The month of march.....mega post.

So who knew that it had been so long since my last update, I guess if I was going by JD time then it wouldn’t really be that long… but anyway. Life here is still the same, less than a month to go, which is crazy. Next week is Semana Santa and we are going up to Puerto Plata (north) and doing the 27 charcos waterfall climb, which should be greatttttt. Lets see, what has happened in the month of March. We had a day excursion to the Dominican/Haitian Border markets; I went to the south coast for a night with some friends. Julia came to visit Santo Domingo and we went up to Cabarete for a long weekend, I had a 5 day trip to Haiti with my Dominican Haitian relations class, I went on a weekend excursion to Santiago (the 2nd largest city in the DR) and Jarabacoa in the mountains, I had class cancelled because of a strike/protest at la UASD, I visited a Batey with my Caribbean Identity Class and lots of mundane stuff around the edges, including but not excluding eating at the falafel place three times. I guess I should split this up by section then.

Elias Piña.

Twice a week on several made cities along the border there are international markets, where Haitians are legally allowed to cross into the Dominican Republic and sell their goods. While informal exchange has always existed between the two countries, the markets themselves did not become formalized until the 1994 Haitian Embargo; Dominican President Balaguer made the decision to legalize the exchange on a biweekly basis, to benefit the Dominican and Haitian economies during this period. The markets still exist today, and people from all over the DR will come once or twice a week to pick up many items in bulk for very low cost.
Since Haiti is the poorest country in Latin America they receive large amounts of donations from other countries and international organizations, and what is sold in these markets reflects this. There were piles and piles of clothes, shoes, and surprisingly garlic, all from an overabundance of donations. While it may not occur to someone when they are donating their old clothes and shoes to a good cause, what people really need, after they have enough to clothe themselves is food. After a point getting clothing donations is not helpful, Haitians come to the markets with their clothes to sell them and get money to buy food, so they can feed their families. It was obvious just how long the country has been receiving donations of clothing because a lot of what was there was straight out of the 1980s, and a bunch of us got some great windbreakers for less than $1 US dollar. It was also interesting to note the amount of winter coats/ general winter wear that people were trying to sell, there is no way in hell anyone in Haiti or the DR would need a big down coat or anything like that, which kind of says something else about the donations that they receive. On the garlic front, I guess China recently donated a lot of garlic to Haiti, so they are trying to get rid of it to buy other kinds of food.
We were only at the markets themselves for about an hour, we had stopped by to talk to a priest from Michigan who had lived in Elias Piña for about three years, he talked to us for a bit until we headed to the actual border, which was just a large dried up river that has been dubbed a “no-mans land” a few guys in camouflage with guns and a steel “gate”. Anticlimactic to say the least.
The highlight of the border trip was probably watching a huge pig head get chopped up into little pieces…. bye bye Wilbur.

Barahona.

So a bunch of us decided that we might as well take advantage of a free trip to the south and split off from the CIEE excursion and hop on another bus to Barahona, a biggish town on the southern coast of the DR. We got dropped off at the intersection of two highways and hopped on a bus bound for Barahona. A couple hours later were we trekking through the town attempting to find the cheapest hotel room possible, which generally involved 4 people going inside while the other 6 or so hid. We eventually managed to get the last two rooms in this hotel for one night and it cost us under 10 bucks. Great deal. We then proceeded to find the beach and make a campfire where we spent the rest of our night. The next day we were off to find Playa San Rafael, we hopped on a guagua headed in that direction, that got so full that the cobrador (man who takes the fares) held on to a bungee cord at the back (outside) of the bus/van. The twist and turns and ups and downs of the southern coast were gorgeous, the area is untouched by tourism and the water was that Caribbean blue that you always here about. We ended up at a beautiful beach with a river running into it that had natural pools, it was amazing. We spent the rest of the day on the beach and then hopped on a GuaGua back to the capital.

Julia’s Visit.

The next Monday THE Julia Kent came to visit. She stayed in a cute little hotel in the zona colonial. And I spent most of the week trekking back and forth between my house and her hotel. We went to the Falafel place (http://www.falafelenlazona.com) two nights in a row…and tested out all the mojitos in the zona. On Friday we hopped onto a caribe tours bus and headed to Cabarete for the weekend. The bus only goes as far as Sosua, and then we had to take a cab, which cost at least triple the bus ride. Either way we made to our hotel, all the way on the other coast of the island in about 5 hours for less that 30 bucks for the two of us. Great deal. The hotel we stayed at was interesting, but the Cabarete beach definitely made up for whatever the hotel lacked. People aren’t kidding when they say that Cabarete is the kite surfing capital, the water was filled with people kite surfing and the sky was also chock full of all different kinds of parachute kite things. The next day we went to Ocean World, the Dry’s Sea World (except much much smaller). We had signed up to swim with dolphins, but before we could do that we had time to see the dolphin show. Swimming with the dolphins was really cool, a once in the lifetime experience. We then were at oceanworld for the rest of the day and saw the bird and sea lion shows and then wandered into an aviary where we were given birdseed and became human bird feeders for little tropical birds. The weekend itself was very relaxing, and on the Monday we got ourselves organized and headed back to the capital. I made sure that Julia got a chance to get Bon Yogen Früz and an empanada before she headed off the next day.

Haiti.

The next Thursday I headed off to Haiti with 10 kids from the program all but 1 of who are in my Dominican Haitian Relations Class. We took a Caribe Tours bus there, which cost about $70 US round trip, and we had to pay about $60 US in border taxes. The busride took around 6 or 7 hours, most of which is spent getting to the border from the DR side, they also took our passports before we got on the bus and we didn’t get them back until after the Haitian border, which was a little sketchy but seemed to work out both ways. When we got to Haiti we were met by our professors’ wife, they had rented a van for us to be driven around in, and we headed straight to the Jesuit Retreat Center where we would be staying. Our professor had expressed some concerns about the center due to their militaristic regimented time schedule that involved all of the power going off at 930 pm, people having to be inside the compound at 9pm and up for breakfast at exactly 7am. An interesting experience, but it was the cheapest option and right across the street from Guy and Lynn’s apartment so it made sense.

The first morning we got on our mini-guagua and took a tour around Port-au-Prince, a city that was planned for 250,000 residents and now contains around 3 million, so you can imagine the kind of lack of infrastructure that was present. Many of the people we met in Haiti called the cities grown “anarchic”, the crazy expansion of the city had led to the flight of the middle and upper classes into the hills to a town called PetionVille, and the city has grown out to meet them. The merchants were the next to leave the city center, so the city streets have few open stores and lots of informal markets or “mercados salvajes” as Guy put it. These markets show the impact of the informal economy in Haiti, as people are forced to sell whatever they can in order to survive. The US embassy also moved out to Petionville, along with many of the other embassies.

After a small tour and stopping by the university where Guy works, we headed to the former “malecon” or oceanfront boulevard of Port-au-Prince. Tourism in Haiti ended with the coup d’état of the Dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986. Since then Haiti has ceased to be a tourist destination, which had lead places like this boulevard to be completely run down, and other places outside the city to be beautiful and untouched. Next we went to the Pantheon museum, which turned out to be one of the best/most interesting experiences of my life. The museum was about the history of Haiti and had pieces from colonial times and slavery up until today. It was a small museum but the artifacts that they had were incredible, they had Louvature’s Crown, Louis XIV book Code Noir, an original slave sale receipt, punishment chains from the time of slavery and more. Haiti was the first black republic, and gained independence from France with a giant slave rebellion in 1804. Many people call Haiti the “birthplace of freedom”. The museum had examples of all the different flags from throughout Haitian history, especially interesting was the flag post revolution where they literally took the white out of the French flag, just like they took the whites out of Haiti. Interestingly enough they also had a Haitian flag that had been taken to the moon with Neil Armstrong on Apollo 11, because Haiti was a founding member of the UN. Anyway the flag had a plaque and some moonstones and a message from Ronal Regan.

Lunch that day was special to say the least. We got a plate of food each, with rice beans salad and what turned out to be Goat. Now I wouldn’t have been too weirded out by the Goat if I had gotten a regular piece of goat meat (whatever that means) but I definitely got an ear, and my friend had a tongue…Definitely and experience. Later that day we had class, and at the end of the class one of the Haitian students that we had talked to in the DR talked about how he hoped his generation would be the one that could realize the necessary changes that needed to be made in Haiti.
The word chaos cannot even begin to describe a streetscene in Haiti. Sidewalks are full of people, streets are full of cars. TapTaps, the Haitian guaguas, are amazing, beautiful, brightly colored with images of everything from Barack Obama, Che Guevara, naked women and Legolas from Lord of the Rings… They ranged in size from pickup trucks to school busses and were always completely filled with people and stuff. The streets are dirty, there is no other way to explain it. They are dusty and filled with trash, the smell of sewage is inescapable as you wander around the city. The famous Victorian houses with “Gingerbread” architecture are falling apart, and the old military buildings and political prisons from the time of Duvalier are still standing but completely abandoned…a haunting reminder of the oppression and tyranny that has existed in Haiti.
That night we had dinner at Guy’s apartment, his wife made a really really good soup and we all drank wine and hung out and talked a mix of Spanish, English and French. His wife had worked for the UN but now works for One Computer, One child, and NGO that is bringing computers to schools allover the world.

The next day we had class in the morning and then went up into the hills surrounding Port-au-Prince. As we ate lunch at a missionary restaurant it was clear that much deforestation had gone on, the farming technique of thrash and burn had taken a toll on the mountains, and on the people who lived in the area. As we left the city and headed towards Petionville, the presence of the UN because evident, that day we counted 25 UN vehicles and several different groups of Peacekeeping troops (overall during the last 2.5 days of the trip we saw about 47 UN trucks), we also saw a few Doctors without Borders trucks driving around. The Urn’s role in Haiti is still fairly unclear, as they have neither clearly defined their objective nor have they provided a timeline for withdrawal.

We went up higher into the mountains to see a set of ruins from the battles for Haitian independence. While were there we adopted a tour guide who was about 15 and insisted on giving as a tour of the old fortress (in English!). Once we entered the ruins and the “guide” began to explain what was there we were essentially surrounded by a group of teenage Haitian guys, who had obviously be drinking and were not that impressed with a large group of whites being in the fort. Our professor quickly got us out of there after the leader of the group took out a wallet sized pictures of former Haitian president Aristide and saying stuff to us in Kriol. Aristide was removed from presidency in a 2004 through a US/French/Canadian backed coup d’état, and the groups support of Aristide somewhat explained their displeasure in seeing us. This was by far the most uncomfortable experience we had in Haiti, and even since I have come abroad, but at the same time it was very interesting. We headed down to Guy’s sister-in-laws compound where we met her family, and hung out with all of they pets, including a Rooster named Figaro that had its own towel and liked to be held and petted… Later that day we got to hear a talk by a friend of Guy’s (we soon found out that Guy Alexander literally knows everyone, including the current presidents of both Haiti and the DR, the Pope and random people wandering along the beach…) about Haitian Voodoo. We had expressed interest in seeing a ceremony but since we visited during lent there were none to be seen.

The next day we headed down to the southern coast to a town called Jacmel, we crossed through the most beautiful mountains, the natural surrounds of Port-au-Prince, the bay and all of the hills are some of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. All the water is the beautiful Caribbean blue and it is mostly untouched. We went to an artists house in Jacmel, he lived on an old plantation and was making furniture out of old colonial mills. It was very cool, his house was amazing. We all wanted to move in. After that we went to lunch, at a restaurant on the beach. We were literally sitting on the most beautiful beach, postcard perfect, eating fresh fish caught that day and drinking coconut water straight from the shell (is that what its called? My English is slowly becoming worse and worse…soon I’m going to be as ESL as JD). While we were waiting for our food to come a bunch of us played dominoes, which had become a theme of the trip due to the quiet hours at the retreat center. After lunch we headed back into Jacmel where we got to see some of the traditional masks from Carnival, they were all sea animals and were handmade and very beautiful.

The next day we were headed back to Santo Domingo, back onto the bus for 7 hours with a unexciting stop at the border to get our passports stamped. The trip was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, it was truly a once in a lifetime experience with our guide for the 5 days being the former Haitian ambassador to the DR. At what other point in my life am I going to be able to say I went on a trip to Haiti where I played buzzword bingo about the speaking tendencies of Guy Alexander…

Santiago/Jarbacoa.

The next weekend (!), the program had a trip to Santiago (the 2nd capital of the DR) and Jarabacoa, a mountain town. We visited several museums in Santiago, including a museum about the Mirabel sisters who were assassinated by Trujillo for their involvement in the Anti-Trujillo movement during the 1960s. We took a short walking tour of the old part of the city and went to a folklore museum, which was really cool and had lots of examples of carnival masks. We then headed up to Jarabacoa and went to where were staying which were a bunch of little cabins. Jarabacoa looks nothing like the rest of the DR, the trees are pines, and it is as mountainous as the sierra nevadas (but with a little less altitude…) The next day we went to a couple waterfalls, short hikes to them, but the views were really amazing. We also went on a horseback ride that left me sore for a few days, with young guides that really liked galloping…

I’m probably not going to be able to post this until I get back from Semana Santa…but that’s they way it goes. If you survived through this mega-post I will be very impressed. I personally would have only read the Haiti section….