niningo eventually showed up but no one had the shopping cart because Altagracia had left it behind in a fit of pique and we didn’t find it until it had already been rounded up by the abandoned shopping cart patrol and most of the stuff had already been sorted out into other carts for reshelving but we were eventually able to recollect everything. As we headed toward the check-out line Altagracia started to veer back into the store toward the grocery area but we grabbed her and lied to her and said that we had bread and cheese and yucca in the house to get her to leave quietly because hog tieing her and dragging her out would have been the next option. When she tried to bolt from the line I waved my fingers, which smelled of Café Perfume, under her nose, and that calmed her down and on the way back home we stopped off at Hipermercado Olé and bought our needed staples without incident.

Chloë

When walking Chloë on a leash, which is an undisciplined process at best, she will track straight down the center of a sidewalk but if we step out onto the street she careens crazily toward the center of the road, nearly slipping her collar at times-- it is like trying to heel a lemming along a cliff-- and it does not matter which side of the street we are on or what is on the other side or which way we are going or how much traffic there is.

Chloë loves the guaguita although she has not yet had a ride in it. If the doors are left open she can be found sleeping in it during the day even if nobody is in the marquisina with her. I think she knows that it is cars that take people farther away from her and if she stays in the guaguita she will not get left behind.

Chloë will not drink tap water, osmotically purified water, ice water or rain water from her water dish which is a normal glazed ceramic bowl on the kitchen floor but she will drink whatever cleanish water running down the street gutters and loves to drink from a full 5 gallon bucket of water just bailed out of the cistern. I have now placed a new aluminum water dish next to her ceramic one but it seems to be as distasteful.

Dec. 20, 2005

DRIVING

Driving here requires a mixture of patience and aggression and constant surveillance using the rear and sideview mirrors. Aside from the fact that they are cheaper, many people here buy motorcycles so that they can weave their way through the frequent traffic jams, or tapones, and may travel on the sidewalks and down the median strips as well. Motorcycles frequently shoot out into intersections against red lights figuring that they are agile enough to slalom their way through the traffic and may do so with several children on the bike-- I have seen motorbikes carrying as many as five people, counting babies, at a time. Very few motorcyclists wear helmets and I don’t think I have ever seen a passenger wearing one.

(During the period when I was photographing in the caves of El Pomier, Johnny Rubio and I had gotten a ride on a motorcycle to take us down out of the hills and back to town and the road wound down through limestone quarries and was severely potholed and was strewn with boulders that had fallen off of dump trucks and I realized that, ironically, between the three grown men with four bulky backpacks on the Honda 50cc Club motorbike we actually had two helmets with us that we used in the caves but it would never dawn on us to wear them on a motorcycle.)

(When I stayed for a month at the pensión where Altagracia works, which is located on the corner of an intersection with four-way stop signs in a quiet residential neighborhood I heard or saw three accidents happen because most cars do not stop there but honk their horns and speed up and I would listen to that driving pattern of beepbeepvroom as I was dropping off to sleep nights and wait for beepbeepvroomCRASH.)

Another driving habit that I am learning to anticipate is that when crossing a big city intersection traveling in the left or center lanes it is not unusual for someone, usually driving a large vehicle, to make a left hand turn, whether or not permitted, across your bow, from the right hand lane. One time while we were with Norkis, our lawyer, and stopped at such an intersection in the left hand lane waiting for a break in the traffic that was still streaming across in front of us against our green light, a large Hielo Nacional ice delivery truck, did just that and drove over the top of Norkis’s front right fender in doing so-- later in the police station the ice truck driver emphatically insisted he had done nothing wrong and was flabbergasted when the policewoman confiscated his license and handed him a summons.

Solutions to tapones may be creative. I have seen two of three southbound lanes of stretches of Maximo Gomez filled with northbound traffic during the afternoon rush-- moving fast too-- and I was once in three lanes of traffic on a one-way, single lane sidestreet going the wrong way-- many cars had one wheel up on sidewalks and at intersections two or three drivers would get out of their cars and direct traffic in a jigsaw puzzle crossing.

When breakdowns occur where there is no breakdown lane you might see someone changing a tire in a center lane of a highway and I have seen a whole bus transmission being rebuilt on the sidewalk next to the bus it had fallen out of.

Cars may swerve crazily in front of you while passing to avoid potholes-- which may be cavernous. The use of turn signals is not unheard of but is not common. Altagracia warns not to put one’s elbow out the window because of the chance of stray chunks of rock or metal bouncing down the road.

I may have chosen the single worst possible time to buy a car in Villa Mella because construction of the elevated commuter train that will run the length of Maximo Gomez nearly from the center rotunda of Villa Mella which is about one kilometer north of my house south to the Malecon on the sea. Upon the project’s approval by the Senate, work was immediately begun and holes the size of houses appeared overnight in the center of the road dug by large earthmoving equipment as well as by pick-and-shovel. Within two weeks giant towers of grids of 3/4 inch re-bar were lifted into place in some of the foundation holes-- sometimes using ropes and man power and sometimes using backhoes or cranes and in some holes the towers were built in place within a cage of wood staging nailed together with rough sawn lumber. I saw one crane that had toppled over while trying to lift a concrete barrier, but traffic was still able to move under the nearly horizontal boom and the half dozen or so workers that were gathered around it scratching their heads did not seem too bothered. As I write this,some of the steel re-bar towers are being enclosed by round, steel, prefabricated forms that will be filled with concrete and later removed.

The Metro is being built to alleviate the terrible traffic problems that plague Maximo Gomez during rush hours but while being constructed is making traffic much worse. While the published estimated construction time is hovering around one year most people are wondering if it will be done in one lifetime because the history here is that public works projects almost always run out of money and if the project lasts for more than one term it may turn out that the next President has other plans. Many different construction companies are working on the Metro and there is much speculation already about how the bidding process was legally completed in the one or two days between Senatorial approval and the start of construction.

DEC 21

Yesterday I went to el Conde to look for a good road map of the country as well as to visit Bettye Marshall, the proprietor of the gallery where my photos are sometimes for sale and I used public transport. I was in a public taxi in the back seat behind the driver and to my right was a small boy and to his right was his mother and to her right was a man in a suit. The boy, who was practically sitting on my lap did not look happy so I asked the mother if he was sick and she said yes and I asked if it was la gripe, or a cold or flu, and she said no, he was about ready to vomit. The driver pulled over, the man in the suit left and the boy got out and tried unsuccessfully to vomit at the curb, got back in with his mother and within about 100 meters successfully projectile vomited across the back seat and out the open window.

Today I went to the Conde again, this time to deliver 6 framed photos to Gallery Toledo, Bettye’s gallery and this time I drove. I am beginning to enjoy driving here, it is adventurous and as I become accustomed to the unwritten rules it is feeling safer and safer. There are many drivers who drive slowly and cautiously and signal turns and although one tends to notice the reckless, there is a place for everyone.

Jan 1, 2006

Like last year, we spent new year’s eve at home. Last year Altagracia’s brother, Tito and his wife Noody came for the holiday from Dajabon on the northern Haitian border where they live and Kiki and Jhoanglish were home. Tito is in the military and, over the years, has been the most upstanding of Altagracia’s siblings partly because she took care of him when they were children as he is about 6 years younger and 7 is old enough to baby-sit here. We cooked chicken and mashed potatoes au gratin and made s big salad and drank creme d’oro (fortified eggnog) and Presidente beer and the boys even chipped in and bought some muscatel from the colmado. I set my laptop up on the galleria with big speakers and we danced to bachata mp3s all night. At midnight Tito, after removing his official clip and replacing it with his private clip so his unexpended bullet count would balance at the next inspection, emptied his pistol high into the roble tree in front of the house-- the next morning as I was re-imagining the angle he was shooting at I doubted it was really high enough to clear the houses on the hill behind the tree and he was probably lucky that there was nobody home. There are often reports in the newspapers of deaths and injuries from stray bullets.

This year there were just the four of us plus Chavela’s new boyfriend, Calderon. We ate roasted-fried chicken with potato salad and the same mashed potato dish as last year all the while Altagracia claiming that she was going to go to bed because she had to work the 1st but after her bath she got dressed and she and I and Chloe got in the guaguita and as I backed it out of the marquisina to go up to the street venders near Olé to buy candy, it idled itself down and died in the road. A mechanic came over from the colmado and after I explained the short history of gas problems and after he pulled some tubing apart and blew and sucked through it we pushed it down the hill and it still didn’t start so we had to push it back up the hill and back in to the marquisina and it took 4 of us pushing hard because the hill is steep and potholed and the mechanic is going to come back this morning. He thinks it is a sticky float.

The street filled with more and more people as midnight neared and firecrackers of all sizes as well as fireworks filled the air with the smell of gunpowder and the noise kept Chloe barking furiously. Altagracia has a friend who drives a large panel truck with election campaign posters plastered on its sides and he drove it up alongside the galleria to position his giant speakers to blare bachata into the house but a drunk on the street chucked a rock, breaking the brake lights on the truck, because he wanted to hear salsa but this was the only discordant note of the evening. At midnight the air filled with the smoke and smell of firecrackers and everyone spilled out onto the street and hugged and shook hands-- young and old, tigueres and strangers and evangelists and neighbors and passed bottles back and forth and by 12:30 Chavela and Niningo and Calderon left to go out dancing till dawn with some other friends and Altagracia and I went to bed in an empty house for the first time ever. At 5:30 this morning when we were sleepily drinking our first cup of coffee the crew returned fromt he disco and went to bed.

Jan 15th or so

Las Matas

On the 7th I drove the guaguita to the airport, about one hour outside the city and it gave a little cough or two on the way out but ran smoothly on the way back. On the 8th I drove the guaguita to the airport to pick up Scottie and it ran smoothly the whole time so on the 9th, around 10:30 in the morning we left for Matas de Farfan which is almost as far as Elias Piña or about 150 miles. It ran great as far as Cruce de Santana, about an hour and a half from Villa Mella, where it stopped. It would start but it wouldn’t go. We waited a little while in the van and then got out and waited with a woman whose house we were stalled in front of while a neighbor with a motorbike went to look for a mechanic. When the mechanic eventually arrived he eventually determined that the problem was a sticky pita de abajo and so to work around the problem he tuned the carburetor (or maybe it is an injector) such that the motor would only run while mightily revved but would run although at every shift one couild feel a little more clutch burning away and we made it.

Scottie and Louise work every year with a group of volunteer nurses and nurse practitioners who spend two weeks based in Las Matas and make trips to many outlying villages and set up one day clinics. The day I was there their group split into two and I went with the one who went to El Valle which is past El LLano and past Guanito and way up a mountain with a new gravel road that is powdery and windy and narrow enough that you realize that if the brakes on the truck fail on the way back down that death is certain but It was very beautiful and the brakes did not fail on the way back down.

The clinic was held in a plain concrete church set in a cluster of a half dozen houses. Most people arrived on foot and then had to pay 10 pesos or 30¢ for a number to wait in line-- the clinic itself was free. There were three tables set up for consultations and boxes of medicine to be handed out were arranged on benches along the walls. Not all of the nurses spoke Spanish so I served, along with three others, as a translator. Sometimes even those of us who spoke Spanish had no idea what the patient was saying because, being practically on the Haitian border, many spoke a heavily accented patois and were describing medical conditions such as smoke in the head, wind in muscles, bites in the chest, vague pains everywhere and of one food tasting like another. Many people were hypertensive and quite a few others were malnourished. Louise is working on a funded project to study blood pressure here and it is possible that it is linked to living at higher altitudes.

During the day another mechanic worked on the guaguita and pronounced it good to go after installing a new fuel filter so the next morning I headed back toward the capital with the same clutch grinding tune up and made it about an hour and half outside Las Matas to Las Guanabanas where it stopped. I waited 40 minutes thinking it might have been somehow flooded, and unsuccessfuly tried to start it again. There were only a few houses in Las Guanabanas and two men sitting on a rock but one of them had a motorbike and so he went to look for a mechanic. When the mechanic eventually arrived he determined that gas was not getting to the carburetor and after much testing of wires with his circuit tester (which he had to go back home to get) that it was due to a bad fuel pump, which is, in this case, located inside the gas tank. So, along with Augusto, who had been sitting on the rock, we dropped the gas tank out of the guaguita, removed the fuel pump and the mechanic took it along with 1000 of my pesos to Azua, 13 miles away, to look for a replacement. While we waited Augusto and I walked to his sister’s house and she fed us lunch and it took the mechanic almost 3 hours to return but he brought a fuel pump and when we got everything back together in the dark and the thing started and ran normally and I paid everybody and got going but after 10 miles it reverted to its high-rev-stall at idle situation of before so it was a long 3 hour drive and boy was I glad to get home.

YOLA

Saturday two flat bed trucks carrying many policeman arrived in front of the colmado next to our house and the cops fanned out and swept through the neighborhood looking for the yola that was rumored to be near completion and hidden nearby. It is illegal to build such a boat without a special permit here because most of them are used as yolas, or boats that carry illegal immigrants to Puerto Rico via the Mona Strait. There are always horror stories about yolas in the newspaper-- they are generally poorly outfitted, overloaded and leaky and often swamp in the surf just after launching or disappear or sink at sea. There are evidently only a few suitable landing sites on the coast of Puerto Rico and the authorities there are on constant look-out for illegal arrivals so most that do actually make it that far are locked up and then returned to the court system in the Dominican Republic for their trouble. Passage on a yola costs between $700 and $1000 and many yola operators could care less if the yola makes it all the way because advance payment in full is always required so overbooking on unsafe craft is a common practice and the owner himself is not foolish enough to go. Saturday, however, no yola was discovered.

Sunday night after dark Altagracia called me out of the shower to see what was happening on the street. A guagua was parked in front of our house and people were gathering and boarding to be taken to where the yola was to be launched. The dome lights were on inside the bus so we could see who was going and the scene was oddly quiet even though families were being separated, perhaps forever. We saw that Tootie, the new guy who sells pot on the street was going, along with Jose, who walked over and handed Altagracia a mint the other day out of the blue and whose girlfriend murdered his wife some years ago; and Sandra’s husband was going without Sandra or their children; and Lao who used to consul Kiki but turned out to be a gang leader himself came out of hiding and got on too. The lights went out inside the guagua and it pulled away from the curb and about a dozen people on the street watched as it made the turn at the top of the hill where the bakery used to be. Altagracia and I leaned on the railing of the galleria and watched a tall slender old woman walk slowly back the other way through the dark to her empty house.

Within 24 hours of the guagua’s departure from Loma de Chivo rumors began making their way back and it seems that upon arrival on the beach at Nagua, the men were asked to leave and the women were invited onto the waiting yola. The Marines arrived and some of the men were arrested and some ran away. The boat never left the shore.

LA PULGA

Altagracia is getting sicker and sicker of working in the pensión. Her take home pay averages out to 160 pesos/day and her commute costs 30 pesos and lunch is not provided and even coffee is never offered. There is a new receptionist who manages to go into the rooms after guests have left and takes the tips left for Altagracia and, to top it off, Elvira, the owner, has asked Altagracia to bail out the toilet bowls before putting in the cleaner so as to use less cleaner. Saturday and Sunday Altagracia, unprecedently, called in sick and on Sunday we went to La Pulga to see if it could be a venue for a negociocito, or little business for her.

La Pulga, which literally means the flea, is a weekly outdoor market in Santo Domingo which, these days is located under Ave. Luperon where it is an elevated highway between Ave. Independencia and the Malecón and must be a half mile long with hundreds of vendors. There were more clothes and shoes than anything, but also for sale were bootlegged CDs and DVDs (I saw King Kong, which is still in theaters for sale for about $2), used kitchen utensils, tools, second-hand cell phones and stereo equipment. We wended our way through a maze of mountains of loose clothes, bales of clothes, racks of clothes, clothes hanging on chains of hangers that were suspended from under the highway far over our heads looking for Alfonsa, who is married to one of Altagracia’s cousins and who drives to the Pulga every Sunday all the way from Elias Piña to sell bales of clothes, which are called paca, that she buys in Haiti. At the end of our first pass through the throng of hundreds of vendors and shoppers we found Alfonsa seated on one of her paca and we sat on another paca and Altagracia asked about licensing to sell here and the prices for paca in Haiti and whether there would be trouble in Customs and about selling prices and it all sounded feasible.

After giving Alfonsa some money to give to Kiki on her return to Elias Piña and after buying a handful of chicharrone to eat on the way home on the guagua, which is always a little risky but even chicharrone that makes you feel sick a half hour later tastes great, we decided that the next time we go to Elias Piña we will buy some paca and the following Sunday Altagracia can call in sick again to the pensión.

Los Santos

Altagracia used to make extra money by reading taza, or tea leaves, although she usually uses coffee instead of tea and reads the drips that run down the outside of the coffee cup after the person has drunk and then turns the cup upside down over a candle to scorch the dregs to increase their resolution. She might be able to tell you what your spouse is up to nights when he or she is out, warn you about upcoming health issues or see other things in your life that might be making you unhappy. Afterwards she gives the client a prescription that is usually a perfume or soap or shampoo, never anything ingested. She read taza for Britannia a week before Britannia got in a knife fight and when I asked if she had foreseen such an event she said no, but that she happened to know that Britannia never took her prescription. She was very matter of fact about this talent when she explained to me that, yup, her father had it but that she was the only one of her 13 siblings who had it, so it goes.

The other evening Altagracia announced that she would like a rum and coke so we dispatched Niningo to the colmado for a half pint of Brugal, the most popular local brand and the one that many people think actually comes from drilled wells in the ground rather than from a distillery, and a large bottle of coke and when she finished that we sent him for more. Altagracia frequently announces that she is going ot get drunk but she scarcely ever has more than a sip and it has become a joke that when she says, “I am going to get stinking drunk tonight”, we say, “Not again!”. But tonight was different and, as she drank while we watched television, she became quieter and quieter and eventually she nodded off for a few seconds but when she awoke she said clearly and in her own voice, “I am Anahisa.” Niningo happened to be heading out the door but when he heard this he called for Chavela and he grabbed a notepad and we all sat down in front of her to listen and Niningo took notes.

We listened intently as Anahisa, who is the Voodu derivative of Saint Anne, addressed each of us in turn and warned us about certain possible although vague dangers looming in our lives and recomended a balm or tea to help avoid them. After a few minutes Altagracia’s head dropped again but she rewoke after a few seconds and announced that she was now San MIguel and she again advised us and Niningo took more notes and after a few minutes she dropped back off and awoke as Santa Marta. During allof the visitations she spoke clearly and in her own voice, perhaps a little more deliberatley than usual. After Santa Marta left her she reawoke sleepily as Altagracia and looked at us a little confused because we were sitting in a row in front of her in straight-back chairs paying close attention-- which is unusual for us-- and she listened curiously as we described what had happened. When I asked her where I might find the shampoo named Arame that Anahisa had prescribed for me she said that she had never heard of it and I could not tell if the little smile that flickered across her face meant that she was telling the truth or not.

Danny--Arame shampoo

Chavela--

Niningo--

Jan. 9, 2006

Dear Click and Clack,

I just bought a used, year 2000 Daihatsu Hijet minibus from a Japanese import lot here in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It measures 5 feet wide by 11 feet long and is 6'3” tall and is a 5 speed with a 660cc, 3-cylinder motor and uses lots of regular gas, which costs $3.50 a gallon here. In 5th gear at 60mph it runs at a little over 4 grand but it is adorable.

It's been “tuned up” a couple of times now by street mechanics who each had one wrench-the 10mm is ubiquitous- a pair of bent pliers, a screwdriver and a piece of cardboard or burlap to lie on in lieu of a creeper. The timing was set by ear. When I have asked whether that thing that they are tweaking is a fuel injector or a carburetor they tell me it is “somewhere in between” and keep on turning the four adjustment screws on and near it until it idles smoothly and restarts easily. After one bout of adjustment one mechanic shrugged and suggested that I should start it cold by not touching the gas pedal and when starting hot that I would need to keep it matted until it started and this system has worked fine except for on New Year's Eve when, thankfully--because drinking while driving is not discouraged here and we would most likely have been killed had we actually ventured out-- it would not start at all. One of the muchachos spent about 3 hours New Year's Day underneath it installing 3 new spark plugs and now it starts again using the methods described above.

In the city it runs great and is peppy when weaving in and out of traffic-which is essential here to avoid being run over by gigantic guaguas (busses) making left hand turns across your bow from the far right hand lane through busy intersections but on the highway, after about an hour of driving at a steady cruising speed, it sometimes shows the unnerving symptoms of running out of (or maybe of being flooded by?) gas and jerks, I mean IT jerks, and it almost dies but this symptom is not at all predictable. Occasionally I think I detect an increased smell of gasoline in the air when this happens but, since the motor is directly under the front seats, this may be expected from time to time due to proximity. I have, so far, always gotten to where I was going. One of the mechanics working out of a grease pit found the fuel filter under the chassis and blew it out from both sides with a compressor and proudly announced that it had been installed backwards and reinstalled it the right way, but this seems to have made little or no difference. I have also poured an assortment of carb-cleaners and dry gasses into the gas tank and just when I think that did the trick I find myself lurching toward the breakdown lane again. I do not want to spend much time standing around in the breakdown lane because when the street thugs here steal your sneakers they don't wait for you to take them off, they remove them at the ankles with a machete-- without hurting the sneakers.

My real question is why am I getting only 22MPG? I am certain that I am converting from kilometers accurately and I have confirmed that the gas stations here indeed sell the stuff by the normal gallon and I have checked the odometer by using a handheld GPS unit and it agrees. I was hoping for more like 50mpg. One “mechanic” tells me that 22 is normal because my model of Daihatsu has a turbo, and, indeed, the van does have the word Turbocooler written on the side in what appears to be factory lettering but I do not know what an actual turbo looks like or how much one might drink.

What do you think?

P.S.-

Well, I thought that the new plugs had cured the “dying on the highway” problem but three days ago it died dead in a village far from home. A mechanic who materialized out of the bushes determined that I had a bad “pita de abajo” which was failing to control the flow of gasoline. He described this pita as a small vertical pin that works like a float and is next to the real float and is located in the lower half of the carburetor. He then adjusted the carburetor for highway driving, so that I could get to where I was going, which meant that the thing ONLY ran at 3500 rpm or above and stalled instantly at idle but could be restarted. This strategy worked (at the expense of much of the clutch while negotiating speed bumps, traffic lights and craters and goats in the road) for 200 miles when it died dead again in a smaller village, even farther from home, and so the next mechanic had to be fetched by a friendly stranger on a Honda 50cc Club Special motorbike and he determined that the fuel pump was working erratically. So, after finally locating a new-used fuel pump we changed it on the side of the road-and it is a submerged fuel pump so we had to drop the gas tank and he figured that maybe a wire was bad too so, after stripping the ends of a found length of insulated wire with his teeth he ran it from the tank to the fuse box where he jammed it in alongside one of the live fuses. The motor idled and ran at normal rpm for 5 miles, even though the screws on the carburetor had not been reset, but then reverted to its custom-highway tuning of before-- but I made it the 80 neck-jerking, backfiring miles back home, and boy was I glad to get there.

So now what do you think?

P.P.S.

I have taken the Daihatsu minibus to a dealership to be worked on. They tell me that there has been a spate of bad gas in the country and that this could easily be causing all of my problems. The bad gas evidently came from the National Refinery which, fearing fuel shortages over the holidays, topped off their supplies of gas with an, as yet undetermined, although clearly detrimental to the fuel delivery system, substance- garages have been reporting ten-fold increases in fuel pump and pita de abajo replacements in the past weeks.

P.P.P.S.

I just retrieved my minibus from the Daihatsu dealer because they refused to work on it because, evidently, none of the running system is Daihatsu-they did not know what it was, but it was nothing they had seen before. So I bucked and burned the clutch back to Moto Plaza where I bought it and I will find out more on Monday (the 16th) how this is going to be resolved.

Jan 30, Monday--

Moto Plaza, in a last ditch effort to get the guaguita running smoothly, removed all of the vacuum tubing as well as disconnecting the air filter and the turbo-cooler. But the guaguita ran worse.

Moto Plaza replaced the motor with all its adjunct parts with a motor from a like guaguita in their lot and the guaguita ran worse.

Moto Plaza has painted me up another minibus from their lot. This one does not have a turbo, has a simpler motor and is supposed to be ready for me this Friday.

9. Multiple truck crash jan 28,2006

Just one day after President Leonel Fernandez inaugurated the overpass over Duarte Highway, the first in the country to allow trucks and freighters, there has been a crash involving four trucks. Listin Diario reports that it started off when a Pimco rice truck crashed into another, and that shortly after, the driver of a Presidente beer truck, distracted while looking at the crash, himself crashed into the rear of another vehicle from the same company that had slowed down to see the first crash

Monday Jan 30

The 26th was the anniversary of Juan Pablo Duarte’s birth but, in the spirit of the three day weekend the holiday was moved to today. Duarte was the DR’s equivalent of George Washington in inspiring and leading the eastern half of the island in its fight for independence from Haiti which was declared on Feb 27th, 1844. I am, conveniently, reading just that chapter in Frank Moya’s, Manual de Historia Dominicana, the very readable and very complete history of the DR up to about 1990.

LIfe has been quiet. Kiki is still living in Elias Piña and reportedly, making a living not so much smuggling as bringing items across the border as a Dominican to save on import taxes for the Haitians and he is able to make 700 pesos a day when he works. He called last night and when Altagracia asked him what he was doing he answered, “Cooking a chicken that had been Ana’s (his grandmother)” and then he asked for money to fix up the little house of Altagracia’s that he is living in because he is going to marry a Haitian girl soon.

The barrio has continued quietly as well, the only recent gunshots were heard from quite far away and were the result of a domestic squabble.

Jhoanglish continues working as a fireman and sleeps here roughly every other night.

Chavela works in the banca practically next door although, when there is a quiet moment she locks the door and wanders around visiting with friends. She will not get paid this week because she forgot to log in a, what turned out to be, a winning lottery ticket number for a customer and so she has to cover the winnings with her salary. Lucky for her it was not a big winner-- they tell me that jail is a possibility if she was unable to cover such an error for a million peso winner, but I don’t know if that is true.

I have applied by email to a number of American private schools in Santo Domingo by email for a teaching job. If I hear nothing in three weeks I will hand deliver resumes to the various campuses.

Feb 3, Friday, 2006

When Altagracia is in a happy chattery mood, chuckling on about food, love, clothes, her hair and work there is no one like her, and when she is complaining about this house that is no good that is in this barrio that is no good, these children who are no good, that she has nobody to help her, that she is going to die soon from anemia because she hs run out of blood and does not have one drop left in her and that Luis, her not so dearly departed ex knew what concoction to give her to cure her anemia but that I know nothing about anything, there is no one like her either. On these bad days she wakes up like after being hit by a bus and says that everywhere hurts and that she has no strength and is dizzy and cannot walk and hot coffee does not taste hot and even though it might have 4 teaspoons of sugar in it it does not taste sweet either. She says she is hungry but will not eat and says she wants anemia medicine but when I hand her the bottle of Ferro-sul from on top of the refrigerator she will not take any. It is 6 in the morning by now and she wakes up Chavela to give her the school lunch money for the day and tells her that she is putting too much salt in the food and that is why nobody can finish their lunch and it winds up getting thrown out and that she is forbidden to wear clothes through which her panties can be seen and that she better hurry up and get married because there is no money here to feed her. Then she wakes up Niningo and tells him that he is going to die if he doesn’t stop being constipated and that he better quit school and quit fooling around with that computer and either get a job or sign with a major league team because there is no money here to feed him and she is sick and tired of working 8 hours cleaning the pension and 8 cleaning the house and washing clothes by hand when she gets home.

Altagracia is an anomaly in a country that has been renown for its laziness for over 500 years. We have running water in the house and in the utility sink on the patio but Altagracia fills the 55 gallon drum by hauling water out of the cistern using a bucket on a rope. We have a portable washing machine, called a lavadora, but Altagracia usually washes and wrings the clothes out by hand because she can separate the colors better even though she believes that it is having her hands in strong detergent so much that gives her migraines. At 9 o'clock last night, after work and after bleaching the bathroom and washing the dishes leftover from the noon meal, she washed 5 dresses by hand that had not been worn but had been hanging too long, she figured, in the closet and were getting dusty. The day before was her day off and she spent that day double-mopping the entire house because Chavela misses the corners on her daily moppings, scouring her cast aluminum cookware and ironing. She does this fueled only by a breakfast of coffee with hot milk, a 15¢ sleeve of heavy gum drops on the guagua commute home, a plate of rice with beans around 5PM and a late dinner of bread and cheese with boiled platanos or yucca. When we have chicken she only eats the feet and necks.

DR HIstory

I am reading the Manual of Dominican History by Frank Moya Pons and it seems that at no time in its history since Columbus did anyone really want to live here. The indigenous culture was dead within 40 years of contact with Columbus. In the early days the European population was comprised of sailors and soldiers many of whom married indigenous women to then live on in poverty. The gold rush was short lived and the gold rushers moved on to Mexico where there was more. Africans were imprisoned and brought here by force to replace the local population which was rapidly being exterminated through disease, slaughter and overwork; in 1546 there were 12,000 Africans to 5000 whites. Natives of the Canary Islands, who were even poorer than Dominicans were encouraged to immigrate beginning in 1684 with gifts of land and again in 1687 and 1690 to replace those previous who had died of smallpox and other pestilents. The money here has ALWAYS been concentrated in the hands of a few aristocratic types living in Santo Domingo or in Spain-- most the population has always been poor. Other than cultivating and refining sugar cane--which is a lot of work for, often, small profit, the most consistent source of income from export was shooting escaped and feral cattle and selling the meat and hides. The colony was always dependent on financial aide from Spain which was sent through Mexico and sometimes arrived years late due to piracy and negligence. The general tone of depression, hunger and fear of invasion by either England or France of the first 250 years of colonization gave way to fear of invasion by the western part of the island,i.e. Haiti, which came true in 1803 and lasted until 1843; and the Dominicans racial distrust and dislike of Haitians stems from those years. The nominal Father of the Dominican Republic, Juan Pablo Duarte, was highly educated, enlightened, principled and honest and is, today the most honored figure in the history of the DR and who inspired the revolution of 1844 along with Mella and Sanchez, but in the months following the successful revolt Duarte was exiled by the military and never led or was able to beneficially influence the country. The Dominican Republic’s very first years as an independendent nation were spent under the ruthless military dictatorship of Pedro Santana who led (off and on in between overthrows and deportations) from 1845 through 1862, who was then followed by a string of about 20 presidents and generals until 1916-24 when the US Military occupied it and in 1930 began the 30 year reign of the dictator Trujillo followed by the 20 year presence of the only slightly more benevolent Balageur.

The Dominican Republic has had a different history than, say, Massachusetts, which was begun on a basis of belief rather than of conquest and greed and was populated by the people who wanted to be there and who thought about where they wanted to live and could read. I wonder if the roots of the sensibilities of the tigueres who rule the streets of Santo Domingo today can be directly traced back to the histories of all the pirates who have stolen here from Francis Drake and the other corsairs and buccaneers to Pedro Santana to the U.S. Marines who ruled the streets in the 20’s to all the presidents who have counted their own ballots and to the rich 300 year history of smuggling across the border with Haiti or through customs. Despite what one might say about any contemporory political figures in the US, and despite what uglinesses US foreign policy has wrought or is working, the basic desire there is the desire for justice, for just behaviour, just rewards and for just punishments. Even if this underlying principle is perverted beyond recognition 99% of the time, it is still the underlying principle. In the DR justness is not the underlying principle, profit (or at least evading loss) is and any laws that favor fairness over gain are ignored. Columbus came for profit, as did Drake the pirate, as did Napolean and as did Toussaint and Soulouque the Haitian invaders and, it is safe to say that outgoing Presidents of the Republic today still enjoy sacking the treasury on their way out the door, if not on their way in as well, when they can manage it.

Police Feb, 10

On last Friday afternoon the replacement guagua, a white one, was finally ready so picked it up around 5 in the afternoon. The only major fix before I could drive it was to switch the driver’s and passenger’s front seats because the one on the driver’s side could not be adjusted back and it was so far forward that I could not get my foot to the brake. The body of the thing evidently was from a Daihatsu built for Hong Kong or Great Britain with the steering wheel on the right.

Saturday morning while following a string of cars through the street light at Hipermercado Olé an AMET policeman who had been directing traffic in the intersection waved me over to the side of the road and asked me why I had driven through the red light and I said that he had waved me through it. He looked over my paperwork, walked back and forth to his motorcycle a couple of times, exchanged a few words with another cop and told me to have a nice day and that I could go.

Saturday afternoon I drove down Maximo Gomez to pick up Altagracia after work and was pulled over by another cop directing traffic because I did not have my Revista on the windshield. The revista is like a safety inspection sticker in the States although,usually, without any actual inspection. I have seen the renewal stickers for sale in kiosks in front of supermarkets in March when the old ones expire. He did not care that I had bought the car only the day before and had not had time to get a revista and besides my title had not even been issued yet which you need to apply for a revista he then confiscated my driver’s license and said that I could get it back after paying my fine at the AMET building and he gave me directions on how to get there.

So after finally learning that I could probably get a revista with my temporary transit title or registration I went to Obras Publicas or the DMV on San Cristobal and just as I was pulling into the gated parking lot a man came up and showed me his ID card wich was hanging on his neck and got in next to me and we drove a few yards down th road. I figured this was the safety road test-- then he started filling out a paper form that was stapled to the sticker and when he showed me the paper I could see that it was about a 10th generation photocopy including the stamp. When I pressed him he admitted that the revista was a counterfeit but would only cost me 1000 pesos and that Obras Publicas had run out of revistas for the month anyway and, after hesitating, I bought the revista from him. After he stuck it to my windshield he told me that if I brought the police back he would say hehad never seen me before. About two minutes after I drove off I realized what an idiot I had been because AMET would surely want to see some kind of receipt or paperwork before they gave me back my license. I almost turned around and went back to buy a real revista from the real Obras Publicas, but I didn’t. I took a different route home to avoid the Metro construction mess on Gomez and got pulled over AGAIN, this time by a National Police who leaned in my window, glanced cursorily over my paperwork and glanced at my new phony revista, asked me if I had any pistols and then asked for soda money. I had 10 pesos in my shirt pocket, which obviously were not enough but 50 more were. A $2 shakedown.

When I got home I went online and ordered a replacement license from the Massachusetts DMV-- AMET can keep the one they have. In the meantime I will print out and laminate a new license of my own from a scan I have in my laptop and I will cross the bridge of renewing my fake revista when I get to it.

Friday Feb 10 cont--

Kiki has been arrested again. Evidently, while he was working Customs on the Haitian frontier, his roommate, who unbeknownst to anybody had recently completed a 10 year prison stint for rape, was surprised in the act with a 10 year old Haitian girl on the border by a Dominican police who fired at him but he ran off and the cop then gave the naked girl his shirt to cover up with and then Kiki was found eating dinner in front of the TV at his grandmother’s and was arrested until he tells where the perp might be hiding.

Altagracia had been missing him mightily of late-- she had never been more than a month without seeing one of her kids before-- but with the news of the incarceration she called Elias Piña to arrange for some food to be brought to the jail and said that since he didn’t do it (and she called more than one source to affirm that he didn’t do it) that they would let him out soon enough and would probably not beat him up too badly.

Now it has turned out that Kiki is also being held for beating up a Haitian and cooking and eating one of his roosters. Altagracia is still not considering bailing him out, “So if he’s in for a few months maybe he’ll learn,” she said.

Feb. 12, Sunday

I always sort of hoped that the wisdom that comes with age would have some kind of practical application.

There have been several articles in the papers about the AMET situation. Exactly one week after losing my license to a AMET cop the chief of AMET declared no more license confiscations in the streets and that a computer system had been developed to keep track of tickets and fines not paid and so on. But some cops kept on confiscating and they have been, reportedely, punished. The stories about getting one’s license back include tales of lines at the AMET building of more than one day waits and of one having to paw through bags and boxes of confiscated licenses grouped only by by State and country of origin.

Tomorrow, I suppose, I will reluctantly begin the retrieval process because, also reportedly, any outstanding fine goes on one’s record and ever leaving the country by legal means-- like from an airport for example-- becomes problematical. I am going to figure that they are not going to care that I do not have a legal revista and just going to rty to pay the unjust fine to clear my record, get the license (or not, if that line is long too) and get out.

Feb 23, Thursday, 2006

On the day my ticket would expire and,presumably, become a more serious infraction, I went to AMET to settle up. I got there at about 10:30 and settled into my line. After a little over an hour I got to the window, the cashier glanced at my summons and told me to go wait on that other line after lunch to appear before a judge. I got back early from lunch and was the fifth person to be heard. I explained to the little man seated between a gaggle of clerks that I had bought the minibus on a Friday afternoon and was unfairly ticketed on the next day which was a Saturday when a revista could not be procured. He brusquely asked me if the minibus was new or used and after I answered imported used he pronounced a fine of 40 pesos. I paid after a short wait on the next line and then took my receipt upstairs to retrieve my license. Upstairs was a parking garage and along one side was a line of folding 8 foot long tables covered with steel desk drawers all filled with rubber banded bundles of driver’s licenses. There were thousands of them. A police woman took my receipt and after thoroughly riffling the Maryland bundle found my license in the middle of a pack of about 150 Masachusetts licenses.

As I was walking away from the AMET building I noticed two street signs. One was a One Way sign pointing to the left and the other was an AMET This Way > sign pointing to the right against the one way traffic <.

Kiki is still in jail.

EXTRA ¡ALTAGRACIA HAS LEFT THE PENSION! and she managed to get most of her sevarance pay, here called the liquidación, of about 13,000 pesos. Sat. the 18th. Since then we have heard that the other employees-- Marta, Nelly and Julis are desparately seeking their liquidacións because they are now being made to share the chores Altagracia left and they can’t hack it.

So far we have spent two days getting Niningo’s probable hernia checked out. We first went to Robert Reid Cabral Children’s Hospital and after a two hour wait were told that Niningo, at 16, was too old for their services because when it was crowded the cut off age was reduced to 13. We then walked up to Mata Hambre Hospital Emergency room and, after a brief exam were referred to Padre Billini in the Zona Colonial. Because we had a referral we were able to cut one of the lines and Niningo was seen by a doctor who turned out to be related on the Alvarez side. The next day we came back for blood and urine testing and tomorrow we we will return once more for the results and, perhaps, a final diagnosis.

Saturday Rick and I toured in the minibus going to Monte Plata where the National Games are being held (in direct competition with the Winer Olimpics) and we watched a quarter of physical basketball.

Sunday Rick was here, and so with Altagracia out of work, were able to go to Playa Palenque. Chavela could not go because of her work in the Banca. It was Niningo’s first time ever at the beach although he grew up about five miles from it.

DR and Neotony, mami etc.

March 1, 2006

While the hospital would have been happy to perform sonograms and more blood and stool testing, one ot he doctors suggested that he might only be dehydrated and so, over the weekend he drank a lot of water and now feels fine and is pissing clear.

Article in today’s newspaper says that Obras Publicas is indeed out of the plastic stickers for the Revistas and there is a moratorium on renewals until more can be made.

Altagracia took the bus out to visit Kiki in the prison at Elias Piña on Sunday and reported that it is the nicest one that she has ever visited him in and is equipped with new mattresses, cold drinking water, television, an infirmary and has computer courses available. Kiki was very thin but perhaps because of an aching molar that was to be worked on by the prison dentist the next day. The official charges seem to be whacking a Haitian with a machete and stealing and eating one of his roosters and although Kiki says he didn’t do it and Altagracia says she believes him she is not going to bail him out saying that maybe he will learn this time and besides, the lawyer wanted 10,000 pesos which was too much.

With more than half of the population younger than 24, this is a country of youth and, therefore, of the solipsism of youth.

Street Dogs

General noise

If traffic behavior reflects a national consciousness what can be interpreted about the Dominican Republic by driving around?

With half of the population younger than 24, the Dominican Republic is a country populated by teenagers

The leading cause of death of young men is motorcycle accidents.

Mon. March 13, 2006

We buried Mocho today. Mocho was a thin, sad, one-armed man with ears like open barndoors who hung around the colmado and could often be found lounging against the doors of our marquisina alone or with other tigueres. Mocho-- who was not called Mocho before-- lost most of his left arm after witnessing some kind of disagreement among some tigueres and when he went home one of the tigueres followed him, entered the house just behind him and whacked his arm badly enough with a machete that the amputation was completed in a hospital. One might translate Mocho into English as Stump or Gimp. He had been reported to be a thief and one of the neighbors reported him to the police as such and he spent three months in Victoria prison before getting out in December. He was even thinner and sadder looking and he told Altagracia once that he was not a bad man but that drugs had destroyed his life and that nobody should mess with them. He always greeted me with a smile and he never asked for money. It was rumored that he had contracted HIV in prison. We saw him the day before yesterday hunkered under the roble tree across the street that is covered with the little white trumpet shaped flowers that are supposed to bring good luck and when we asked how he was he just shook his head. He died yesterday around lunch time at his mother’s house.

This morning many people hung out on the street waiting for Mocho to be brought out of the house on the next block where he was being encoffined and eventually 6 tigueres carried out the box which was in the shape of an elongated hexagon, was blue and had a little glass window over Mocho’s face with a hinged wooden flap that could be closed over it. He was loaded into a city ambulance and a large guagua showed up to help carry mourners to the Municipal Cemetery here just outside Villa Mella. There was a cavalcade that included the guagua, about 4 private cars one of which was ours, and Cheque’s moribund pickup truck with at least 15 people riding in the back and that threatened to tip over at every curb or pothole because of a nearly flat right rear tire. The pick-up’s passengers boisterously passed Presidente grandes back and forth with both the drivers and the passengers of the 10 or so motorbikes circling in accompaniment. Every so often an empty beer bottle was hurled from the back of the truck toward the bushes.

The unruly cavalcade turned off Avenida Jacobo Macluta down a dirt road that was being prepared for paving toward Las Casabes and the Municipal burying ground. There were many more naked children than usual along the roadside and the colmados were full of dust from the dry clayey gravel being spread on the road bed. There was a small building at the entrance to the cemetery outside of town and a woman ran out as we passed saying that we had forgotten to pick up the cross and so one of the motorcycles turned back to get it.

The two lane dirt tracks ran through the grounds and scrubby brush overgrew many of the white stone or wooden crosses that marked the scattered grave sites. In places the crosses were almost in the road and it was hard to tell if the road had encroached on the graves or if those dead were planted that close to the road; perhaps to shorten the walk. Off in the bushes could be seen concrete sidewalks that started and stopped in the middles of nowhere. With tires spinning dust we wended our way up the last steep little hill and parked. Many of the men immediately turned their backs on the scene and pissed.

From this humble weedy summit the city could be seen in the distance and here and there in the scrub could be seen groups of freshly filled graves, the backfill still mounded up high enough so that I thought at first that the dead were just covered over on top of the ground. Six drunk tigueres carried Mocho’s open coffin down to a group of fresh mounds where his grave was neatly dug about 3 and a half feet deep. When the crowd of about 50 had gathered, the pallbearers guided the open coffin gently down the pile of dirt it was perched on and into the grave where a cemetery worker was waiting to settle it into its final position. A few of the tigueres sobbed last words emotionally and unintelligibly and, after placing a small Dominican flag in Mocho’s hand folded on his chest, they closed the box and shut the little window flap and began to backfill by hand as well as with mattocks and shovels-- I tossed in a clod too-- and the job was finished in a few minutes. The white cross on which was scrawled Benito Angel Mendez 12-3-06 (March 12th, 2006) was set and we climbed back up the hill. There was a brief commotion when Mocho’s sister began to wail that he had been nothing but a shit in life and that to have any kind of ceremony was an excercise in hypocrisy but many of Mocho’s friends took exception and several offered to fight someone, or even anyone, over the matter and Julio actually drew his pistol but everyone eventually drove quietly out of the cemetery and, after stopping at a colmado in Las Casabes to replenish the supplies of Presidente, returned to the barrio.

I had felt uncomfortable crashing a burial for someone I hardly knew, but Altagracia explained that, here, it is a case of the more the merrier and that it also was a chance to support the poor of the barrio. As relative newcomers to the neighborhood, and as relative odballs because I am a gringo who walks a cocker spaniel on a leash every morning and we own a car, attending a burial of a local unfortunate in potter’s field was a nice thing to do and showed that we cared about our neighbors and belonged, even if peculiarly. She also said that she has seen a lot of rich people buried with many fewer well wishers in attendence.

Fri April 7, 2006 Flea Market

Altagracia returned yesterday afternoon after spending 4 days in Elias Piña trying to spring Kiki from prison. The newest version of why is in is that Isido, who we really trusted, as the Alcalde, turned in Kiki’s name as the perpetrator who beat and whacked the Haitian with a machete even though the Haitian says he does not know who hit him and Altagracia met the Haitian who, she says cannot even barely speak Haitian and only has a small mark on his wrist that could have been from years before. Kiki was ORIGINALLY arrested in conjunction with the rape and it seems that the ammended charges for assault are dated the 10th but the actual alleged beating took place on the 13th.

While she was gone I built a frame to hold privacy curtains in the corner of the kitchen where she has her altal set up where she reads taza and I built a table to use in the flea market so I will not have to continuously borrow the taza table. The rough lumber for the 2´x4´table came to about $20 or about 600 pesos. The flea market has been erratic but last Sunday I sold $40 worth of fotos and some people claim to be planning on returning with more money. Most of Antique Flea Market Sundays is spent either sitting in the shade talking with other vendors or reading (also in the shade). I bring tunafish sandwiches with lettuce and tomato and folks seem very impressed with the preparation although they stick with the plato del día lunch special from La Despensa on el Conde which consists of rice, beans and chicken for about 80 pesos.

This Pulga de Antiguedades convenes on Sundays yearround in the Plaza de Maria de Toledo who was the wife of Nicholas de Ovando who was governor of Santo Domingo around 1500 and who was responsible for instituting the mandatory work sentences for the Taíno in the mines where most workers died within 9 months from disease, overwork, starvation or broken hearts. The plaza is on La Calle de las Damas which is considered the oldest street in the New World andis in the oldest part of the colonial city and right across the street is what is now the 4 star Hotel Ovando which was originally the home of the Ovandos themselves. In a recess inone corner of the plaza is a small chalkboard with initials etched down one side and a place to put numbers which is how the tourist guides, who spend most of the day lounging on the steps and talking about either baseball, women or politics, determine whose turn it is to give the next tour.There are about 10 vendors.

Pedro, 60ish fat balding and friendly but who tried to start a political argument by claiming that Pedro Santana was the true father of the republic and not Juan Pablo Duarte and who has a tent with glass display cases to display jewelry, medals, trinkets and who speaks English and is planning to move to Fort Worth, Texas next year and who has lived in NY City.

A tall man who, with his newly pregnant wife, sets up a larger tent and sells new jewelery-- amber, larimar and silver and even comes Saturdays even though there are hardly any other vendors to help attract customers.

An elderly fat, sometimes bearded man who sells trinkets, broken camaras, piles of obsete coins, war medals and used silver and larimar jewelery with his son and a granddaughter who also has a large tent.

An even fatter Frenchman, who looks like an enormous Rodney Dangerfield and who sometimes merengues by himself while waiting for a customer, sets up a row of broken,sloping tables of varying heights along the far wall where there is usually shade and sells old watches, walkng canes,mother of pearl buttons and bric-a-brac.

Sanivar, frail and thin and 50ish who, usually with a harsh looking but friendly woman who visibly relishes her lunch special, sells genuine Taíno artifacts-- well some of the smaller ones might be genuine but I understand that the nicer pieces come from modern Taíno artifact factories in the interior.

One week a man came who leaned a board against the wall of the parking lot next door and tried to sell plastic decorative refridgerator magnets. Sometimes people wander in carrying an old lamp or pair of reading glasses or a wad of baseball cards and sell or consign them to a vendor. A coffe vendor passes through carrying urns of sweet black coffee, shoeshine boys are always present and, in the afternoon, a man passes through with a 5 gallon white plastic pail filled with ice selling bottles of mabí, a slightly fermented, champagney,not too sweet, juice made from bejuco de india.

In the front of the plaza, in the sun, are a large amount of swords, statuettes, used books and posters of Marylin Monroe, laid out on the ground and leaning against the wall. The vendor darts out from distant shade when a potential customer approaches his wares

Estelle, 20ish, tall lean and pretty who lays out a tablecloth on the ground and tries to sell her 15 or so used books. Last week she also had a vicks vaporizer for sale although she did not know what it was even though Bicksbopperroob is very popular here for everything from headaches to loss of appetite to chest congestion, as well as a used pair of shoes and three small ceramic ducks. She sits in a borrowed chair or on the carry on suitcase that she carries her books in and squints out into the sun beating down on the plaza and sighs and says, “É difícil.” (It’s tough) Sometimes a man with his own car drops her off with her suitcase and some similar things of his to sell but she says that he is just a friend, that she is single and has no children.

Carlos, alert, 30ish, shaved head; who brings antique brass platters and urns, looking glasses, old silverware, a mahogony coffee table and a three foot high Haitian carved bald eagle but has not sold anything in three weeks. His area is next to mine so we sit in the shade under the limoncillo tree and chat. He works with his brother in a glass and mirror shop during the week and has a 6 year old daughter who lives with his ex who left Carlos for no obvious reason. We observed a slowly passing couple-- a pretty, young dominican woman and a middle aged, lean,slumping Italian looking man, pause, lean against the far wall to, apparently, get to know each other before adjourning somewhere more private. This event gave Carlos the chance to rant against the imorality of Dominican women and how they so easily line up boyfriends, called chulos, who are not really johns in the sense of blatant prostitution, but are sexual companions who buy presents and food and clothes in return for the intimate favors which are perhaps enjoyed by both anyway. So, I reckon, that Carlos’s woman began lining up chulos which is what led to the end of his marraige.

Partly because it is nearly summer, and partly because of the economy, not everyone sells something every day. If customers have spent much time talking at a booth later a vendor will stop by and ask-- Did you sell? and if yes-- For how much? and then congratulate the seller. Some of the vendors arrive with their boxes of stuff by taxi which can cost $15 round trip. It is a long day when one sells nothing.

I have installed a thermostat in the guaguita and am adjusting the carburetor as I go-- almost literally since I can lean over toward the passenger side while I am driving (or idling by the side of the road really) and turn the adjustment screws on the carb with the passenger seat flipped back out of the way. I am looking forward to the next mileage check.

Niningo just asked me in what countries Portugese is spoken and before I could answer Jhoanglish yelled confidently from the next room-- “France.”

April 20, 2006

The other day I saw a GIANTIC earth moving excavator that had fallen apart while digging for the Metro. The cab together with the boom, stick and bucket had tipped off the big round bearing that sits on the tracks and fell in the hole it was digging. Most of the towers are done and many have the crosspiece placed on top that will carry the tracks. The masons that are putting on the finish coat of stucco set up pipe staging, 5 sections high, in the left lane of traffic and hope for the best. 1 of about 5 such setups has warning pilons or even sawhorses arranged to divert traffic.

Today on the way to the Plaza de Maria de Toledo to try to sell fotos there was a long tapon on the bridge and it turned out to be a stalled pick up truck that was heaped full of motorcycle and bicycle rims in the center lane.

Pulga de Antiguedades

table, lona, french girl, Birchard, guides, Estelle

White Guaguita, Mario, Andres

Kiki still in Jail, chavela feisty, Bilita pregnant and eating lunch at who knows how many other houses, Niningo sleepy.

10. Traffic accidents are biggest killer

Traffic accidents are the leading cause of death in the Dominican Republic, according to data from the Ministry of Public Health, as reported in Listin Diario. The number of traffic accidents increased from 22.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1995 to 48.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2005, which means that the number of accidents has doubled in just 10 years. The number of vehicles also doubled during that period. In 1996 there were 1.6 million vehicles, and by 2005 there were three million, said Dr. Nicanor Rodriguez Almanzar, coordinator of the Ministry of Public Health's Program to Prevent and Reduce Traffic Fatalities.

According to the study, 70% of those who died were 15-45 years old. Likewise, Rodriguez pointed to the high cost for the state of dealing with traffic accidents.

He said that average cost of a traffic accident patient is RD$23,000. Most traffic accident cases involving people who do not have private insurance are taken to the Dario Contreras Hospital in Santo Domingo.

Three of every five motor vehicle accidents involve motorcycles and 70% of these accidents are attributed to careless driving. Males from 12 to 15 are the group that suffers the most deaths in accidents and boys are twice as likely to have an accident as girls. Eleven minors die each month in traffic accidents. The seriousness of the problem is accentuated when the report states that accidents involving minors under the age of 15 constitute 4% of the total death rate for the Dominican Republic. Rodriguez also pointed out that the real figures are probably even higher, since a significant proportion of accidents involving minors are never reported to the authorities.

Rodriguez says, "Traffic accidents are the cause of death that can be most effectively prevented." He said there is a need to establish prevention measures, oblige drivers to respect the traffic laws, improve their vehicles' conditions, and guarantee timely assistance to victims.

Along the same lines, in an interview in Hoy last week the Dominican Rehabilitation Association warned that motorcycle-related accidents are the leading cause of the worst epidemic of amputations, deformities and handicaps nationwide. The ADR has begun a campaign to raise public awareness and encourage drivers to follow traffic rules.

14. Be very careful while driving

A scientific panel meeting in Paris, France has placed the Dominican Republic as one of the most dangerous places to drive in the world. In the Dominican Republic, the level of accidents and fatalities exceeds even that of the African nations. The group pointed out that there are 1.2 million traffic fatalities throughout the world in 2002 and called for serious steps to be taken to reduce this number in the coming years. The World Bank has estimated that by 2026 traffic fatalities will increase by 66%. In the wealthier countries the increase will be 28% but in places like China it is estimated that it will reach a 92% increase and India a 142% increase. In high-income European countries, there are 11 traffic fatalities for every 100,000 inhabitants, and in Africa the number climbs to 24/100,000. In countries with reliable statistics, countries like El Salvador and the Dominican Republic report 41 or 42 traffic deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In these developing countries the majority of the dead are pedestrians or people traveling on two-wheeled vehicles. According to the researchers, the "majority of the people who died on the roads in 2002 were not inside vehicles."

dead horse

cleaning cistern kids playing inside

they finaly killed herman

broken glass at pulga

other altagracia, dolores

anahai in Baní, in hospital

skidding cement truck

roble tree pruned

colgate and marijuana

14. Drug trafficking spots

According to a report in Hoy newspaper based on data from the National Drug Control Department (DNCD), the areas where most drugs have been confiscated are Alma Rosa, Los Mina, Ensanche Luperon, Capotillo, Guachupita, Cristo Rey, Herrera, Villa Consuelo, Villa Maria, La Zurza, Las Caobas, Villa Agricolas, and Gualey in the National District and Boca Chica in the Province of Santo Domingo. With the exception of Boca Chica, which is an industrial and tourism enclave, most of these areas are low-income areas. The report indicates that current prices for drugs in the DR are: RD$400, RD$600 and RD$1,000 for an ecstasy pill; RD$250-RD$300 for a kilo of cocaine; RD$35-RD$50 for a portion of crack, and RD$20-RD$30 for a marijuana cigarette. Heroin goes for RD$9,000 the pound, or RD$200 for 100mg.

Mateo Moquete, chief of operations of the DNCD told parents to warn their children that they could be offered drugs when visiting high-priced nightspots.

The DNCD has considerably increased drug arrests and confiscations since the change of government. In the last four months of the year, the DNCD has confiscated 2,711 grams of drug in the National District and 974 in Santo Domingo Este municipality in 37 operations. Marijuana is the most frequently confiscated drug.