It’s weird, though, to see all that and then to see how threatened men get when two girls dance together.  Not that I expected the ’2-girls-are-better-than-one culture’ to translate here, but it’s still strikes me as odd.  Men have literally pried me away from my friends when we dance bachata together.  It’s very straight the way we dance, with a platonic distance between us, singing the words because really, Aventura is the only thing that matters in that moment.  We go out because we want to have fun.  We dance because good music is playing.  Last weekend I went out with a group of 6 of my friends, all girls, and none of the 5 guys that were watching us asked us to dance.  At least, not until the DJ threw on some of our favorite reggaeton and me and Kellie started dancing with each other.  I heard a guy say, ‘God, will someone please dance with her?’ before he and his friend dragged me and Kellie to the tiny dance floor.   Because, you know, we always need guys to have fun.  Even my friends Romny and Carlito (our lovely boys from el barrio) raise an eyebrow sometimse, though they dance with each other all the time and in general are really physical.  Romny’s asked me, ‘tú eres gay?’ a couple times, and I’m not always sure he’s completely joking.

Enjoy!

That's one of the things I jumped off.

I hate that I’m always in arrears with the posting, but trust me, if I had Internet in my house, there would be a lots of fresh, late night posting. That’s what El Twitter Stream is for (look to the right).

Last week was Semana Santa, the week that everyone that can heads to the beach. Monday night, I took a bus to Puerto Plata, on the northern coast and rested up for my big adventure. At 8:00 the next day, I was on a bus on my way to 27 Charcos. 27 Charcos is a system of pools and waterfalls in the hills just outside Puerto Plata. It’s amazing; the water, though freezing cold, is the most beautiful blue, and so clear. At some parts, when you’re in the pools (charcos) you can float on your back with these rocks on both sides and see the sunlight filtered through the trees. All this communing with nature crap doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared out of my mind. The company that runs the tours through the Charcos asks you to put your life in the hands of a helmet, a life jacket, and two really strong guides. These men tell you where to put your feet and hands and pull you up–whoosh!–right out of the water to safety.

Once we got to the top of the Charcos (there are much less than 27 but I’m not sure how many), the fun part; jumping down. The first jump was easy; we were by a gorgeous waterfall and only maybe 10 feet above the water. The second jump had my heart in my mouth. This one was about 20 feet and when I looked over the edge, my legs felt a little weak.  The minute I hit the water, I was glad I’d done it. It’s amazing how your body feels when you’re dropping. I stalled before every jump but felt so energized after I popped back up the surface. In certain places, the waterfalls carved out a natural slide and in some ways, those were scarier than the jumps. I saw all that rushing, white water and thought how, if I didn’t have a life jacket, I would have very little chance of surviving.

About 45 minutes after the first jump, I was standing on a cliff that I swear had to have been about 100 feet high looking down at all this water and all my friends. On the way up, I could see it was high, but I didn’t realize just how high it was until I got to very top. I was the last person in my group to jump and the guide was doing his best to coach me through it: “If you jump, you need have to just go because if you change your mind, you’ll hit those rocks down there.” Gulp. Not what I needed to hear. “Just look out at the group and jump. If you look down, you won’t do it.” My legs were shaking and my breathing got shallow. My friends were cheering me on but I had to shush them because the shouting just made me feel more like I couldn’t do it. After about ten minutes of my stalling, the guide was ready to push me but at this point I calmed myself down (and realized the only way down was the jump) and I was ready. I closed my eyes on the way down and opened them and started screaming when I realized I was still falling. I hit the water before I finished screaming. I popped up and almost couldn’t believe I was still alive.

On the trail back to the office, our guide, the one that nearly pushed me off the cliff, told my friend Kellie she looked exactly like his ex-girlfriend. “That’s why I barely looked at you.” Oy. Dominican men.

Links
27 Charcos Official Website

Saturday morning, after me and a few friends had been out til about 4 a.m., our program took us to Salcedo to visit La Casa Museo de las Hermanas Mirabal. Remember that Julia Alvarez book, In the Time of the Butterflies? The real-life family of the three sisters that opposed Trujillo in the 50s and got brutually murdered in returned preserved the house and turned it into a museum. The sisters Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa have their faces in plazas and on the 200-peso bill. I swear there’s a street called Calle Las Hermanas Mirabal in every town.

The house is gorgeous and the lawns are perfect. It’s one story and everything is made of beautiful wood. Each room has a portrait of the sisters and one of their favorite dresses on a mannequin in a glass case. They were all beautiful and had all these portraits of them that make them look like old movie stars.

The next stop on our tour was Santiago. It’s the second largest city in the country next to Santo Domingo. We went to el Centro Leon, a beautiful two-story museum about Dominican culture in general and Santiago’s culture specifically. The second floor is an art gallery with paintings and sculptures from Dominican artists. The program took us to a big monument/church which, as far as I understand, was planned as a tribute to Trujillo–Santiago had to do something because it wasn’t as loyal to Trujillo as other parts of the country–but was finished after the end of the dictatorship. It sits on a hill that has really striking panoramic views of the mountains around Santiago. The monument is white stone and really high.

After the monument, we got dragged to two more museums, both of which starte to blur together. I do remember that in the Museo Folklorico, I was overwhelmed. That’s where Dominican kitsch goes to die. In this tiny house, ery inch of wall was covered with a Carnaval mask, a postcard, a comic strip, an album cover…there were no real descriptions of any of the stuff, so I don’t even know that you can call it a museum but there you have it.

Santiago is cute. After 5 minutes of walking around the city, I noticed there was a lot less trash and noise than in Santo Domingo. No Omega blaring from cars, no cobradores shouting from guaguas? Something is amiss.

We didn’t get a chance to rest until we got to Jarabacoa. Jarabacoa is up in the mountains and everything is so green and natural, I too wanted to kick off my shoes and walk down a dirt road like a campesina. We stayed in a hotel/farm where groups of two or three slept in separate rooms in little stone cabins. We ate (food was amazing) and played cards, dominos and the Swiss Family Robinson Fun Game.

Next day, we were up at 7 for a hike. We transfered all our stuff to Rancho Jarabacoa and got into trucks to get to the hiking site. This hike was a lot less strenuous than the one in Parque Los Haitises, so it was more of a walk than anything else. We went to a river and walked across bridges of dubious integrity but the waterfall at the end was worth it. We sang songs on the walk back to the truck. I felt like I was at camp again. The truck took us back through the hills again. We saw all these really interesting looking houses built into the hillsides, including one that belongs to some former president of the Dominican Republic.

Back at the ranch (haha) I rode a horse for the first time. All these boys between the ages of 8 and 14 helped rode with us on the horses and I thought I was going to die. Every step the horse took made my butt smack against the saddle really hard. I actually was more comfortable when my little guide pushed the horse a little faster, but then, of course, I started screaming because I thought I was going to fall off. We got zero instruction in horse riding so I had no idea what I was doing. The boys, though, had fun and had all the horses racing each other. Ay mi madre.

Batey Lecheria is on the outskirts of Santo Domingo at the foot of beautiful mountains. During the sugar boom, other farmers jumped on the Haitian bandwagon and soon there were bateys on all types of farms and later in the cities. When we got there, we could see the smoke from a trash fire in the foothills. Bateys are the poorest areas you’ll probably find in the Dominican Republic. Our van dropped us off on a ‘street’ looks like in those informercials you see late at night when that old guy holds up a starving/HIV-positive/worm-infested orphan, beginning you to send just a few dollars each month to give him food and medicine. From the window, we could see this old woman beating the living crap of a girl that couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old. There are little shacks made of tin in lots of different colors. There were chickens pecking in the dirt, trash piles burning in the streets and a strong stink.

We toured a Montessori school set up by an order of American nuns with the help of the Clinton Foundation. The school was the nicest place in the batey, which isn’t very big. One of the teachers, named Luz, explained that while the school teaches the usual reading, writing and arithmetic, they also have to teach the children have to use a toilet and wash their hands, since they’ve never really had to do it before. The school works with children of all ages, but the older kids don’t come until a bit later. We met the smaller children, who I think were only about 5 years old. They were so precious, and so excited when the blonder, whiter students from my program stooped down to say hello. The school also works to improve the health of the people living in the bateys. On the second floor, they have a doctor’s office.

This girl from a small town in Connecticut signed up two years ago to work with this program. She was short and pale to the point of looking sickly and had a weird, high voice. Something was off about her. Her Spanish was crap, even though she said she majored in Spanish in college. She gave us a tour of the batey. She showed us these wood and tin buildings where families lived in single rooms. We passed a cheerful fat woman sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a wooden shack. The girl knew a lot about the batey and it was nice to be able to ask her questions. She told us about how at night people from outside the batey come to sell drugs, how women in the batey sell drugs themselves, how the men do construction in an illegal sandmine and the women work in rich houses for a living, how sometimes mothers accept money from neighbors in exchange for sleeping with their daughters, how there’s a lot of prostitution and teenage pregnancy and yet the clinic at the school only gives out condoms if you have a prescription–they’re Catholics, after all–and how the people in the community are her friends.

On the ride back, we talked about how horrible all of this is and why the hell would the government pump hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars into building a metro line with maybe 6 stops while people are living in unbelievably bad conditions. It was weird, too, though to walk through as a group and peeking into houses. I felt like such an intruder. I can’t believe our teacher asked us to bring cameras.