I’m Not Giving This A Creative Title Because I Don’t Want You To Get Your Hopes Up
You know, when I first came here, I had a journal. It was all of three months ago and I was caught up in the idealistic spirit of the Peace Corps, and so I told myself that for the first time in my life, I would actually keep up with it.
And, well, you know what they say about the best laid plans. I got a few good weeks, some funny entries about first impressions, some entries alternating between the stress of training and the joy of training and everything in between. One day, I’ll sit down and write it all out, but today I don’t want to talk about the last three months. Today, I just want to talk about yesterday.
Last Friday officially marked two weeks in site — meaning that after two and halfish months of training with my cohort and sector in Santo Domingo and Rio Arriba, we all headed our separate ways to the communities where we’ll live the next two years. My site is the community of Mariano Cesteros, a small campo (a community in the countryside) of 350ish people tucked into the mountains in the province of Dajabon, near Haiti. We are so small that we are not on most maps. If you wanted to find me from the capital, you would take a giant bus from Santo Domingo a good 6 or hours to Loma de Cabrera, a pueblo nearby. If you wanted to find me from the capital, and you are an idiot like me, you would miss the direct bus to Loma de Cabrera, have to get one to the pueblo of Dajabon instead, find a guagua sitting on a street corner (guagua, in the capital, is like a city bus. Outside of the capital, it’s more of a term of courtesy than anything — a truck is a guagua, a bus is a guagua, a yellow American school bus, which I took the first time I came here, is a guagua) and take it to Loma. From Loma you get another guagua or moto and tell them to drop you off at the Cruce of Mariano, the corner where the main road leading to town meets the highway. Walk a little ways down that road, and on the left you’ll see a little green casita with my name on the door and likely numerous kids running around the compound. That’s me. If you can’t find it, just ask the first person you see where Kelly lives. If they don’t remember my name yet, ask for the rubia. They’ll know who you’re talking about.
When I first came to my site for a weekend visit before swearing in, I fell in love with the community. I am still in love, but if you recall your high school English classes, the course of true love never did run smooth. The people here are outrageously kind and warm and patient in a way that continues to humble me. The little kids are loving and adorable and protective over me, the older ones ask me to play dominoes and pelota even though they know I suck, and the adults give me coffee and tell me they are at my order always and that when I am with them yo estoy en casa. My school has 5 classrooms and I walk 15 minutes to get there, I do my business in a latrine, and the electricity comes and goes as it pleases. It is gorgeous and cold enough at night that I can wear a sweater, a precious gift on this sauna of an island. I could not have come up with a place this perfect for me if I tried.
However, it is hard to explain the complex emotions of such a complex situation if you’ve never experienced it. To be immersed in a new culture that is not your own, in a language you don’t fully speak, living with a family you barely know but share everything with — these things are alternately exhausting, hilarious, and stressful. A lot of the time, I feel like an overgrown child, and not in a cute Tom-Hanks-in-the-movie-Big kinda way. Tom Hanks at least understood English — I am like a giant mute-deaf child being led around like a doll that can only say random words when you pull its string. I remind myself constantly that this is the hard part, and indeed, it is what I signed up for. I signed up to be uncomfortable. There’s not much of a point to the Peace Corps experience if you’re not. Every established volunteer tells me that it gets better, easier, and I bite my tongue to stop myself from asking but when? On June 2nd, at 3:48 PM, will I suddenly understand what the hell my neighbor has been saying to me this whole time? Will I be sitting in class at 11:02 in the morning on July 21st when I suddenly understand the strategy behind dominoes? Exactly which visit to the colmado will I become able to say salami with a Spanish accent?
But let’s talk about yesterday. Yesterday was a meeting of local education volunteers in the pueblo of Dajabon. It was a couple things: a get to know you as new volunteers come in and some go out, discussion of opportunities over the summer, planning for upcoming events. But selfishly, for me, it was mostly a chance to reunite with some of my friends. As much as I hate to be that token American who can’t wait to be back in the company of her compatriots, it is always a relief. I keep in touch with many of my cohort-mates fairly regularly by WhatsApp and Facebook and what not (because your girl is #bendito with great service) but it doesn’t replace the feeling of face-to-face conversation. I didn’t realize how much I missed being able to talk like an adult and without running through verb conjugations until I realized that all day, nobody could get me to shut the hell up.
As a card-carrying Lifelong Perfectionist, I have blamed my difficulties in site mostly on myself. If I had only gone from a novice speaker to a fluent one in two months like I could have if I had just worked harder, I wouldn’t be struggling, right? If I had paid more attention during Community Based Training, I’d probably be able to open the library next week, right? If I hadn’t taken that 2 hour nap the other day, I would have so much more confianza with my community, right? If I had just bought a headlamp, the luz being gone wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous, right? Okay, that one is actually right. I almost strangled myself the other night in my mosquito net trying to get up to get a glass of water in the dark.
But my friends in my cohort, as I will gladly tell you after I’ve had as little as 2 plastic cups of Presidente beer, are some of the greatest people I know — a group of incredibly, brilliant, determined, capable badasses who have been a support system for me since we left American soil. Not just in my sector (EDU), but in CED as well. Everyone knows how much I love to talk about my love for my friends (#nonewfriends), but it is true — there is not a person amongst this group of 34 whom I don’t adore (plus my amazing PCVL, Brady, and other PCVLs who have been there for me), and I am immeasurably thankful for their presence in my life. What was I saying? I forgot. I just really like my friends.
Anyway, this group of people (not just the EDUers present yesterday, but the absent others and the CEDers whom I’ve harassed constantly with messages and Snapchats), who are all very accomplished and composed, some of whom are native speakers of Spanish, almost all of whom speak better Spanish than I, have for some crazy reason been telling me they feel the same way. They’re also getting themselves into weird cultural misunderstandings, they also have no idea what the hell people are saying at least half the time, they’re also nodding and smiling awkwardly when they don’t understand what’s happening, and they are also running the emotional gamut of sressed, worried, thankful, overwhelmed, joyous, etc. The funny thing is, I know these people pretty well. We’ve spent an awful lot of time together, and for a lot of them, I’ve seen them at their best and at their not so best, and I was surprised. If they had called me and said they were worried they weren’t going to do well in their sites, I would’ve said, come on, are you kidding me? That’s ridiculous, of course you are. So if these people, my favorite #govermentissuedfriends, whom I don’t have a worry in the world about when it comes to the wild success they’ll have in their communities, can be feeling this way, I guess it’s okay for me to feel this way too, right? The fact that everyone is struggling together forced me to take some load off my back and be a little more fair to myself. It probably says something about me that the suffering of my dear friends made me feel better about myself, but whatever.
The closes thing I have to a site mate is Lucia, who lives in a similar community 15 minutes up the road from me. After the meeting, after lunch and reconnecting and debriefing and destressing and little shopping, we head home. We talk about our frustrations while the guagua out of Dajabon winds its way through the fields towards Loma de Cabrera — the cultural mix-ups, the challenge to find time to recharge in a culture where “alone time” is a foreign concept, the intimidation of being a follow-up to a beloved volunteer. And the good things, too: our love for our host families and communities, the small victories we find in things like a child reading out loud to us, and our plans for the summer.
But when we get to Loma, we get excited. From Loma de Cabrera to our sites, you have to get a bola home on the backs of one of the motorcycles or pick up trucks that regularly wait to take people deeper into the mountains. I’ve taken this ride maybe 5 times and it is already one of my favorite things in the whole world. I hope I never get sick of it. To be honest, you have to see it to believe it. I’d take pictures, but I’ve already lost a hat to the gush of the breeze as the pickup snaked along the highway, and I’m not finna lose my iPhone just yet (and we all know the quality of those flota pics). But to summarize: you sit in the bed of the pickup and hold on as it swerves through the switchbacks of the highway, and when Loma disappears, it gives way to the lush green of the Cordillera Central mountain range, as far as the eye can see. Certain days, it is misty with fog and majestic in its own right, but on a clear afternoon it’s breathtaking valleys and mountains as far as the eye can see, with the wind blowing through your hair and at minimum two or three Dominican dons casually sprawled out in the bed like this ride isn’t one of the most beautiful things they’ve ever seen, just another commute home from work. Sometimes the mountain beside the highway goes straight up and against all logic, there are cows perched on the edges of cliffs grazing, or goats tied up waiting for their owners by a random house or two where little boys wave from their domino table. Both sides of the highway have peaks and valleys, with little villages and rivers tucked in between in the distance: if I had a better arm, I could throw a rock and hit Haiti from the truck. I usually spend this ride whipping my head in every direction, smiling like an idiot wanting to take in every inch, or closing my eyes and tilting my head back and letting the wind work through my hair and reminding myself this is actually my life. But like I said, it has to be seen to be believed.
Lucia gets off in front of her school in Carrizal, and I’m a couple more curves of the road down. We’re starting to get closer to my community. One of my sixth graders is on the side of the road on his moto, and he laughs when he sees me, his favorite gringa I’m sure, waving like a maniac from the back of a pickup. We pass my host sister’s house and I can see the door is open and she’s home. There are more people on the street now and I recognize them: my students, people who work at the school, people who’ve been over to my house. We pass my friend Casilda’s house as I’m slapping the top of the cab to let the driver know it’s my stop. I see one of my students standing in front of the fence, and when she hears my slapping and turns around, the look on her face is pure joy. She shouts my name in surprise, smiling ear to ear, and I laugh and I think my heart is going to burst from how full it feels in this moment, how much I already love this place, how much it already loves me. I pay the driver my 50 pesos and take my salami and Tevas that I bought at the market. The sun is setting over the field across from my house as I start walking home and I have to stop and take a picture. It never does it justice, but I keep trying. I tell everyone here about how beautiful it is here, how different it is especially for me who grew up in a desert, whose eyes still haven’t gotten used to all the green, but I don’t think I have the words for it — in Spanish or English. My host sister-in-law is on the porch with her 1-year-old who is just beginning to be able to say my name, and she asks me how it went, and when I say, oh, it was fine, how was your day, my cat hears my voice and comes running, and after a long day, this feels a whole lot like coming home.
