Adventure

I forgot to mention I´ve been adventuring a bit, and it has been awesome. I saw some beaches, lakes, mountains, new towns, the capital, crazy things, and enjoyed myself. This weekend I´m going to climb Pico Duarte, the carribean´s highest peak. Take care.

Death

The shouting only increases as time passes. I can hardly see what´s happening. There is a flurry of feathers working its way around in a whirling circle.



I can see faces, all of them male, full of emotion, passion, and desire. Surely something important is happening. Freedom or liberty must be being won. Lives must be being protected or enhanced somehow. Nothing short of a historic even could possibly be occuring.



Then a voice rises above them all, ¨ES PORQUE SOY MACHO!¨and repeats this over and over. I catch sight of the face screaming these words. It is gleeful and excited, and attached to a small and weak body dressed in a pink polo shirt and slacks.



The voices reach a fever pitch, screams and rìpped vocal cords from all directions. Nations are freed from slavery with this much excitement.



Then, completely unexpectedly, the shouts and screams turn to howls of laughter. Loud and unsubsiding chuckles, cackles, and wheezes. Something has changed, and looking around at the faces, ranging in color from white to red to black, and in age from toddler to great-grandfather, I can see that the seriousness has gone from the moment. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and now it´s okay to make jokes about it.



Leandro gives me a playful shove and makes a throat slitting motion while opening up his lips into a wide smile that displays his schockingly whit teeth. ¨What do you think? I told you I know what I´m doing!¨



I´m still looking into the crowd. There, in the small space surrounded by laughter and masculinity, are two birds, and half a life.



One cock, barely alive, is walking in circles, while the other, fully dead, is dragged behind him. The winner has just embedded the blade, attached to his claws with tape, into the head of the other. Wearily he stumbles around trying to dislodge his foot from the corpse that follows him, not appearing to enjoy the victory.



What do I say to Leandro when he asks me for my opinion about the two clumps of feathers covered in blood? I say ¨yea.¨ A non-commital commital that neither supports nor debases his pastime. The question I probably should have asked is, ¨You were right, Bird X did win, but do you really know what you´re doing? Or is it me who´s confused?¨ The laughing continues.



We´ve come to Biafara, a small mountain town to the north, just to have a look around. Leandro has been asking me to go with him on the back of his motorcycle. So, I finally came.



This is a pretty little place tucked into the hills surrounding it. Like most small villages it runs on agriculture. There are barely enough kids for a school, and yet this town is the area´s capital for nightlife, women, and cock fighting.



Leandro doesn´t ¨play¨ cocks much. He´s too busy working in the field and as a ¨cobrador¨ for the guaguas that run through. At age 25 he has 3 children, one 10 year old girl, and two young boys. The mother of his girl now lives in spain and his daughter lives in San Juan with her maternal grandmother. The two boys live in Lost Toros with their mother, who is Leandro´s only ¨serious¨ girl. He has introduced me to several other young women he terms ¨mi novia.¨



On our way here we talked alot about agriculture, but mostly about money and women. I´ve learned how to force conversations into wider topics pretty well, but it is impossible to avoid talking about those two. Leandro is a straight-forward guy, and I like that about him. I know exactly what I´m in for when I´m with him, and can therefor prepare for, or avoid, what´s coming.



Today is an exception. ´We stumbled across this scene, and when Leandro asked me if I wanted to have a look, I figured I should do so at least once. Alot of the male Dominicans I know raise ¨gallos¨ (cocks), but until now, I hadn´t seen a fight.



Normally I don´t like to condem things before I experience them or am sufficiently informed somehow. That being said, I walked into this crowd fairly sure I wouldn´t being opened up to the enlightenments of cock-fighting.



¨Gringo!¨they had shouted as we entered into this backyard ring made of stretched out tin cans. They weren´t shouting at me though. Here I´m invisible because the action takes priority. ¨Gringo¨was the name being used for a white bird being sized up. They were declaring that he would be a winner, though Leandro disagreed.



Before the fight had started money was flying around. The ¨trainers,¨ about 6 of them, were walking around the ring and testing their birds on one another to find the matches with the most chemistry. They would pet their birds slowly and carefully, pulling the long shimmering tailfeathers softly to their ends, as if caressing a lover´s hair in a honeymoon suite.



Then they would jut their bird out like a torpedo at another bird, ramming its face into that of the other, to provoke a fight. Some birds seemed to show no interest in the scene, whereas others, such as Gringo, seemed inclined to be gladiators.



The first pair was selected, and the cocks were brought over to the official. This man is serious, and I feel inclined to respect him on account of this. He sits on the only chair present, wearing and old cowboy style shirt and a facial expression of that of a priest performing a rite, or a doctor in surgery. His job is to weigh the birds to ensure they are more or less equal in size. Then he tapes on the blades, his hands nimble and concentrated as he turns the birds´natural form of protection into weapons of agression. He is a doctor of sorts I suppose, performing an operation, but one that hastens death rather than prevents it.



Once armed, Gringo and his opponent were held up. More money had seemed to fly around. Countless hours of field work were put down on these birds by men whose families lack decent water and live in houses with dirt floors. The calmest beings present were me and the birds, who seemed oblivious to the attention.



Then the ring was cleared, and silence was almost achieved. The owners of the two combatants moved closer, and began thrusting their birds at each other once again. The birds took to it, and as they were let loose the quiet was buried by the voices.



I am at the back, and had craned my neck to see, even though I didn´t really want to. They fought like ninjas, half flying and half running, pecking and slashing and pinning each other down. I couldn´t tell who was winning, though Gringo was already covered in blood. A few minutes passed and then I could see an end approaching. Gringo stopped fighting. He stood there as the other bird buffeted him around. He had lost the will to fight and the desire to live.



That was when ¨machö,¨the winning owner, had started to shout. Just before Gringo recieved his final blow and the laughter began. I don´t understand why it was that the time of death, the second a life stopped, was the moment that laughter began. I guess I really don´t understand much of any of this, and that´s why I just struggled to answer Leandro.



Gringo´s owner stoops down and disconnect the bird. He too laughs when, as he removes the blades and tosses the bird outside the ring, someone shouts ¨Make a stew!¨ That person has offered me something to latch onto, that maybe there is a hint of a purpose to all of this. Yet I doubt he´ll make a meal out of the tattered flesh he´s thrown aside.



Another fight begins, and I don´t put much effort into watching. I´m lost in my thoughts, searching around inside of me for answers to questions about life, humanity, and culture.



The fight ends quickly. This bird has died from a punctured lung. His body too, a splash of colors and patterns more beautiful than any human creation, is tossed out of the ring.



I think Leandro senses my feelings, and he asks me if I want to go. I say yes. Back on his motorcycle, we head out of the hills and down to our valley as the sun begins to set.



I don´t say anything. My mind is still inside of itself.



Why does this sport exist, and why do they enjoy it? Who is they? Doesn´t the history of mankind turn up examples like this and worse? A history of fascination with pain and death. War, gladiators, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, wrestling, boxing, sport hunting, and domestic abuse. What do we enjoy about it? Is it a sensation of power? Is it that in seeing another life end we feel like we ensure ours continues, having satisfied the grim reaper for a day?



I don´t find the answers, but I do come across more questions to ask and some that I shouldn´t.



I shouldn´t wonder, ¨What is it about these Dominicans that makes them like this?¨ That would be narrowsighted for two reasons. One, because Dominicans are human and I could simply ask why would I like this, and two, because cock-fighting is just one example of a global and historical trend.



In realizing this I do find one answer. That is that I can´t expect to figure this out on the way back from Biafara if it´s something that has developed and embedded itself in reality over the course of mankind´s existence.



Not despairing, but still feeling a bit overwhelmed, I try to refocus on my surroundings. The fields zip by us in flashes of brilliant green and yellow, and the warm breeze from the ocean buffets our bodies and fills our shirts with air from far away places. Palm trees and coconuts throw shadows across the landscape dotted with grazing animals and tiny houses. The sun, further down in the west, is starting to sink down behind the mountains, casting the sky into a splash of orange, yellow, and red, as if it is exploding on impact somewhere in Haiti. I think to myself, ¨Pure beauty. Life is full of this.¨



It forces me to ask one final question. ¨How does anyone not living in the most horrible of conditions ever get this wrong, revelling in the ugliness of death when life hits them with beauty every second?¨ I smile.



¨Do you want to go again sometime?¨Leandro asks, turning his head to the side so I can hear him over the wind.



¨No thanks!¨I half shout back, without turning my head away from nature´s nightly fireworks, ¨Death isn´t my thing.¨







P.S. I don´t consider hunting and killing for food a part of this, as that isn´t an obsession with pain or death. It´s a pre-occupation with nutrition, a means to an end that can be carried out with respect and minimalized suffering.



P.P.S. Commenting on the amazing sincerity shown by fanatics and trainers also raises questions about all of the ¨Sports¨ out there. Why do we, whether Packer, Badger, Red Sox, or Arsenal fans, treat these games with such importance, to the point of neglecting necesities of ourselves, families, and others?



We get mad or sad when a team loses. We won´t remember that for long, but we will remember forever the times we were seriously injured, lost family members, and other such things. What will we think about at the end of this wonderful life? Not a 30-17 final score.

Because it´s been too long, this blog is too long...

Words are extremely powerful. They can do just about anything, start wars, build friendships, make money, and fill silences. You all know this, but you probably wouldn´t be able to guess correctly if I asked you to identify my current selection for most powerful words. Money? no. Family? no. Jesus? no. Love? no.


BANANA! Yes. These six letters are borderline magical, because they manage to conjure the image of a nice fruit, good with breakfast or in milkshakes, while burying the dirty, sweaty, slimy, machete-wielding truth.



I have encountered this truth, and am lucky to have the opportunity to expose it. Having been through so much to bring you this ¨boots on the ground¨coverage, I ask only that you listen. (There will be no opportunity for laughter.)


The Spanish word for bananas is chiefly platano, though here there are three names, plateno, guineo, and rulo, to denote the three varieties grown here. (Platanos are longer, guineos shorter and fatter, and rulos, my favorite, are by far the most suave, and are rumored to help diabetes.)



I find these names to be 1000 times more accurate than banana, not only due to the existence of more than one variety, but also because they are strong and intimidating, like the plant itself.


Calling this plant, which has been responsible for, among other things, WTO free-trade lawsuits, rainforest destruction, the overthrow of Guatemalan President Daniel Arbenz, a Gwen Stefani song, the soreness in my shoulders, and the domination of the lives of millions of tropical farmers, bananas, is like calling Antartica ¨Cabo San Lucas¨or re-naming racism ¨color-shyness.¨


For starters, there is the actual process of plantings and growing platenos, which I have been experiencing (suffering) first hand. There is no tossing of seeds into machine prepared earth involved in this. Instead there are sepas. These are the trunks of secondary and tertiary offshoots from a mature plant. (Just to give you a picture, the platano ¨tree¨is anywhere from 8 to 12 ft tall, witha soft, water filled trunk topped by wide and long leaves.) The offshoots can be anywhere from 2 to 8 feet tall at the time of sepa harvesting.


To obtain sepas, a farmer talks to another who happens to have a field already planted with mature platanos, and negotiates a per sepa price. As an example, our price was 1.5 pesos per sepa, which is around 4 cents US. He then gathers a crew of workers and an innocent and unsuspecting American kid who´s excited to ¨play with bananas¨and heads to said field so early in the morning that God is still asleep. The jopb starts with going around and digging up the trunks with a tool I would describe as a pick-shovel. This is particularily challenging considering the constant muddy star of the ground between the rows of the ¨banana forest¨.



Once uprooted, the work is divided into two parts, cleaning and carrying. Cleaning involves chopping the sepas down to size and removing chunks of worm-infested flesh with a machete. (Note, ¨to-size¨is very general, as some sepas are fist-sized and others are double Jon Atwell head size.)


Hauling involves going around and filling plastic rice sacks with sepas, shouldering them, and stumbling out through the swampish field complete with giant unseen spider webs and leaves that seems to intentionally slap people. The sacks, about 3 to 4 ft tall and weighing more than 100 lbs, are then dumped at the corner of the field closest to the path.


As my time machete in hand is restricted, on the (correct) assumption that sooner or later I will chop a finger, or hand, off, I was assigned to hauling. I don´t know how many sacks we filled, but time passed, and soon it was lunch. Platenos with spaghetti, 100% energy, but heavy on the stomach. We struggled onwards, and finished the first step of the process, so tired that we only had energy to hunt mangos for 10 mins.


Then came the next part, more hauling. Some farmers spring for trucks, others borrow horses, and some combine the two. Because we had collected sepas from 2 separate fields, one miles away from ours, and the other half a mile, we used a truck for one and a horse for the other. Filling the sacks and dumping them out at the edge of our field.


I was assigned to horse duty, which meant loading Gringo (which I named him for his white color) down with saddle bags first and two or three sacks on top, walking alongside to catch anything that fell. Just for kicks sometimes we´d shoulder a sack ourselves, showing solidarity with the Dominican stallion.


The sepas, after sitting out overnight, become slimy and slippery, and the fluids unexplicadly sting one´s cuticles. Thankfully this step is short, lasting only a half day. I had enough energy to find a more standard 8ish mangos and triumphantly rode Gringo back into town, finding the straw saddle surprisingly comfortable.


Step three, more hauling, though this time is is ¨al hombre¨whihc means Gringo got a day off. Maddeningly, we once aghain re-filled the sacks, begging the question ¨why not find more sacs and leave them filled?¨Yet such logic can not be applied to such an illogically powerful plant, so we loaded and hauled, this time dumping the sacks at intervals along the edge of the field.


Finally comes the big day, planting. The workers leave early, waking the roosters up on their way out, pocketing tiny flasks of coffee and carrying old liter soda bottles of water. The morning chill calls for long sleeves, but those are soon shed. Planting involves a horse and plow to dig furrows. The horseman pushes down hard on the plow while the horse pulls slowly, obeying the whip and the three principal ¨commands¨of ¨Diablo!¨Cono!¨and ¨Haitiano!¨ Behind them follow the rest, carrying the sepas and dumping one into the furrow at an interval of 4 feet. After covering the whole field, the workers go through and position the sepas in the best way possible, so they grow upwards. Then the horse and plow come through again to cover the sepas in dirt, and where needed hoes are used to patch up. Then they wait, and weed, until the plants gorw tall enough to sustain themselves and shade out weeds. It takes more than a year for them to produce fruit, and they can be left in production for almost three years at times. Harvesting involves chopping off the bunches, which are about the same size as a sack of sepas, and hauling them off to market.


Platanos are not eaten as a fruit here. They are a staple food, eaten unripened and plain. Producing them seems to be popular in the village right now, which means soon it won´t be. The farmers seems to follow each other, and in doing so flood the local market with the same commodity, sending the prices down and forcing them to plant something else. (at least it causes crop rotation, a positive side-effect.)



One thing that doesn´t change is the nature of the work. This living is made and maintained by hand and sweat. You can´t imagine the intensity of the labor. I´m slowly getting accustomed to what I´ve privately termed ¨bacon labor.¨ (Bacon because a day in the field is like being a piece of bacon. You enter the frying pan, not yet heated up, happy to get out of the package and slide around a bit. Then the surface starts reaching higher temperatures and you start to lose fluids. You turn around a bit, drink water, have lunch, but you can´t avoid the inevitable result of being a shriveled and sad version of your morning self. The main flaw in this analogy is that bacon is tasty at the end. The workers, dirty, grimy, and weak, are not!)



This, from what I can see, can have two different effects, A lifetime of this work either leaves people older looking than normal, or as uincredibly sprightly ancients. The work either defeats their backs, or they grow stronger. A test of Darwinian fitness perhaps. One that few of the villagers have chosen but nearly all experience. The concept of retirement must have been introduced to the local dialect by the tv, as I know of at least three 90 year olds still working in the field. With my ¨retirement¨ approaching fast, I can´t imagine having to look forward to 1000s more days of ¨playing with bananas.¨



Then there are the wider impacts of this fruit. Although the bananas we eat in the US don´t come from this village, they do come at a great impact on the lives of similar people. Our giant transnationals such as Dole and Chiquita (which in Latin America is at times has been referred to as ¨the octopus¨due to its tenticles reaching offices of power and tiny villages alike.) wield incredible power over happenings. They own huge tracts of land, often times letting it sit unused, while pushing landless peasants further into to the rainforests at the expense of the world´s health, and not to sound conspiracy theorist, meddling in governmental affairs.

Tiny nations such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines are based on economies almost entirely dependent on banana exports to Europe. Yet, a US lawsuit filed in the WTO and backed by several large US fruit companies, complained that the favoritism the countries of the SEM (Single European Market) had been showing towards their former colonies in Latin America and Africa were in violation of internation free trade policies. Even though no US jobs were at stake, the US argued that protecting banana imports from tiny countries such as St Vincent discriminates unfairly against US companies. While they were meant to hold back US transnational dominance, the policies of lower tariffs and quotas were primarily meant as a form of aid and support to these impoverished countries.

This suit happened in the late 90´s and ruled in favor of the US, but I do not know the current state of affairs in the affected areas. That being said, the effect on the economies of the Windward Islands (St Vincent etc), whose 1992 total exports were over 50% bananas, and coming from small farmers (40% of land holdings of 10 acres or less), of direct and ¨fair¨competition with the economies of scale and deep pockets of ¨the Octopus¨, is obvious. (figures from Grossman, 1998)

These small farmers, just like those here in Los Toros, work by hand and earn very little money. I can´t imagine the scene there when the ruling came through. Hauling and digging and frying. A lifetime of this, to try and scratch together a living, only to have your tiny economy squashed by the Trade Liberalization Gospel, is sad. It is a well sung gospel that promises a lot, but the invisible hand seems to bring little in terms of equality. Maybe the non'existent hand is a better name. It is all very deflating to think about, especially knowing what it´s like to work so hard on the edge of poverty.

Earlier I referenced the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala. Like many things in history, I cannot be 100% positive that this is how it played out. I´ll tell you what I know, and let you decide whether or not BANANAS had anything to do with it. When Arbenz came to power in 1950 by fair elections on a platform of Agrarian reform, United Fruit Company (later renamed Chiquits Brands) was the largest landowner in Guatemala, with 565,000 acres and only 9 percent of that in use. With 75% of peasant families landless, Arbenz set about expropriating land and paid $6,000,000 US to UFC for 413,000 acres, paying the value UFC had stated. Soon 100,000 peasants had title to land and Arbenz was extremely popular. Similar movements began picking up in Costa Rica and Honduras, both UFC strongholds.

The then US secretary of State John Dulles, was a senior partner in Sullivan and Cromwell Law Firm, UFC´s legal agent, and his brother Allen was the CIA chief. At the same time, the Cold Wat fever and suspicion being spurred on by the Eisenhower Administration (VP Nixon) was wary of any type of movement for the opressed, something that is a theoretical part of communist ideals. Throw in the fact that Arbenz, not a communist, has several members of the communist party in his government, and this all spelled trouble.

The CIA either believed, or was simply able to justify, that Arbenz and his reforms at the expense of UFC were communist attacks on US capitalism. In 1954, the CIA backed Guatemalan colonel Castillo Armas and his 300 man army, with propaganda and pledged US miliotary support against Arbenz. To top it off, CIA planes bombed the capital city, causing a panic. Arbenz, in spite of popular support, stepped down out of fear of a bloody coup. Bananas? You tell me!

To this day the large plantations of Chiquita and others continue to mass produce bananas and other fruits, while drenching the land in pesticides and pushing the small subsistence farmers to cut out plots in the the rainforests. This is why there is a book on the subject called ¨Breakfast of Biodiversity¨ To eat bananas from these companies is to eat the rainforest.

To sum it all up, this is a plant so powerful that it is responsible for international conflict, backbreaking work, and threats to the survival of planet earth. More powerful yet, is the word that disguises that power, BANANAS.

So there you have it. An explanation for my lawsuit to the High Court of the English Language, ATWELL V. BANANA, on the grounds of deception.

Bananas, in reality, are not as sweet as they sound.

Ahh April

This morning I was out in the field of Maria´s father, hoeing and weeding at 7 am. It was good to get in a decent days work, as the past few days there hasn´t been a lot of work.

On the way back in we passed a group of Haitian roadworkers, hammering away at the cement with pick axes. I couldn´t help but think about the American equivalent, a guy in reflective gear and a helmet, using a high powered jack hammer. These guys have been at this for weeks, digging a canal or drain of some sort all the way from Azua, about 30 kms. Every day they are out there in the sun, in street clothes, using their muscle bound bodies to break through a material only slightly stronger than themselves. I don´t even what to know what hourly wage they get, especially in comparison to our road crews. If the pay scale for a days work in the fields is anywhere close, then they pull in less tyhat 300 pesos daily. Care to know what that equates to?

Less than 9 dollars a day.

Keep in mind that these people have come here to escape from poverty and send money back to their families in Haiti. What does that say about conditions there, if backbreaking work for 9 dollars a day is an improvement?

One must remember, however, that the pricing scale here is different. To me everything seems cheap, a meal for under 3 dollars, a giant beer for 2, but to them the prices are high. Exchange rates are tricky things, and I can´t really tell how high or low the prices actually are in comparison to home. I don´t have the information to figure out the prices of staple products as a percentage of average income, which could then be compared to the same at home.

(Note post blogging. In my blog I have failed to emphasize that I am speaking of what I know about Los Toros, and cannot say for certain that things I see here hold true for the cities or even other small towns. Please keep that in your mind as you form a picture of things here. You may well go to another part of the DR one day and not find anything to uphold what I am saying. Then again...maybe you will...)

Continued....

In any case, especially for the Haitians, food seems to be their main expense, and it´s mainly rice and plateno. They don´t have electricity or water billes to speak of, and I´m not sure if they own their shacks or the land they stand on. I am sure of one thing, they´re extremely welcoming and generous towards me, inviting me over to eat or have coffee, yelling to me from across the fiels in french or creole, and giving me a smile on their way back from yet another days work. Maybe it´s just because I´m a novelty, but I think it´s genuine. The Dominicans, while many are nice to the Haitians, tend to disagree.

Just last night, while talking about my haitian frien Roberto, (who is in the hospital in Haiti after being attacked or in an accident, I can´t be sure.), a Dominican said ¨I hope he´s okay. There are a lot of bad Haitians, but he is one of the good ones.¨

To me, I can´t see where they base their prejudices, or what the Haitians are doing wrong. When I point out this out, I can´t believe some of the things I hear. ¨

One guy said, ¨One Haitian took a Dominican baby and threw it into the air and impaling it with his machete.¨

¨Wow. When?¨

¨I don´t know. My grandfather told me when I was younger.¨

Sounds like, if it happened at all, it was a long time ago. Also a long time ago, in 1937, Trujillo, the then Dominican dictator, ordered the massacre of around 20,000 Haitians in the matter of a few days, but the Dominicans don´t tell that story too often. To distinguish beteern the Haitian and Dominicans, the police walked around with a plant I can´t remember the name for, asking people to name it in Spanish. The Haitians, unaccustomed to Spanish, were unable to pronounce the R correctly. For lack of a sufficiently trained tongue, they were killed by machete.

My point in telling these stories is that for every crime one or another has suffered, there´s a story for one they´ve comitted.

I´m sure that, given my different perspective, what I see in the Haitians is different than what the Dominicans see. The outsider perspective is always based on a different set of experiences. It´s possible that I may never understand, just like a Somalian may never understand American racism towards Mexicans, just like Jon may never understand the relationships between Germans and Turks (or maybe he already does because he´s that smart.) That being said, there is always a truth to be had, irrespective of vioewpoint. Once reached, it holds its value no matter if you are Dominican, Haitian, or American.

The truth is that we´re all people and wer´re all flawed. Racism and xenophobia hold many forms in our societies, governments, and cultures, and are based one an infinite number of historical trends and national psyches and experiences, but at the bottom of it all, can we avoid the fact that we´re all just humans?

In our lives we encounter many stories and ideas that attempt to justify racism and xenophobia, some of them very compelling. However convincing these arguments may be, the conscience, when listened to, points to the conclusion that across boundries and up and down the social scale, we are all equal in value and in what we deserve.

Here, in the village, I´m being reminded of some of the problems in the world that I am sometimes shielded from in the US. Yet some of the things I´m seeing, I am seeing because I´m being more attentive. If you look around you in the US, or elsewhere, you´ll likely encounter the same problems of racism, xenophobia, poverty etc. It´s funny that outside the states I think about it more thoroughly sometimes than when I´m there. Sometimes we get caught up in our schedules and normalities that we only live them, and cease to analyze them.

Anyway, all is good here. Our yuca crop was nearly drowned by 3 days of rain, and we considered planting corn, but it has seemed to pull through.

Be like our yuca, and fight the flood.