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.