time and heat

It’s been a week since I arrived in Santo Domingo, and I’m surprised by how much we’ve done. Time feels totally different here – more stretched out and elastic, like taffy – and I’m not sure if it’s being new to the culture again or the spontaneity with which things happen here, or both. My first two days here were spent totally stunned that I had decided to spend almost 3 whole months here. From arriving at the airport to riding through La Victoria to arriving at the hogar, everything was familiar yet new all over again. The road from the airport in Santo Domingo to La Victoria is still filled with crazy drivers, smog, fruit vendors and trash. There were notably more palm trees along the road and throughout the city. Maria Elena pointed to all the green saying, “It’s prettier now.” The town of La Victoria is most well known around here for it’s jail, which resides just outside the town, and is a lot more run down looking than I remember it. The town itself consists of many small, brightly colored shops and houses clustered tightly around a central park and a 70s-esque catholic church. There are only two types of houses here – those made with cement blocks and those made of wood slats, the latter of which always seem to be leaning slightly to one side. The streets are bustling with people, vendors, dirt bikes and people sitting in plastic chairs outside their houses just watching everyone walk by. My favorite is the occasional “chiquita banana” woman walking by with a tub full of fruit on her head. Basically everyone is black. Even riding in the back of Maria Elena’s brother’s car, people noticed me right away. Right away a couple of guys who saw me through the open window started shouting, “My visa! My visa!” So that’s why men are always hissing and kissing and catcalling at me here… I like that they were so straightforward about it.

The girls are all much bigger now (it’s been almost 6 years), and I even mistook one girl for her older sister, who was about that size the last time I saw her. The heat here is incredible. The two times I’ve been here before it was winter, when the heat finally lets up a little for a couple of months. Sweating through two entire outfits a day is a new experience for me altogether. Thankfully the new house is much more comfortable than the old one, with ceiling fans in almost every room. It’s big too. There are two separate bedrooms for the girls, which are both huge – one for the chiquitas (the little ones) and one for the grandes (the big girls). They sleep in bunk beds up against the walls, leaving a big open space in the middle and on one wall they each have their own little closet. Connected to each bedroom is a bathroom with various showers and toilets. My room is in the front of the house near Maria Elena’s room, and the two of us share a nice bathroom. I’m really impressed with the new house. It’s bigger and nicer than I imagined it. It’s all concrete and painted pale yellow. All the bedrooms, bathrooms and the office have sliding glass windows, which is really rare around here. All the floors are made of tile and they are mopped at least once a day so I have to tread carefully now because I’ve almost slipped several times, and there’s nothing soft about that landing. I found out recently that it was the Japanese embassy that gave them the house. In the kitchen there are glasses that say Japan on one side and Coca-Cola on the other.

“Madrina” means Godmother and it is the girls’ name for Maria Elena, so I’ve taken to calling her that too. (Some of the girls who came to the hogar when they were really little, as young as 6 months, call her “Mami”.) Madrina and I got to work right away planning the garden, and things were moving a little too fast at first…  I told Madrina that if we are going to buy tools we are going to need a place to store them safely. There is another little house – a gazebo really, but house-shaped – behind the big house that is a great space for the girls to play (also where I do yoga in the mornings). There is a little space behind the little house, between it and the chain link fence that surrounds the entire property. So we started looking back there as a possible space to build a tool shed. Before I knew it Maria Elena had a guy over to look at the space and give an estimate. If we made it out of cement blocks it would have been 20,000 pesos, or 575 dollars, which is way too much, and Maria Elena had her brother come over with another guy to look at the space. He said that with iron bars and sheets of wavy metal (the same stuff everyone here uses for roofing and fencing) he could build it for 13,000 pesos, around 375 dollars. So we basically said ok and said we would meet him (and his beat up truck) at the store where they sell the metal later that day.

All of this was moving faster than I wanted. My plan originally was that I was going to build it with the girls, and that we would use sustainable building techniques. After the first guy came I had tried explaining to Maria Elena that there are other ways of building that could end up being a lot cheaper – like the earthship method of using cans and bottles as “bricks” and connecting them with cement. Many houses have been built this way successfully and still Maria Elena somehow did not believe me. She kept telling me that there are strong winds here during hurricane season and that anything that is not built well will fall down. She wondered too, where we would get the cans and bottles because the glass ones people bring back to the store, and all the others, according to her, people collected early in the morning after big nights of drinking to earn a little money. On our way to meet the metal man, I looked out the car window at all the piles of trash by the side of the road. By the time we got to the supermarket, where I was going to take money out of the atm, I figured I had seen enough bottles to construct a full size house. I pointed it out to Maria Elena, feeling a little embarrassed about how persistent I was being but not letting that stop me. She said, “Si, Margot, but there are bacteria in there. Very dirty.” (All this is in Spanish by the way, which I’m doing my best to translate.) There it was. The real reason people aren’t open to using trash to build is because trash is actually really gross here and nobody wants to touch it. It’s a big problem. Maria Elena says, “este es el pais mas basurero que hay” which basically translates to “this is the biggest trash-can of a country that there is”, based purely on statistical information, obviously, but it’s basically true.

When we were on our way to the metal man from the supermarket, I finally spoke up about my hesitance to move forward so quickly on constructing a slapped together tool shed for 400 bucks. Then Maria Elena and Neco, her brother, and I put our heads together and decided then and there that the tool shed really isn’t necessary at all right now. We need to focus on the garden – and yes, we will need some tools, but for now we can store them in the little house on a shelf above the bathroom where they store the hoola hoops. I had my doubts about the shed the whole time and the relief I suddenly felt was another sign that this was not a good way to start the garden project. I had originally planned to make a shed before getting tools because I wasn’t sure if there would be a place to store them safely, but now that I’m here it’s clear that the shed is the least important part of the project, and that we just need to start the garden. We drove by the place where they sell the metal and gave the metal man some pesos for his time and told him we would let him know what our plans are later. And then we went to buy tools. We bought a wheelbarrow, a shovel and a rake.