Kreyòl Camp

 By Vickie

On Saturday, I  made it back from the capital to my site without any problems. I took a taxi to Caribe Tours, where there were about 15 young Peace Corps volunteers headed to…… our site. It is known as one of the most beautiful, inexpensive, and unspoiled beaches in the DR. They had all been in country for a year and were taking a week off to vacation.  We separated in Barahona and they headed off to find food, while I wandered around looking for a guagua to take me home.

The weekend passed uneventfully and I headed to Batey 9 on Monday morning at 8. Fortunately, one of the volunteers I met on Monday had given me good directions to Batey 9, because somehow I got left off the distribution list for information about the camp. I caught a guagua to Barahona – old hat. Once there, I got help from the lady sitting next to me in finding the next guagua that would take me to Batey 4. Basically, she grabbed my motorcycle helmet, said, “Follow me,” and started asking around until she found the guagua. I can tell you that I truly do “depend on the kindness of strangers” to survive here.

This guagua drove slowly out of Barahona and into the flat, dry, dusty plains to the North. Covered with scrub brush and sugarcane.  Sugarcane and dirt: gray, dusty dirt.  And bateys. Houses of tabla (rough wood) and zinc. Streets of dusty dirt. Electricity is sporadic, water comes to the batey through a pump where people take buckets to collect water. Some have water inside their homes, but many don’t.  

At Batey 4, I got off the guagua and looked at the group of men on their motoconchos waiting under large shade tree for customers. I picked out an older guy and told him I needed a slow and smooth ride.  We rode down a dirt road beside a canal looking out over miles and miles of sugarcane, with beautiful blue mountains in the distance, fading into the blue of the sky.  I told him a little bit about why I’m here – volunteering, working with people – and he told me about how politicians say things but don’t mean them – that they are liars. “Sí,” I said.

Washing clothes.

I have to say I’m glad I’m in a pueblo and not in a batey. When we first arrived and walked around, I just became more and more depressed as we walked. Everything is dirt. Everyone has to live in dirt. Yes, they sweep the dirt and pick up the garbage in their yards. But in common areas and outside of the batey, there is trash – trash in the road, in the scrub brush, stuck on the barbed wire fences. And even if there’s no trash, there’s still dirt. The children walk in it, play in it, the parents work in it. It’s just really hard for me to accept it and the first sight of it was very discouraging. And it was in the afternoon and the heat and sun were oppressive and suffocating.

Main Street

A beautiful smile.

After a few days though, greeting and being greeted by adults and children in Kreyòl (or Spanish – our choice) with beautiful smiles and a willingness to stop anything and talk with us, or to share warm “biskwit” (biscuits) fresh from the dutch oven cooked over a fogón, I started to feel the beauty there. In the evenings, the air was cool and fresh with an uplifting breeze flowing down from the mountains. The sunset and shadows on the mountains were a visual delight, and always there were sheep, goats, children, dogs, chickens, and cute little pigs running around to keep us entertained.

Add dutch oven -- biskwit follows!

Start with hot coals.

The view from our dorm room.

He came every day to watch our class.

The week was wonderful. Our teacher, Getro, works at a private school in the capital. He teaches Spanish and English, but he also speaks Kreyòl and French. He’s Haitian. There were 9 of us in the class – all young volunteers in their early 20’s. I’m the doña – mother. We stayed in two separate dormitory type rooms, maintained by the pastor there – an evangelical pastor who has lived and worked in the community for 25 years. He loves to host Kreyòl camp because he thinks it’s important that we understand a little bit about the Haitian language and culture before going to work in the bateys.

My camp mates and teacher.

The Dormitory.

A few amazing things happened while I was there. The first day, I arrived at about the same time that a huge air-conditioned bus arrived, unloading a group of nurse practitioners from the US. They were there to dispense medication, give Pap smears to the women, and do dental work – just for that one day. They set up shop in the girls’ dorm. The amazing thing was – they were from Carson Newman College in East Tennessee. That’s where my dad spent his first year in college, before WWII intervened. In the middle of nowhere, listening to the familiar cadence of my east Tennessee cousins. It was a happy surprise.

I also found a very surprising thing at one of the small homes in the batey. A huge confederate flag used a door curtain. The house was painted in the colors of the flag – blue and red. Our teacher had walked to the house with me to ask if it would be OK to take a picture. After we left he said, “Ésto es una cosa de brujas.” That’s a witch thing. The colors, the bottles buried in the ground and the little scraps of fabric hanging under the porch were all signs of witchcraft he said. I have a lot to learn.

Thursday afternoon at around 4 PM we were treated to a music and dance exhibition – a group of men rolled into town in the back of a truck, with handmade and hand-painted wind instruments and drums. The amount and variety of music they made with these simple instruments was amazing. The set up a rhythm, got a groove going, and two men dressed in jeans, Tshirts, rag skirts, wildly decorated caps, and sunglasses, did a very sexy hip gyrating dance – imitating women? Anyway, I was reminded of Michael Jackson in the precision and subtlety of each move, mostly concentrated in the hip area. After awhile, they headed off down the street with a large crowd following them, dancing and singing.

Earlier that day, while we were in Kreyòl class, we heard a wild, terrified screaming squeal coming from down the street. We all ran to the windows to see who was being murdered. Under a large tree a small group of men had hog-tied…..a hog. A monstrous gray hog lay kicking and crying out for dear life. He knew exactly what was up. A large group of little boys stood watching the spectacle. After awhile the hog settled down – not sure if he was just worn out or if they had drugged him somehow. I thought maybe they had cut his throat, but no. There was a motoconcho parked there with  two boards tied longways across the back. The men hoisted this monster onto those two boards and tied him down.

To market, to market to sell a fat pig.

The real surprise for me though, was the next morning. I walked out from the dorm, headed to class, and under that same tree, lying on a table was the gray hog – minus head, feet, and entrails. All day long, the men cut pieces from the hog, hung them in the tree and waited for customers to come by.

I left at noon that day, working my way back home, making the connections with help from strangers, and Jim met me at the street leading up to our house. As the day was crushingly hot, he convinced me to head to the little river that our town is famous for and hop in. This river is about 200 yards long, it comes up from underground and flows into the blindingly beautiful sea. It is clean and cold and we were refreshed. Sigh.