My light hearted- extremely awkward life which involves moments like my walking into a glass door.. or trying to leave the super market through the entrance door.. (and it wouldn’t open because its motion censored and I was on the wrong side of the door. ) those moments still happen a lot, but I think my blogs are going to take a more serious turn. Not because my life is worse or I’m unhappy with the situation. It’s just the more I learn here the more I realize that people back home don’t know about Dominican. I would rather not sugar cot life here. Living your life in Canada is not a bad way to live especially if that is all you know. And you shouldn’t ever feel guilty for not being a missionary, I honestly think most people shouldn’t be or shouldn’t try to be. Let’s get into why I say this:
I’ve realized to be a ‘missionary’ (I really don’t like that word) but to be an expat in another country, doing humanitarian work that happens to be at a religious institute- I’ve realized that this takes a special kind of person. -You need to have a heart that loves strangers unconditionally and care about other people’s problems. -It is necessary to make meaningful friendships, connections and relationships with many different types of people. -You must have endless amounts of patience for learning new cultural norms and understanding that people do not know your culture and do not really care to know ‘where you are coming from’. -You must be incredibly adventurous and be prepared to learn so much about yourself and your emotions. -It is important that you are out going and not afraid to meet new people and essentially start your life over again. -Also you can’t be a cultural prick. Stop thinking your culture is superior. -Humbleness is important, you are living/visiting a new country not saving the world- lets be honest- people in the other country will probably help you more than you will help them. And you are probably not going to do well if you dehumanize people and treat them like they are less than you. (you are probably thinking, how horrible I would never do that.. its pretty easy when you use words like ‘poor’ ‘helpless’ ‘needy’ and ‘unfortunate’ and then groups throw money at the problems) But I realized that the most important thing is YOUR PERSONALITY AND MINDSET. The longer I’m here I realize that relationships are essential… but your personality and mindset allow you to fit in or become horribly lonely in your new country. You can have the best intentions in the world but if you can never adapt to your new culture or have a mind that is incompatible with your new culture, you will not do well. This is what I’ve found watching other expats and taking to many different people that struggle here socially with local people. I must say it is not always easy making a friendship with a person from a different culture because you need to explain and learn so much. It will not be effortless. (I am also really trying to write this as neutrally as I possibly can.. which is difficult because it is so difficult for me to think that people don’t have curious personalities and don’t want to learn new languages or live in different cultures. And it is almost difficult for me to comprehend that being an expat here could be a horribly tiresome experience because 95% of the time I love life here.) This is why I advise 90% of people to not be missionaries. And if you want to do a short-term mission trip (even though I don’t agree with them), follow my above advise of how to be a ‘good missionary’ and you better not give dollar store crap to ‘needy’ children. And then take pictures of them like they are zoo animals and come back and tell everyone that you practically saved the world. This is incredibly cynical.. with so much truth underlying in these acts. *If you don’t understand why I say this, ask me and I will give you a lengthy explanation of why I believe mindlessly giving is a really the opposite of beneficial.* Getting back to my above point of changing my writing style to be more educational to readers, I have decided to do this for a selfish and unselfish reason. The selfish reason is when I come back, I don’t think I will have the patience to explain simple things that seem like common knowledge to me, even though it isn’t common knowledge to people in North America. The unselfish reason is, it is important to become aware of another part of the world and think about problems in another part of the world on a more personal level. It is healthy to learn- especially about different cultures. I cannot stress how important I think that is for the mentality of the world. If we were all more understanding of other cultures and types of people.. I think the world would run more smoothly. So I hope you are prepared to read about feminism, the ethics of missionaries, cultural differences and much more. Also I have started some journalism projects about Dominican for the organization Nexo. When I am done them I will create a new tab just for articles.
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Blogging has taken a back seat to me actually living my life here, which is an understandable predicament for someone that would prefer to have a conversation in real live than spend time on her computer. But I felt today that the best thing to do before I sleep is to try to sort emotions and figure out how to appropriately react.
This morning I woke up incredibly early to hit up the market before 8 am so I could get the best deals for my beloved vegetables and fruits. I got a bag of passion fruit, cucumbers, carrots, green onion, mangoes, a red pepper, 5 lbs of potatoes and more for about 5.00$ (USA). The only downside to this was because I bought so much stuff and hardly could carry it from the market to the school (which is on the same street) I was advised that I should not attempt to walk to my house with the produce. This disrupted my original plan. I went to say good morning to all of the staff at the school before I left to my house with my massive bag from the market. While I was chatting with a friend, I was volen-told that I was needed to make these little packages that would have chocolate kisses and starbursts in side of them. Everything was very pintrest worthy. After completing this task, I was given lots of fiddily little jobs like gluing new covers on notebooks. Everything needed to be done before 2 pm, because this is when the teachers meeting would commence. During these tasks the students participating in the English/French voice competition wanted to practice their songs. That was a good hour of my life explaining innuendos to 12 year olds after telling them why they can’t preform Nicki Minaj for their Christian School. (Well half explaining innuendos because I didn’t want to damage their innocent minds.) Somehow my intention of leaving at 8:30 am was pushed back until almost 3. When I finally got on a motorcycle and was on my way to the house the motorcycle driver misunderstood were I lived and drove down a wrong road Calle 5- and I live on Calle 6. It took about 30 seconds to make him turn around and go on the right street. The rate for motorcycle rides is 25 or 30 pesos for every ride. But he expected that I was going to give him 50 pesos because he drove down the road. I was infuriated because at this point I am sick of people looking at my skin colour and automatically assuming that I’m so rich and I’m practically swimming in money. They think I’m stupid because I’m a white female and that life is just ‘so easy’ for me because I was born in a different country to white parents. I just about lost it on that motorcycle driver, and we had a very heated argument because I was enraged that he thought I was an idiot tourist that would pay double. The argument ended with me not paying what he was demanding, him calling me very colourful words in Spanish and me walking into my house feeling fed up with false cultural awareness about white Canadians. Just because most of the white people go to Dominican to ‘have a good time’ which entails them turning red, getting extremely drunk and making fools of themselves does not mean every single white person is like that. These ‘resorters’ are basking in their golden sun, like kings while surrounding them is poverty that they will never fully acknowledge. This is an incredibly jaded view of tourists but I’m not going to lie it has been my experience of what I’m witnessed here. My selfish reason for resenting ‘resort life’ stems from the amount of B.S. I need to put up with everyday when I interact with people outside of my circle of people I know. I’m just so tired of explaining that I’m a university student and I actually don’t have all this money lying around. Contrary to their belief I am struggling to not be in debt to my school and have had a job for a long time and worked really hard to try to get places in life. But just because you are born somewhere else and are acquainted with a rich culture, your words mean nothing when you try to tell someone facts. Sometimes I just want to scream ‘I’m only 19! I’m still a child! Just give me a break.’ The people at the church for the most part are different and know me and understand that I’m not a billionaire. I’m just a human being that is from a different place. I felt exhausted after all of this rush of anger towards cultural ignorance towards North Americans. Then I started analyzing the other view of life and if I were a struggling Dominican that drives motorcycles, wouldn’t I try to charge the ‘ignorant’ white person double for their taxi ride? He had a picture of a little girl on the dashboard of the motorcycle maybe he needs more money to support here. It is just so hard to make money here. This attempt of scamming tourists has probably worked before and it would be easy money. He just tried to scam the wrong person that has been treated like this one to many times. After calming myself down by talking to one of my Dominican friends that really understands and knows me well I decided to walk to the school. On the walk two Dominicans asked me if I needed to get to Playa Dorada and I told him in a very tense voice ‘that actually I’m living here and want to just walk to church’ and right after that I saw a bright orange SUV full of sun burnt middle aged gringos driving through the poverty- looking incredibly bored and were honking their horn aggressively at the motorcycles. I wanted to silently screamed over the death of accurate perceptions of white people as I saw that SUV fly by like a flame. Another terrifying thought entered my brain that maybe I’m in the minority of white people that actually care and come to a country to make relationships and understand how to make lasting political change. And when you put it in that extremely dark perspective, everything makes sense and my soul shudders. I’m really sorry if it seems like I hate tourists and think they are evil- I don’t, but if you were in my shoes for the past month, I think you would be drawing a similar conclusion of frustration as me. At this point my mind is completed stuffed with thoughts running wild but I’m feeling a lot more stable after speaking with my friends at the school. Then before church I decide to full out a folder with stories I need to translate into English. I started reading through slowly, as I thumbed through the realities of children that go to the school I’m at everyday, I could feel the horror of their stories grow as a lump formed in my throat. Page after page, written so matter of factly, these short stories broke my heart. Church started and I stayed in the office reading heart-wrenching things about these children whose only fault was being born to their family. I put the folder away in the pastors’ office and I just broke down. I wept because I felt helpless to fixing these problem, I wept because life isn’t fair. I cried because they are only kids, why do children need to go through so much pain. And for about thirty minutes the pastor sat with me and talked about the economy, reality of most people in Dominican, about the cultural difference of my country, how it makes me sick the way North American culture is and how no one from North America will ever understand. More that anything we just talked about Esperanza (hope) that we hope that things will get better and slowly they will. My heart still hurts for so many reasons. I’m so angry with consumerism and so enraged at inequality. And it’s no ones fault, yet its everyone’s fault at the same time. In my self-absorbed mind I think about my self and what my next steps are. So what’s next, I graduate, hope to make lots of money and live in the suburbs, have a minivan to take my kids to soccer practice and live in my plushy house filled with first world problems. Everything about that after the graduating the plan makes me sick to my stomach. I know that most people know the facts of how unequal the world is and how hard life is for them- but they will never understand it because it isn’t something they can fathom. Once you’ve had a change of reality there is no going back to who you were. “I remain confident of this. I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” Psalm 27: 13 Life picked up fast after the 27th and on the 28th I found myself in the position of substituting English class for a teacher because it was raining too much for her to come to work. And the entire thing was sprung on me when I was sitting in the office casually reading a Spanish book when the principal tells me ‘by the way can you cover all of the English classes this afternoon? The first one started 3 minutes ago. Thanks’ and that was the end of that conversation. I scooped up my books in my hand and frantically ran across the open patio to the classroom where a bunch of curious 3rd graders looked at me. Luckily I had been in their class the day before and they at least knew my name. So I looked at them and thought to myself how am I suppose to teach in Spanish? But I did, I stumbled through it. We reviewed colours and sounds and the kids jumped around the room and fought for whose turn it was to hold the big paper with the sound on it. After that I got tossed into another room full of grade 5 students and it was the same confusing last second put together lesson.
Following that I had a free period and in this time I frantically put together a lesson for grade 7 about the verb Hacer and the two different English verbs that come from that and we talked about the differences. It actually went really well. Mind you almost no one was in the class because it was raining- and Dominicans are convinced you will get the flu if you go into the rain. After this the rain continuously poured into the street all night, washing away all of the garbage that covers the sidewalks down to the ocean. The day after I found myself in a similar role when I was needed to fill in for another sick teacher.. but this time I would be teaching science. If you know me at all, you know 1. How much I suck at science. 2. How little I know about science. Now teaching at a 5th grade level in science is not something that should be challenging but if the language was switched, you will find yourself in this predicament of being the most clueless person in the world. All I had to do was right in Spanish about water, liquids and gasses and put the page numbers of the text book on the board and sit there and watch the class… so I thought… instead all of the kids had questions and thought to ask the random white person sitting in the teachers chair for help. So once again I was sitting there revaluating my life choices that brought me to this point when I found myself reading a textbook about Science in Spanish to help children answer questions. After these two days I felt that I could pretty much teach anything in Spanish or English because somehow, by the grace of God I didn’t die when I was thrown into these situations. The rain brought more than just a down pour of water from the heavens it developed confidence that I could communicate what I want to say in a different language, even with a subject I knew nothing about. The first time I felt like I couldn’t survive in this culture was the day when I was determined to wash my clothes. That was the morning I was ready to give up on almost everything. When culture shock came roaring in my ears in the form of cleaning dirty clothes. I was so optimistic about this simple task, there is a laundry machine in the kitchen so how hard could it be? How naïve I once was about this.
I wanted to do it at night but my host mom shot me this look like “are you on crack right now” which confused me but I agreed that I would do it in the morning. The plan was I would stay home from school in the morning to do my wash. I thought this would be tons of time. At 9 am Ramon returned back to the home to ‘help me’ with my wash I thought this was super weird because why would I need someone to help me do my wash. We he got here he explained that I have to move the washing machine out into the backyard. Which made absolutely no sense to me, to our dismay neither of us had the key to the back door. Ramons solution was moving the laundry machine through the front door and bringing it around the house.. which was something I flat out refused to do. At this point I was feeling pretty annoyed because the door was locked and I would have to wear gross clothing for another day. Ramon left the house and shortly after I was in my room studying Spanish- when I was interrupted by a loud continuous obnoxious honking sound outside of my window. When I went to the door to see what was going on.. I realized that some random taxi driver was standing beside motorcycle jingling the set of keys I needed. I was in shock that they sent the keys with some random driver. I snatched them from his hands and ran back to my room. At this point I was feeling determined again, I would succeed at washing my clothes. So I dragged that super heavy laundry machine outside by myself. And then realized the switch for water to flow from the hose was just out of reach because it was behind locked bars.. and I didn’t have the keys to that as well. At was looking pretty ridiculous at this moment. This young girl practically foaming out of the mouth because of frustration over being locked out of everything- this is exactly how one of my neighbours found me. She came over curiously inspecting the scene watching as I fluttered around anxiously. It was probably very entertaining for her. I showed her that I couldn’t reach the hose and the old woman looked at me nodded her head and without another word walked back up the path into her house. Minutes later another man walking down the same path sees me and wordlessly he puts the house in the washing machine and some how makes water fill the machine that I am ready to kill. It was very odd that two people that I had never seen before came walking down a path and decided to take pity on me and my failure. Two hours later I am still painstakingly sorting my colours and hanging then on the line to dry and I’m thinking to myself- this isn’t so bad, I could do laundry again as I finished up the last of my clothing. I went inside to get ready for school and took my dry clothes into my bedroom leaving the other slightly damp ones to finish drying in the breeze. I took a motorconcho to the school and left my frusterations about doing laundry at the house. That afternoon I started assisting the English teacher with her classes and was kept busy with that. I was watching classes help children pronounce letters and feeling good that I was doing something productive with my time when massive angry clouds crowded the skies. I didn’t really realize how much weather could effect life but in that moment I wanted to curse the skies for bringing their heavenly water to the earth because all of my work had now been ruined by 30 minutes of the skies pouring down. When I returned home what I found was very damp clothing spread across the furniture inside, where my host parents had salvaged my soaking clothes from the rain. And in that day I made a very conscious decision, I have decided to support the local economy here. That involves me paying someone else to wash my clothing for me because it took hours of work, me being locked out of doors, me having to hear those awful roosters loudly all morning outside, incredibly heavy lifting and having the rain destroy most of my work and knocked some of my clothes in to the ground.. Definitely not my finest day here. 1. When I walk in the streets my name is not gringa it is arubia the word for blonde. Yes people think my hair is blonde when it is very obviously brown.
2. People drink Oat Juice by choice. It looks like milk, tastes like sour oats and smells like sugar. It’s disgusting 3. Yutcan is a food that has a similar consistency to chalk.. it is consumed often along with plantain. Every. Single. Meal. 4. Coffee. Well coffee is here is drank in cups the size of shot glasses. 5. Coke a cola and lime can fix any aliment you could possibly have related to your stomach. 6. Just because you are the same colour as someone it means that you are most likely related to him or her in some way. 7. No matter how far away or close you need to go within the city of Puerto Plata, the price for a taxi motorcycle is always 25 or 30 pesos. 8. Rain has the power to shut down a city people will not leave and go to work or school because they don’t want to get wet. 9. People wear garbage bags to protect themselves from the rain. 10. Laundry is the most time consuming process here. Dominican time is something I still need to get used too. The plan was to meet at central park at 9 am to watch the parade. I don’t have a cel phone here so once I leave my haven of wifi I am on my own. I decided to leave at 9:15 because I thought it would be fashionably late probably everyone would just be arriving at around 9:20-30. I was wrong everyone got there a few minutes before 10. I didn’t mind waiting, I’m not complaining about that- that’s not the point of the story it is on how when you want to meet someone expect that you will actually meet 30 minutes to an hour later.
At the park when I was basking in the morning sun that was shining down on the massive Catholic Church I was sitting beside, waiting for everyone, random vendors would try to speak to me like they would to all of the other tourist. And I found it quite annoying. The one guy came up to be telling me that he could show me the best place to see the parade for a small price and I told him in Spanish the only thing I want to see are my Dominican friends. Then he left me alone. The power of Spanish and an early morning ‘I don’t want to deal with this face’ helped me out in that situation because I refuse to be thought of as ‘typical ignorant tourist.’ The parade consisted of the different schools in Puerto Plata competing against each other as they celebrated Duarte Day. It was nice being able to recognize all of the children walking in the parade from the school I go to everyday. In the afternoon I got a ride back to my house and went to my upstairs neighbours for lunch, which consisted of a mountain of food that I could not finish on my plate and watching a movie in English. The afternoon was the most exciting part of the day because it was my very first time going to the beach. My soul felt complete when my feet touched the sand and I threw off my sandals and threw my towel on the ground. Dominicans in their quest to be whiter choose a spot that was in the shade. I think I was the only person that protested this decision. As soon as we got there I dragged my one friend into the ocean and I did cartwheels and everything felt perfect. In my excitement running towards the ocean I almost knocked someone over. It was awkward. I could feel my friend the sun looking down at me causing my face to turn a little more pink. At least I didn’t turn into a lobster so I can’t complain too much. And when I plunged into the water, it felt like I was being greeted by a familiar friend. Every time I am in the ocean, my tongue is filled with a salty taste- like I’ve eaten too many potato chips and my hair gets knotted by the force of the powerful waves stretching towards the sand. But I love it. On Playa Dorada the resort is on the right side and the part for locals to swim in is on the left. In the distance I could see mostly white figures moving on the beach and sometimes those figures would venture out further walking down the on the seashore. One of the people that walked down the beach was an old man wearing a bright purple speedo and for some reason his skin had a purple tinge to it. I was swimming happily in the ocean when I could hear my name being called in a Spanish accent and my friends called me over to look at something. They pointed out the purple man and started laughing saying ‘you want to be purple, you want to look like that’ I was mortified. Often I would hold my breath and move against the waves swimming further away from the shore only coming up for seconds for air. I would go as far as I could before I would hear my name being echoed over the waves telling me to come back. I think my Dominican friends were surprised with how I could swim without fear into the deeper water. When the magical time with the ocean came to an end and my friends drove me back to the house, I washed the sand out of my hair, changed into my pyjamas and got my laptop out ready to start writing about last week… when I found out I had a meeting to go to in 10 minute. I had just enough time to change into jeans before the pastor came to the house to pick me up and drive to hotel to sit down and talk more specifically about English classes I would teach. In the hotel is where the group of people from my old high school were staying. It was very interesting to see everyone’s reactions to a place that is becoming so familiar to me. Then I realized, like running into the ocean, being here feels like I’m seeing a familiar friend. |
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