Remember the Italian Guy From Puerto Plata killed a few months ago?
He too was "porking"
a Dominican woman with a teenage son,the kid killed him!
He too was "porking"
a Dominican woman with a teenage son,the kid killed him! - Thread starter Timex
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Although my life has never been anywhere near what he describes it is very easy for me to imagine life exactly as he tells it. I am looking forward to reading more and wish him good luck.
Hard story to believe...
..if you've never been. Really hard.
I would have guessed Dan was a photographer, the guy is definitely into the details. He's quite perceptive and obviously asks a lot of questions.
So many descriptors in this narrative made me think "oh yeah, seen that, heard that, did that...".
There is so much in the details and his are spot-on.
If he's a pin-hole photographer than there isn't much in the way of shiny equipment that the tigres would find interesting or even speculatively valuable. He could be using old cardboard boxes for the camera if he so chooses.
Great stuff, great additions. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and to Dan, keep on keepin' on. And keep us updated.
Oh, and he's from the 413 (Western Massachusetts) and they put out some good eggs.
..if you've never been. Really hard.
I would have guessed Dan was a photographer, the guy is definitely into the details. He's quite perceptive and obviously asks a lot of questions.
So many descriptors in this narrative made me think "oh yeah, seen that, heard that, did that...".
There is so much in the details and his are spot-on.
If he's a pin-hole photographer than there isn't much in the way of shiny equipment that the tigres would find interesting or even speculatively valuable. He could be using old cardboard boxes for the camera if he so chooses.
Great stuff, great additions. Thanks for bringing this to our attention, and to Dan, keep on keepin' on. And keep us updated.
Oh, and he's from the 413 (Western Massachusetts) and they put out some good eggs.
Story or real life or a mix of both... I enjoyed reading it, it is really well written! I agree, get him a blog... for those who wants to follow and read..
He is responsible himself for the way of life he has chosed to live for now, his age doesnt matter, he his still responsible for his own life..
And I think its great he shared this part with us, it was interesting reading!
He is responsible himself for the way of life he has chosed to live for now, his age doesnt matter, he his still responsible for his own life..
And I think its great he shared this part with us, it was interesting reading!
Santo Domingo Diary 2nd Installment
Thanks for all the kind comments. Here is the next chunk which is loosely divided into 5 smaller chunks. Dan
JHOANGLISH'S JOB, CONTINUED
On payday Jhoanglish went back to work at the bank for Guardianes Marcos, the watchy-man company, and somehow, the story is still a little blurry even after a week of clarification, during a shift change, the shotgun he was responsible for disappeared. He was promptly thrown in jail, well not exactly in jail but handcuffed to a bench behind the Mirador del Sur Destacamento (Police Department). He looked pretty scared but the police did not treat him badly although Altagracia had to bring him his dinner, a warm shirt and a sheet to sleep under on the bench. He was released after a couple of days when it was revealed that his supervisor had taken the shotgun from where Jhonglish had locked it up and had since returned it into circulation. Perhaps the supervisor borrowed it for a quick side job. Why the supervisor or the succeeding watchy-man were never locked up or questioned I will probably never know. Guardianes Marcos is now insisting, not only that they not pay Jhoanglish his wages of about 1500 pesos for his total of five days of work, but that he pay 500 pesos to be reinstated although he, evidently, did nothing wrong. As well, the Mirador del Sur's finest would like 5000 pesos for processing and for the three days room and board but we figure it will all be forgotten long before we ever get around to paying. Our total losses, on paper, to keep Jhoanglish working would come to 1200 pesos daily, not counting meals and medication. I would still like to hear the story from another angle, there are two guys about the same age as Jhoanglish who live nearby and who work for the same company and they have had no problems with Marcos Inc..
TOWNHALL
Altagracia has decided that, despite my tales of the cold in Massachusetts, she would like to visit this summer when I am there working.
Every resident of the Dominican Republic has a cedula, or I.D. card, with a number that, like a social security number in the States, is linked with one's birth certificate and that one carries for life. But for Altagracia to apply for a passport she must obtain her birth certificate from the city where she was declared. But since she was not declared until she was about 17 and still too young to vote, although she had two children by then, and was declared by an uncle and was not given the appellido of her father, Mateo, but of her mother, Garcia Poche, or Pochet depending on which document you are reading, and since the birth certificate is evidently not filed by date of birth but by the date of declaration, and none of these records are computerized, it is not so easy. We went to the townhall of Bani, about 2 hours away by guagua, where Altagracia was declared (even though she was born in Elias Pina), and went upstairs where there was a corridor lined with maybe a dozen unlabeled offices all of which had equally long, stationary lines trailing out through the doors. Altagracia asked a cleaning lady to unlock a bathroom for her and while we, the cleaning lady and I, were waiting for her to come out we chatted and when she did come out the cleaning lady brought us to a friend of hers in one of the Kafkaesque offices who, after much turning of pages of dog-eared registers and much searching through overstuffed grimy manilla folders that were precariously stacked on shelves behind her, and recopying the cedula number a couple of times with the pencil she borrowed from me, announced that it would take a lot more digging and could she call us when she found the record and so we gave her 100 pesos so she could buy a phone card to call us and have a tip left over and thanked her and now are still waiting after three weeks and have not had time to get back there because, in the meantime, Altagracia's father died.
MORE KIKI & JHOANGLISH, DIARY TYPE STUFF, DUARTE
In the case of Kiki and Jhoanglish, there is no easy solution, they make Altagracia crazy and they know that she will never let them go hungry or throw them out on the street. She made it clear when she described what she would do to those cops and to Guardianes Marcos if any harm came to Jhoanglish that she would defend to the death anyone who had come out of her womb (more exact wording would be-- "?de este maldito culo, cono diablo!" accompanied by unambiguous hand gestures). If she gave the boys food and rent money to live somewhere else they would just spend it and come back to eat and sleep in the marquisina. The fact that there were, what I saw to be opportunities with me, to pay for vocational training or to start them off in a small business does not seem to matter. In the beginning the boys and I had long conversations over dominos about life and work and there were plans for them to sell used cell phones with me and maybe take a cell phone programming course and they said they wanted to learn English and I was going to help them and so forth. But now I think it was all lies. They do not care. Their upbringing was rough; as I understand it there were some harsh physical punishments meted out when they were young, punishments that Niningo and Chavela escaped, and I think that maybe Kiki and Jhoanglish are now punishing Altagracia for those days by breaking or stealing things she treasures or needs; on only a few occasions have the crimes been directed at me. So I can rant and rave and set all the deadlines and ultimatums I want, sometimes I feel a little better afterwards, but they will never amount to anything. Yesterday Kiki borrowed the television from the house and after Altagracia dragged it back from the marquisina she told him to get out, for good, but later when I asked her, "when?", she answered, "when he's ready."
In about two months, after my museum show and after the Feria del Libro, at which I am hoping to sell a lot of prints of the cave drawings, I will be going back to Massachusetts to work for the summer. If airline fares stay low I should be able to come back to Villa Mella for long weekends to see Altagracia but for me to return to the house in November, the marquisina will have to be empty. If the boys are still there I will rent a small apartment and we will put the house on the market and figure out how to move on. I can't live with having to lock my own bedroom door behind me when I go out to the bathroom and not being to leave my cell phone on the kitchen table for an hour and paying for food for two guys who spit on the floor and walk on the laundry that's fallen off the line. The other day I left 15 pesos on the kitchen table so that Chavela or Niningo could pay for drinking water when the drinking water truck came around and somebody swiped it.
Since I don't feel much like working on the house-- I have projects like finishing plastering the garden wall and somehow rehabilitating the indoor bathroom-- I have been listening to Bruce Springsteen and reading John D. MacDonald novels written in the 50's and 60's with titles like, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper; A Bullet for Cinderella; and Cry Hard, Cry Fast-- full of hard-boiled private detectives and dames and lines like, "when I belted him he went down like a horse on ice." Like Springsteen, they couldn't be more american. There is a used bookstore on El Conde that has books stuffed on shelving at least 8 feet high on both sides of a passage less than 2 feet wide, I don't see how you could even set up a ladder to reach the top shelves and there is no organization. But, if you ask, the owner will take you through a series of passages separated by padlocked doors through the back to a large storeroom that has moldering piles of books, not stacks but piles, and some of the piles are old paperback novels in English.
The Curator who I am working with on the catalog for my show at the museum has been sick-- heart and stomach-- and so we are behind schedule, today, Monday Feb. 28, was to be the day to deliver the layout to the printers but I will still have about two days work after I get the text from the curator, so I don't know. Wednesday we are to go to Elias Pina for the funeral for Altagracia's father.
This afternoon I will meet Altagracia after work in Gascue and we will go shopping for funeral clothes for her in the shopping district known as Duarte, where there is Plaza Lama and Gran Via and Almacenes Rodriguez and Almacenes Paloma and Centromoda and Sedereles California which are all relatively un-air-conditioned, somewhat grimier versions of Woolworth or Walmart and where the sidewalks out front are packed with venders set up on folding tables selling everything from alarm clocks to earrings to coconuts to belts to wigs to perfume to toothbrushes to cell phone chargers to bootleg cds to boiled corn on the cob and to the headphones they give away free on Delta flights to listen to the movie with and where I would not go at night and where no women wear shiny necklaces (only bead necklaces that fall completely apart if torn off the neck) and where sometimes you can get a better price even in the big stores that take credit cards and have UPC barcode readers by bargaining and where none of the size labels on clothes can be believed. The stores here are a lot more crowded than the stores in the fancy malls like Acropolis or Megacentro and everything is cheaper. Carry your wallet in a front pocket and keep your purse always in front of you too.
ALTAGRACIA
Altagracia comes up to about here on me, and is slightly but powerfully and gracefully built without an ounce of fat and is the color they call india here. Her stomach sticks out and, because it is not fat, I wonder if it could be from the surgery she had to prevent more pregnancies after the life threatening birth of Niningo, her last born. Her arms are thin but very strong with highly defined muscles from wringing out cloth mops and laundry by hand daily for 30 of her 37 years. She has very high and very pronounced cheekbones and when she talks she uses all the lip pointing and hand gestures that Dominicans are known for, including the very emphatic whip finger snapping move from Elias Pina. When she tells a story she tells it with such animation that everyone in the room listens and watches even if they don't understand Spanish.
I met Altagracia while staying for the month of January, 2004 at a pension in Santo Domingo while I was photographing indigenous cave art near San Cristobal. Our relationship started shyly with hesitant greetings in the mornings when I was leaving the pension for the caves and it wasn't until sometime during the second week that we began to chat. My Spanish was even worse then than it is now and she speaks very colloquially so it was slow going at first but I learned that she had been divorced from a comecomida mujeriego (good for nothing womanizer), Luis, for three years and had had 4 children with him now ranging from 15-20 years old. She was commuting an hour and a half each way from Pizarete by guagua and worked 6 days a week to feed the kids. As child support Luis usually paid her rent of 800 pesos per month and gave her a little food money, but they lived real poor nonetheless.
By the end of my month in the Pension I was looking forward to the short chats we would have in a hallway or by the front desk and when she said she would miss them too, we exchanged phone numbers and she did, indeed, call me about a week after I had returned to Massachusetts and after another week we were calling one another 2-3 times a day. This telephone courtship continued for two months until April when I returned to Santo Domingo to deliver my promised prints and digital archive to the Museum del Hombre Dominicano and to begin arranging the next phase of my project and, of course, to see Altagracia. We met in front of Supermercado Nacional on Maximo Gomez and walked and talked together and it was wonderful. The first besito, the first embrace, then the first real kiss. At that time she was no longer working at the pension so we were able to spend a lot of time together; she shuttled back and forth from Pizarete and we stayed in pensions on nights when she could be away from the kids, all of whom I had met by then. It was a sad goodbye when I left to go back to the States. She was certain she would never see me again, and I couldn't wait to come back.
By this time the cave photography project was looking so promising that I left my position as professor of photography at a small New England private college and began writing grant proposals and planning on how best to move to the Dominican Republic. In July, after another two more months of twice or thrice daily phone calls, I returned and Altagracia and I began house hunting. We walked miles through the city looking for Se Vende (For Sale) signs, talking with the local corredors (neighborhood shysters who presumably know what is for sale), reading the classifieds and talking with real estate agents and cab drivers. Twice we very nearly bought government apartments built in the time of Trujillo after being told that a clear title could be obtained afterwards (it cannot, at least as I understand it now) and we also very nearly bought a very pretty house that needed a new roof on a dead end street on a hill with a view of the Caribbean in Maria Auxiliadora for about $12,000 U.S. before we learned that, at night, no taxi will take you there because it is so dangerous. The trick was to find something I could afford but in a barrio that I would not get killed in the first week and, since we had started out thinking in the under $10,000 U.S. price range, that left a pretty narrow band of possibilities. Halfway through the second week we found the house in Villa Mella through a lawyer/real estate agent named Norkis. It had been lived in by a frail looking little old lady and a smattering of extended family including two overgrown sons for the past 14 or so years and had a clear title. We believed about half of what the owners told us about the house (half too much, but so it goes), made an offer, counter offered, etc. and eventually settled on 860,000 pesos which at the time came to $18,000 US. Altagracia's lease was expiring so we moved her and her family in in a hurry from Pizarete and I was able to sleep there two nights before returning to work in Massachusetts.
Primaveral has some nice houses and some shabby houses and is generally a poor, but not caliente (or hot or dangerous) section of Villa Mella although we knew there would be at least a few tigueres around. The plan was for Kiki and Jhoanglish to stay in the house with Altagracia and the two younger ones for the first month or so, while I was not there, to establish a strong male presence and label the house as not an easy one to break into safely, even though the head of household was a gringo, and then they were to move in with their father, Luis, in another area of the city. Unfortunately, Luis at the age of 74 was murdered in early August. Had he died before I bought the house, I would not have bought the house until the boys were settled elsewhere. Had he died sometime after the boys had moved in with him, they could have stayed there. The fact that I am struggling with these two malcriados in my own house owes itself to an improbable event that happened during a two or three month window of time. But here they are.
In October, about a month before I really moved into the house with Altagracia's family she and I had a fight by telephone. She was so mad that she went and got her job back at the pension and started looking for another house or apartment to move into. It is March now and she is still working at the pension, and working hard, for about $5 a day, 6 days a week and if she is sick a day she loses her day off. It is both fierce pride that she feed her children herself, even though she doesn't earn enough, and an even fiercer, and compulsive, work ethic that keeps her there.
Altagracia was born on June 6, 1967, in Elias Pina on the family property that borders Haiti and where her mother still lives. She was the second oldest of 14 and the oldest girl-- as I write this she is 37. Altagracia was forced to leave school in what I estimate must have been about the second grade to work on her father's conuco (little farm) and shortly after, to begin working cleaning houses both of relatives and of people who would pay her father a little for the service. Some of these positions were located as far away as Santo Domingo, 4 hours by guagua, and were live-in, at least during the week days so she was hardly raised by anyone.
When she was 15 one of her father's brothers, Ramoncito, introduced her to Luis Alvarez, a 54 year old bachelor (and about 8 years older than her father) from Bani who already had 31 children with various women. Before that Altagracia had had one almost boyfriend who she had kissed on one occasion. She found Luis handsome and liked him and they were quickly married. Her mother, Anna, was only 13 when she herself got married. I suspect there was some kind of quid pro quo between Uncle Ramoncito and Luis. She gave birth to Kiki while she was 16. Altagracia has several sisters, Viola and Nellis, who are younger than her own two oldest children. Under pressure from Altagracia Luis curtailed his womanizing ways after a few years and did not father any more children with other women. Luis was employed by a factory as a night watchman for a number of years, that business was bought by another and he was kept on until his death. At one time in the marriage, after the first rocky years of his constant cheating and before the financial demands of 31 other children drained all his resources, they were reportedly happy and lived in a nice house in Bani. Altagracia tells me that she left him because she simply did not love him anymore although, here again, I have a feeling something else must have happened. When Altagracia called me in Massachusetts to tell me about the murder of Luis she had wailed into the phone, tigueres killed my children's father. Since then she has not said much critical about him, whereas before his death she never said much good, but I suppose that is natural. She is furious with him for dying and leaving her with the four and I think she is serious about wanting to kill his murderer with her bare hands.
We wake up at 5:30 every morning and I make coffee and hot milk while Altagracia makes the bed. After coffee she dresses, fixes her hair which has been in rollers all night and, with Chloe my cocker spaniel, we walk the kilometer to the blue water tank where she catches a guagua to take her to work. It is about an hour ride at that hour of the morning. She works making beds and cleaning without a break until 4 PM and then takes another hour long guagua ride home. When she gets home she inspects the house, orders more mopping in the kitchen or galleria, fold these clothes, put these damp clothes back in the sun, wash those dishes cleaner etc. Chavela has made lunch of rice and habichuelas and a side dish of some kind and left it on the kitchen table. I have already eaten half of mine but have saved the other half to eat while Altagracia eats her first real meal of the day after work. After she eats she goes for her bath which is the only time of the day she takes for herself and is not working although she brings the clothes she wore that day with her and washes and wrings them out by hand in the shower. She stays in there for a good hour and sometimes smokes a cigar or two while she is in there and sometimes she bleaches the floor and scours the toilet for good measure. Chavela does laundry every day in the lavadora (portable washing machine) and cleans the bathroom every day too. Cleaning is therapy for Altagracia, but I do not know what for. When she comes out she is frozen half to death even though she has gone in with a cauldron of water heated to boiling to mix with the cold water from the tinaco. She then sends Niningo to the colmado to buy something for dinner, frequently it is just bread and milk or a wheat pudding mix thing, or corn meal to make arepitas with but sometimes it is a big sancocho or salami with mangu. After dinner we watch a few minutes of Xica de Selva, a dubbed Brazilian telenovela (soap opera) that everyone in the family has taken a fancy to, then Altagracia irons for an hour or so, drinks a cup of coffee and we go to bed around midnight.
Kiki and Jhoanglish are different, in a damaged sort of way, than Chavela and Niningo (who I haven't written about yet, but he is a sweet, honest kid who, so far, likes to work and has won academic prizes in school). I asked Altagracia once what traumatic event, something violent or sexual they might have seen or experienced (I listen to a lot of radio talk show psychologists) when they were young and she could not think of anything. But when I asked Chavela the same question, she answered without hesitation, Mommy's punishments. She went on to describe Kiki as a 10 year old, being forced to kneel on a flattened, jagged tin pail for 4 or 5 hours holding a large rock on his head in the sun after being caught doing something wrong. I began to leap to the conclusion that these punishments, which, I believe, exceed those allowed by the Geneva Convention, were what made Kiki the way he is today but the other kids tell me that he was real bad before too.
Altagracia used to make extra money by reading taza, or tea leaves, although she usually uses coffee instead of tea and reads the drips that run down the outside of the coffee cup after the person has drunk and then turns the cup upside down over a candle to scorch the dregs to increase their resolution. She might be able to tell you what your spouse is up to nights when he or she is out, warn you about upcoming health issues or see other things in your life that might be making you unhappy. Afterwards she writes a prescription which is usually comprised of a mixture of herbs. She read taza for Britannia a week before the knife fight and when I asked if she had foreseen such an event in Britannia's future she said no, but that she knew that Britannia never took her prescription. She was very matter of fact about this talent when she explained to me that, yup, her father had it but that she was the only one of her 13 siblings who had it, so it goes. There is no belief system that goes along with this activity-- some people can wiggle their ears or curl their tongue the other way or douse and Altagracia can read taza.
REZO IN ELIAS PINA
After spending the last five years of his life in bed, stricken with thrombosis, emaciated and unable to walk, Amado Mateo Nova, Altagracia's father, died. His wife, Anna, had left him some years ago but came back to care for him during the thrombosis. Altagracia and I went to visit them a few months before his death and, while he was not alert for much of the time, he recognized Altagracia's voice at some distance while we were still outside the little four room house and called her by her pet name, Ninina. She was, and still is, very proud and pleased and moved, inordinately pleased and moved it seems to me, that he recognized her then because, by most accounts, he had not been a loving father and it may be that her affection for him is only because he abused her less than he did her brothers and sisters. Amado's brother, Ramoncito, told me that he influenced her parents to send Altagracia away to work and that he introduced her to Luis, who she would marry, to get her to safer ground-- he spat on the ground when describing his brother, and this was at the memorial or rezo. He told me that while Amado did work he did not bring the money home to his family but spent it on game cocks, rum and women and that his children often went hungry and that he was sometimes violent.
When someone dies here they are buried quickly. At 1:30 AM of the morning that Altagracia heard that her father had died and, even though the first guagua to Elias Pina would get her there well before noon, she worried that she would be too late, but she wasn't. Nine days later a rezo, a day of remembrance and prayer, would be held.
We had arrived at the house of Altagracia's family the night before the rezo and were served some stewed pork liver with yuca cooked over a small wood fire outside on the ground under a shelter of thatch in a kettle set on three cement blocks. Although there was electricity, the house only had two dim light bulbs so it was very dark with most of the light coming from the cooking fire, or fog. Altagracia found that the only outhouse, a snug one-holer, was packed floor to ceiling with firewood so she ordered one of her younger sisters, Momona, and some of the men to empty it out and clean it so it could be used the next day. About 20 people spent the night sleeping on makeshift mattresses, slumped in plastic chairs or on the dirt floor and we all were awake by 6 AM to begin cooking the food for the expected gathering of 200 people. By 10 in the morning there were eight fogones scattered around the compound with some having kettles big enough that it took two men to move them. The two biggest kettles were set over a long fire in a hole about two feet across, two feet deep and six feet long dug in the garden. The foods cooked were pork, goat, chicken, yuca, rice, habichuela, tayota and chenchen, a corn meal and milk based mixture. The pig, which had already been killed, was coarsely hacked apart with a machete and then women with smaller knives finished cutting up the meat and splintered bone into stew sized pieces. The chickens were killed and plucked moments before stewing and the kettles were stirred with short poles that were freshly cut and debarked. One little old man was stopped from shaping one of these stirring sticks with his machete because the particular type of wood he chose was bitter and would give the food a bad taste. The house had no kitchen or bathroom or running water so all food preparation and washing of pots and pans was done on the ground or on one of several makeshift wooden tables and all washing and cooking water was carried in 5 gallon plastic buckets. Scraps of food that fell on the ground were eaten by the dog or by one of the little pigs that wandered around. Coffee was brewed throughout the day by boiling the loose grounds in a kettle and then strained by being wrung through a long fine fabric tube that was closed at the end and then served by women in tiny plastic cups maybe twice the size of thimbles.
Anna, the widow, spent most of the day in a small room with close family receiving well wishers who might sit and stay for a while and who might talk among themselves, but it was generally a room full of sorrow and sobbing. While men did pass through to offer condolences almost no men ever stayed or sat. During the upcoming year the women of the family will observe a luto or mourning by wearing only sombre colors and refraining from dancing, but men do not observe luto.
An even smaller room in the house housed the prayer table with a candle, some leaves and the cross that would grace the grave site, although the inscribed birth date of Amado on the cross was off by about 15 years. I spoke with 4 of his brothers and none knew exactly how old he had been. Ramoncito answered that question by saying, Well, when I was eight he was about this tall and almost a man, and held his hand up to the height of the bridge of my nose.
Out front, on the other side of the house, there was a tarpaulin stretched between trees to provide shade for the ongoing two domino games and where many of the men sat passing small rum bottles back and forth, most of which did not contain rum but cler?n, a cheap, strong aguardiente from Haiti, only a stone's throw away. Many of the guests walked over to the rezo from Haiti, many women smoked tobacco pipes and some had short braids of hair hanging down in front of their ears and much of the conversation was in a Haitian patois which, to me, sounded like Turkish played backwards.
The last guagua leaves Elias Pina at 5:30 in the afternoon and we barely made it in time to return home to Villa Mella.
Thanks for all the kind comments. Here is the next chunk which is loosely divided into 5 smaller chunks. Dan
JHOANGLISH'S JOB, CONTINUED
On payday Jhoanglish went back to work at the bank for Guardianes Marcos, the watchy-man company, and somehow, the story is still a little blurry even after a week of clarification, during a shift change, the shotgun he was responsible for disappeared. He was promptly thrown in jail, well not exactly in jail but handcuffed to a bench behind the Mirador del Sur Destacamento (Police Department). He looked pretty scared but the police did not treat him badly although Altagracia had to bring him his dinner, a warm shirt and a sheet to sleep under on the bench. He was released after a couple of days when it was revealed that his supervisor had taken the shotgun from where Jhonglish had locked it up and had since returned it into circulation. Perhaps the supervisor borrowed it for a quick side job. Why the supervisor or the succeeding watchy-man were never locked up or questioned I will probably never know. Guardianes Marcos is now insisting, not only that they not pay Jhoanglish his wages of about 1500 pesos for his total of five days of work, but that he pay 500 pesos to be reinstated although he, evidently, did nothing wrong. As well, the Mirador del Sur's finest would like 5000 pesos for processing and for the three days room and board but we figure it will all be forgotten long before we ever get around to paying. Our total losses, on paper, to keep Jhoanglish working would come to 1200 pesos daily, not counting meals and medication. I would still like to hear the story from another angle, there are two guys about the same age as Jhoanglish who live nearby and who work for the same company and they have had no problems with Marcos Inc..
TOWNHALL
Altagracia has decided that, despite my tales of the cold in Massachusetts, she would like to visit this summer when I am there working.
Every resident of the Dominican Republic has a cedula, or I.D. card, with a number that, like a social security number in the States, is linked with one's birth certificate and that one carries for life. But for Altagracia to apply for a passport she must obtain her birth certificate from the city where she was declared. But since she was not declared until she was about 17 and still too young to vote, although she had two children by then, and was declared by an uncle and was not given the appellido of her father, Mateo, but of her mother, Garcia Poche, or Pochet depending on which document you are reading, and since the birth certificate is evidently not filed by date of birth but by the date of declaration, and none of these records are computerized, it is not so easy. We went to the townhall of Bani, about 2 hours away by guagua, where Altagracia was declared (even though she was born in Elias Pina), and went upstairs where there was a corridor lined with maybe a dozen unlabeled offices all of which had equally long, stationary lines trailing out through the doors. Altagracia asked a cleaning lady to unlock a bathroom for her and while we, the cleaning lady and I, were waiting for her to come out we chatted and when she did come out the cleaning lady brought us to a friend of hers in one of the Kafkaesque offices who, after much turning of pages of dog-eared registers and much searching through overstuffed grimy manilla folders that were precariously stacked on shelves behind her, and recopying the cedula number a couple of times with the pencil she borrowed from me, announced that it would take a lot more digging and could she call us when she found the record and so we gave her 100 pesos so she could buy a phone card to call us and have a tip left over and thanked her and now are still waiting after three weeks and have not had time to get back there because, in the meantime, Altagracia's father died.
MORE KIKI & JHOANGLISH, DIARY TYPE STUFF, DUARTE
In the case of Kiki and Jhoanglish, there is no easy solution, they make Altagracia crazy and they know that she will never let them go hungry or throw them out on the street. She made it clear when she described what she would do to those cops and to Guardianes Marcos if any harm came to Jhoanglish that she would defend to the death anyone who had come out of her womb (more exact wording would be-- "?de este maldito culo, cono diablo!" accompanied by unambiguous hand gestures). If she gave the boys food and rent money to live somewhere else they would just spend it and come back to eat and sleep in the marquisina. The fact that there were, what I saw to be opportunities with me, to pay for vocational training or to start them off in a small business does not seem to matter. In the beginning the boys and I had long conversations over dominos about life and work and there were plans for them to sell used cell phones with me and maybe take a cell phone programming course and they said they wanted to learn English and I was going to help them and so forth. But now I think it was all lies. They do not care. Their upbringing was rough; as I understand it there were some harsh physical punishments meted out when they were young, punishments that Niningo and Chavela escaped, and I think that maybe Kiki and Jhoanglish are now punishing Altagracia for those days by breaking or stealing things she treasures or needs; on only a few occasions have the crimes been directed at me. So I can rant and rave and set all the deadlines and ultimatums I want, sometimes I feel a little better afterwards, but they will never amount to anything. Yesterday Kiki borrowed the television from the house and after Altagracia dragged it back from the marquisina she told him to get out, for good, but later when I asked her, "when?", she answered, "when he's ready."
In about two months, after my museum show and after the Feria del Libro, at which I am hoping to sell a lot of prints of the cave drawings, I will be going back to Massachusetts to work for the summer. If airline fares stay low I should be able to come back to Villa Mella for long weekends to see Altagracia but for me to return to the house in November, the marquisina will have to be empty. If the boys are still there I will rent a small apartment and we will put the house on the market and figure out how to move on. I can't live with having to lock my own bedroom door behind me when I go out to the bathroom and not being to leave my cell phone on the kitchen table for an hour and paying for food for two guys who spit on the floor and walk on the laundry that's fallen off the line. The other day I left 15 pesos on the kitchen table so that Chavela or Niningo could pay for drinking water when the drinking water truck came around and somebody swiped it.
Since I don't feel much like working on the house-- I have projects like finishing plastering the garden wall and somehow rehabilitating the indoor bathroom-- I have been listening to Bruce Springsteen and reading John D. MacDonald novels written in the 50's and 60's with titles like, The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper; A Bullet for Cinderella; and Cry Hard, Cry Fast-- full of hard-boiled private detectives and dames and lines like, "when I belted him he went down like a horse on ice." Like Springsteen, they couldn't be more american. There is a used bookstore on El Conde that has books stuffed on shelving at least 8 feet high on both sides of a passage less than 2 feet wide, I don't see how you could even set up a ladder to reach the top shelves and there is no organization. But, if you ask, the owner will take you through a series of passages separated by padlocked doors through the back to a large storeroom that has moldering piles of books, not stacks but piles, and some of the piles are old paperback novels in English.
The Curator who I am working with on the catalog for my show at the museum has been sick-- heart and stomach-- and so we are behind schedule, today, Monday Feb. 28, was to be the day to deliver the layout to the printers but I will still have about two days work after I get the text from the curator, so I don't know. Wednesday we are to go to Elias Pina for the funeral for Altagracia's father.
This afternoon I will meet Altagracia after work in Gascue and we will go shopping for funeral clothes for her in the shopping district known as Duarte, where there is Plaza Lama and Gran Via and Almacenes Rodriguez and Almacenes Paloma and Centromoda and Sedereles California which are all relatively un-air-conditioned, somewhat grimier versions of Woolworth or Walmart and where the sidewalks out front are packed with venders set up on folding tables selling everything from alarm clocks to earrings to coconuts to belts to wigs to perfume to toothbrushes to cell phone chargers to bootleg cds to boiled corn on the cob and to the headphones they give away free on Delta flights to listen to the movie with and where I would not go at night and where no women wear shiny necklaces (only bead necklaces that fall completely apart if torn off the neck) and where sometimes you can get a better price even in the big stores that take credit cards and have UPC barcode readers by bargaining and where none of the size labels on clothes can be believed. The stores here are a lot more crowded than the stores in the fancy malls like Acropolis or Megacentro and everything is cheaper. Carry your wallet in a front pocket and keep your purse always in front of you too.
ALTAGRACIA
Altagracia comes up to about here on me, and is slightly but powerfully and gracefully built without an ounce of fat and is the color they call india here. Her stomach sticks out and, because it is not fat, I wonder if it could be from the surgery she had to prevent more pregnancies after the life threatening birth of Niningo, her last born. Her arms are thin but very strong with highly defined muscles from wringing out cloth mops and laundry by hand daily for 30 of her 37 years. She has very high and very pronounced cheekbones and when she talks she uses all the lip pointing and hand gestures that Dominicans are known for, including the very emphatic whip finger snapping move from Elias Pina. When she tells a story she tells it with such animation that everyone in the room listens and watches even if they don't understand Spanish.
I met Altagracia while staying for the month of January, 2004 at a pension in Santo Domingo while I was photographing indigenous cave art near San Cristobal. Our relationship started shyly with hesitant greetings in the mornings when I was leaving the pension for the caves and it wasn't until sometime during the second week that we began to chat. My Spanish was even worse then than it is now and she speaks very colloquially so it was slow going at first but I learned that she had been divorced from a comecomida mujeriego (good for nothing womanizer), Luis, for three years and had had 4 children with him now ranging from 15-20 years old. She was commuting an hour and a half each way from Pizarete by guagua and worked 6 days a week to feed the kids. As child support Luis usually paid her rent of 800 pesos per month and gave her a little food money, but they lived real poor nonetheless.
By the end of my month in the Pension I was looking forward to the short chats we would have in a hallway or by the front desk and when she said she would miss them too, we exchanged phone numbers and she did, indeed, call me about a week after I had returned to Massachusetts and after another week we were calling one another 2-3 times a day. This telephone courtship continued for two months until April when I returned to Santo Domingo to deliver my promised prints and digital archive to the Museum del Hombre Dominicano and to begin arranging the next phase of my project and, of course, to see Altagracia. We met in front of Supermercado Nacional on Maximo Gomez and walked and talked together and it was wonderful. The first besito, the first embrace, then the first real kiss. At that time she was no longer working at the pension so we were able to spend a lot of time together; she shuttled back and forth from Pizarete and we stayed in pensions on nights when she could be away from the kids, all of whom I had met by then. It was a sad goodbye when I left to go back to the States. She was certain she would never see me again, and I couldn't wait to come back.
By this time the cave photography project was looking so promising that I left my position as professor of photography at a small New England private college and began writing grant proposals and planning on how best to move to the Dominican Republic. In July, after another two more months of twice or thrice daily phone calls, I returned and Altagracia and I began house hunting. We walked miles through the city looking for Se Vende (For Sale) signs, talking with the local corredors (neighborhood shysters who presumably know what is for sale), reading the classifieds and talking with real estate agents and cab drivers. Twice we very nearly bought government apartments built in the time of Trujillo after being told that a clear title could be obtained afterwards (it cannot, at least as I understand it now) and we also very nearly bought a very pretty house that needed a new roof on a dead end street on a hill with a view of the Caribbean in Maria Auxiliadora for about $12,000 U.S. before we learned that, at night, no taxi will take you there because it is so dangerous. The trick was to find something I could afford but in a barrio that I would not get killed in the first week and, since we had started out thinking in the under $10,000 U.S. price range, that left a pretty narrow band of possibilities. Halfway through the second week we found the house in Villa Mella through a lawyer/real estate agent named Norkis. It had been lived in by a frail looking little old lady and a smattering of extended family including two overgrown sons for the past 14 or so years and had a clear title. We believed about half of what the owners told us about the house (half too much, but so it goes), made an offer, counter offered, etc. and eventually settled on 860,000 pesos which at the time came to $18,000 US. Altagracia's lease was expiring so we moved her and her family in in a hurry from Pizarete and I was able to sleep there two nights before returning to work in Massachusetts.
Primaveral has some nice houses and some shabby houses and is generally a poor, but not caliente (or hot or dangerous) section of Villa Mella although we knew there would be at least a few tigueres around. The plan was for Kiki and Jhoanglish to stay in the house with Altagracia and the two younger ones for the first month or so, while I was not there, to establish a strong male presence and label the house as not an easy one to break into safely, even though the head of household was a gringo, and then they were to move in with their father, Luis, in another area of the city. Unfortunately, Luis at the age of 74 was murdered in early August. Had he died before I bought the house, I would not have bought the house until the boys were settled elsewhere. Had he died sometime after the boys had moved in with him, they could have stayed there. The fact that I am struggling with these two malcriados in my own house owes itself to an improbable event that happened during a two or three month window of time. But here they are.
In October, about a month before I really moved into the house with Altagracia's family she and I had a fight by telephone. She was so mad that she went and got her job back at the pension and started looking for another house or apartment to move into. It is March now and she is still working at the pension, and working hard, for about $5 a day, 6 days a week and if she is sick a day she loses her day off. It is both fierce pride that she feed her children herself, even though she doesn't earn enough, and an even fiercer, and compulsive, work ethic that keeps her there.
Altagracia was born on June 6, 1967, in Elias Pina on the family property that borders Haiti and where her mother still lives. She was the second oldest of 14 and the oldest girl-- as I write this she is 37. Altagracia was forced to leave school in what I estimate must have been about the second grade to work on her father's conuco (little farm) and shortly after, to begin working cleaning houses both of relatives and of people who would pay her father a little for the service. Some of these positions were located as far away as Santo Domingo, 4 hours by guagua, and were live-in, at least during the week days so she was hardly raised by anyone.
When she was 15 one of her father's brothers, Ramoncito, introduced her to Luis Alvarez, a 54 year old bachelor (and about 8 years older than her father) from Bani who already had 31 children with various women. Before that Altagracia had had one almost boyfriend who she had kissed on one occasion. She found Luis handsome and liked him and they were quickly married. Her mother, Anna, was only 13 when she herself got married. I suspect there was some kind of quid pro quo between Uncle Ramoncito and Luis. She gave birth to Kiki while she was 16. Altagracia has several sisters, Viola and Nellis, who are younger than her own two oldest children. Under pressure from Altagracia Luis curtailed his womanizing ways after a few years and did not father any more children with other women. Luis was employed by a factory as a night watchman for a number of years, that business was bought by another and he was kept on until his death. At one time in the marriage, after the first rocky years of his constant cheating and before the financial demands of 31 other children drained all his resources, they were reportedly happy and lived in a nice house in Bani. Altagracia tells me that she left him because she simply did not love him anymore although, here again, I have a feeling something else must have happened. When Altagracia called me in Massachusetts to tell me about the murder of Luis she had wailed into the phone, tigueres killed my children's father. Since then she has not said much critical about him, whereas before his death she never said much good, but I suppose that is natural. She is furious with him for dying and leaving her with the four and I think she is serious about wanting to kill his murderer with her bare hands.
We wake up at 5:30 every morning and I make coffee and hot milk while Altagracia makes the bed. After coffee she dresses, fixes her hair which has been in rollers all night and, with Chloe my cocker spaniel, we walk the kilometer to the blue water tank where she catches a guagua to take her to work. It is about an hour ride at that hour of the morning. She works making beds and cleaning without a break until 4 PM and then takes another hour long guagua ride home. When she gets home she inspects the house, orders more mopping in the kitchen or galleria, fold these clothes, put these damp clothes back in the sun, wash those dishes cleaner etc. Chavela has made lunch of rice and habichuelas and a side dish of some kind and left it on the kitchen table. I have already eaten half of mine but have saved the other half to eat while Altagracia eats her first real meal of the day after work. After she eats she goes for her bath which is the only time of the day she takes for herself and is not working although she brings the clothes she wore that day with her and washes and wrings them out by hand in the shower. She stays in there for a good hour and sometimes smokes a cigar or two while she is in there and sometimes she bleaches the floor and scours the toilet for good measure. Chavela does laundry every day in the lavadora (portable washing machine) and cleans the bathroom every day too. Cleaning is therapy for Altagracia, but I do not know what for. When she comes out she is frozen half to death even though she has gone in with a cauldron of water heated to boiling to mix with the cold water from the tinaco. She then sends Niningo to the colmado to buy something for dinner, frequently it is just bread and milk or a wheat pudding mix thing, or corn meal to make arepitas with but sometimes it is a big sancocho or salami with mangu. After dinner we watch a few minutes of Xica de Selva, a dubbed Brazilian telenovela (soap opera) that everyone in the family has taken a fancy to, then Altagracia irons for an hour or so, drinks a cup of coffee and we go to bed around midnight.
Kiki and Jhoanglish are different, in a damaged sort of way, than Chavela and Niningo (who I haven't written about yet, but he is a sweet, honest kid who, so far, likes to work and has won academic prizes in school). I asked Altagracia once what traumatic event, something violent or sexual they might have seen or experienced (I listen to a lot of radio talk show psychologists) when they were young and she could not think of anything. But when I asked Chavela the same question, she answered without hesitation, Mommy's punishments. She went on to describe Kiki as a 10 year old, being forced to kneel on a flattened, jagged tin pail for 4 or 5 hours holding a large rock on his head in the sun after being caught doing something wrong. I began to leap to the conclusion that these punishments, which, I believe, exceed those allowed by the Geneva Convention, were what made Kiki the way he is today but the other kids tell me that he was real bad before too.
Altagracia used to make extra money by reading taza, or tea leaves, although she usually uses coffee instead of tea and reads the drips that run down the outside of the coffee cup after the person has drunk and then turns the cup upside down over a candle to scorch the dregs to increase their resolution. She might be able to tell you what your spouse is up to nights when he or she is out, warn you about upcoming health issues or see other things in your life that might be making you unhappy. Afterwards she writes a prescription which is usually comprised of a mixture of herbs. She read taza for Britannia a week before the knife fight and when I asked if she had foreseen such an event in Britannia's future she said no, but that she knew that Britannia never took her prescription. She was very matter of fact about this talent when she explained to me that, yup, her father had it but that she was the only one of her 13 siblings who had it, so it goes. There is no belief system that goes along with this activity-- some people can wiggle their ears or curl their tongue the other way or douse and Altagracia can read taza.
REZO IN ELIAS PINA
After spending the last five years of his life in bed, stricken with thrombosis, emaciated and unable to walk, Amado Mateo Nova, Altagracia's father, died. His wife, Anna, had left him some years ago but came back to care for him during the thrombosis. Altagracia and I went to visit them a few months before his death and, while he was not alert for much of the time, he recognized Altagracia's voice at some distance while we were still outside the little four room house and called her by her pet name, Ninina. She was, and still is, very proud and pleased and moved, inordinately pleased and moved it seems to me, that he recognized her then because, by most accounts, he had not been a loving father and it may be that her affection for him is only because he abused her less than he did her brothers and sisters. Amado's brother, Ramoncito, told me that he influenced her parents to send Altagracia away to work and that he introduced her to Luis, who she would marry, to get her to safer ground-- he spat on the ground when describing his brother, and this was at the memorial or rezo. He told me that while Amado did work he did not bring the money home to his family but spent it on game cocks, rum and women and that his children often went hungry and that he was sometimes violent.
When someone dies here they are buried quickly. At 1:30 AM of the morning that Altagracia heard that her father had died and, even though the first guagua to Elias Pina would get her there well before noon, she worried that she would be too late, but she wasn't. Nine days later a rezo, a day of remembrance and prayer, would be held.
We had arrived at the house of Altagracia's family the night before the rezo and were served some stewed pork liver with yuca cooked over a small wood fire outside on the ground under a shelter of thatch in a kettle set on three cement blocks. Although there was electricity, the house only had two dim light bulbs so it was very dark with most of the light coming from the cooking fire, or fog. Altagracia found that the only outhouse, a snug one-holer, was packed floor to ceiling with firewood so she ordered one of her younger sisters, Momona, and some of the men to empty it out and clean it so it could be used the next day. About 20 people spent the night sleeping on makeshift mattresses, slumped in plastic chairs or on the dirt floor and we all were awake by 6 AM to begin cooking the food for the expected gathering of 200 people. By 10 in the morning there were eight fogones scattered around the compound with some having kettles big enough that it took two men to move them. The two biggest kettles were set over a long fire in a hole about two feet across, two feet deep and six feet long dug in the garden. The foods cooked were pork, goat, chicken, yuca, rice, habichuela, tayota and chenchen, a corn meal and milk based mixture. The pig, which had already been killed, was coarsely hacked apart with a machete and then women with smaller knives finished cutting up the meat and splintered bone into stew sized pieces. The chickens were killed and plucked moments before stewing and the kettles were stirred with short poles that were freshly cut and debarked. One little old man was stopped from shaping one of these stirring sticks with his machete because the particular type of wood he chose was bitter and would give the food a bad taste. The house had no kitchen or bathroom or running water so all food preparation and washing of pots and pans was done on the ground or on one of several makeshift wooden tables and all washing and cooking water was carried in 5 gallon plastic buckets. Scraps of food that fell on the ground were eaten by the dog or by one of the little pigs that wandered around. Coffee was brewed throughout the day by boiling the loose grounds in a kettle and then strained by being wrung through a long fine fabric tube that was closed at the end and then served by women in tiny plastic cups maybe twice the size of thimbles.
Anna, the widow, spent most of the day in a small room with close family receiving well wishers who might sit and stay for a while and who might talk among themselves, but it was generally a room full of sorrow and sobbing. While men did pass through to offer condolences almost no men ever stayed or sat. During the upcoming year the women of the family will observe a luto or mourning by wearing only sombre colors and refraining from dancing, but men do not observe luto.
An even smaller room in the house housed the prayer table with a candle, some leaves and the cross that would grace the grave site, although the inscribed birth date of Amado on the cross was off by about 15 years. I spoke with 4 of his brothers and none knew exactly how old he had been. Ramoncito answered that question by saying, Well, when I was eight he was about this tall and almost a man, and held his hand up to the height of the bridge of my nose.
Out front, on the other side of the house, there was a tarpaulin stretched between trees to provide shade for the ongoing two domino games and where many of the men sat passing small rum bottles back and forth, most of which did not contain rum but cler?n, a cheap, strong aguardiente from Haiti, only a stone's throw away. Many of the guests walked over to the rezo from Haiti, many women smoked tobacco pipes and some had short braids of hair hanging down in front of their ears and much of the conversation was in a Haitian patois which, to me, sounded like Turkish played backwards.
The last guagua leaves Elias Pina at 5:30 in the afternoon and we barely made it in time to return home to Villa Mella.
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There is no doubt about it-----
Dan MUST be a man of amazing resilience and adaptability! Not to mention having a truly remarkable sense of reality.
MORE---More, say I.
Texas Bill
Dan MUST be a man of amazing resilience and adaptability! Not to mention having a truly remarkable sense of reality.
MORE---More, say I.
Texas Bill
I've been there!danduva said:
Wow! What a life you're leading! You are very good at catching details that would pass undetected to other people. You definitely need a blog ASAP.
i truly like your story, past or present, or fiction.
It is a detail version of barrio type living and gives perception of what life is like in the barrios and areas where access to certain privileges are challenging.
Minus violence, sounds like a cool immersion experience to learn a way of life in the republica dominicana.
Many of us on the forums alway wanted to know how some people survive with the price increase of goods and services, and it was alway my guess that many folks had small farms to sustain them. But as your post pointed out, some folks buy in portion for the meal to be cooked that day, and live where rent or the property is really cheap.
Having visited different parts of the country (DR) a few times, and trying to figure out cost structures, i've figure out that the majority of spending is on outing and entertainment. Changing monies to pesos you can lose track of your spending....sometimes, really, you don't know if it is cheap or expensive.
In time past, I stayed a month and spent less money as a tourist than i spend on a monthly basis in my country (island). I've gathered that only the first few days the most expenses are required --- rental/food and beverages
I've rented a condo with a full kitchen and dining and therefore it wasn't
necessary for me to eat out everynight. Having had the opportunity to invite friends over, having enough space for privacy, as well as that my friends were comfortable to spend some time to eat, drink and enjoy companionship, made me feel somewhat partly integrated to the country for the period of time i was there.
Hanging out every night becomes tired fairly quick when you realise you can have the same versatility staying at home to watch a movie, invite a chick to cook her style or have dinner or a couple of drinks. I've learnt that some of the people you see during the day time you may not see them at nights and most of those people are way down to earth, receptive and friendly.
Walk the streets or explore during the day, shop, chang money, visit an internet cafe and the like give you the opportunity to meet tons of people and experience a good social interact of the part of country you're located in .....as well as the ability to learn stuff like the where's, how's, when's, why's and the like that can prove very interesting, efficient and convenient.
Music is a part of the country versatility and runs through, perhaps, the entire country's blood.
The people willingness to help and to participate makes them seem like one large family eventhough they maybe strangers to each others.
While traffic can be chaotic, it appears to be organise choas.
Walking a crowded street with people going in both directions there is an order to it.
I don't see the hostility in walking the street alone after hours, as i've done it a few time, as well as past ladies whom were walking alone. Even if there are reasons to be afraid, you don't feel unease.
The hospitality I've experience is superb. I haven't took advantage of that because I felt as the tourist that I should do the spending or the giving. People readily wanted to volunteer when you need help, and offer protection without notice
The people don't appear to be afraid to spend money. I often wonder if they have a budget. My first time to the Casino I've spent $US3000 and there were locals who've spent more that. It wasn't my intentions to spent $3000 by the way, I just thought it was impossible for the dealer to win. I don't play more than a hundred bucks in the casino but i couldn't see how the dealer beat me 5 times in a row playing blackjack. Sometimes when you are winning, if there are ladies at the table, they feel like you are winning their money....or may want to tell you how to play. I guess if its just play money its ok to do it because if you cause the other players to lose, they will be upset with you. You can alway blame somebody else for the results
For a country of 8+ million, the place and the people are really laid back
It is a detail version of barrio type living and gives perception of what life is like in the barrios and areas where access to certain privileges are challenging.
Minus violence, sounds like a cool immersion experience to learn a way of life in the republica dominicana.
Many of us on the forums alway wanted to know how some people survive with the price increase of goods and services, and it was alway my guess that many folks had small farms to sustain them. But as your post pointed out, some folks buy in portion for the meal to be cooked that day, and live where rent or the property is really cheap.
Having visited different parts of the country (DR) a few times, and trying to figure out cost structures, i've figure out that the majority of spending is on outing and entertainment. Changing monies to pesos you can lose track of your spending....sometimes, really, you don't know if it is cheap or expensive.
In time past, I stayed a month and spent less money as a tourist than i spend on a monthly basis in my country (island). I've gathered that only the first few days the most expenses are required --- rental/food and beverages
I've rented a condo with a full kitchen and dining and therefore it wasn't
necessary for me to eat out everynight. Having had the opportunity to invite friends over, having enough space for privacy, as well as that my friends were comfortable to spend some time to eat, drink and enjoy companionship, made me feel somewhat partly integrated to the country for the period of time i was there.
Hanging out every night becomes tired fairly quick when you realise you can have the same versatility staying at home to watch a movie, invite a chick to cook her style or have dinner or a couple of drinks. I've learnt that some of the people you see during the day time you may not see them at nights and most of those people are way down to earth, receptive and friendly.
Walk the streets or explore during the day, shop, chang money, visit an internet cafe and the like give you the opportunity to meet tons of people and experience a good social interact of the part of country you're located in .....as well as the ability to learn stuff like the where's, how's, when's, why's and the like that can prove very interesting, efficient and convenient.
Music is a part of the country versatility and runs through, perhaps, the entire country's blood.
The people willingness to help and to participate makes them seem like one large family eventhough they maybe strangers to each others.
While traffic can be chaotic, it appears to be organise choas.
Walking a crowded street with people going in both directions there is an order to it.
I don't see the hostility in walking the street alone after hours, as i've done it a few time, as well as past ladies whom were walking alone. Even if there are reasons to be afraid, you don't feel unease.
The hospitality I've experience is superb. I haven't took advantage of that because I felt as the tourist that I should do the spending or the giving. People readily wanted to volunteer when you need help, and offer protection without notice
The people don't appear to be afraid to spend money. I often wonder if they have a budget. My first time to the Casino I've spent $US3000 and there were locals who've spent more that. It wasn't my intentions to spent $3000 by the way, I just thought it was impossible for the dealer to win. I don't play more than a hundred bucks in the casino but i couldn't see how the dealer beat me 5 times in a row playing blackjack. Sometimes when you are winning, if there are ladies at the table, they feel like you are winning their money....or may want to tell you how to play. I guess if its just play money its ok to do it because if you cause the other players to lose, they will be upset with you. You can alway blame somebody else for the results
For a country of 8+ million, the place and the people are really laid back
Timex said:
While I was reading this...it sounded if I were in Cuba....exactly the same scenario, although it sounds like in DR the problems get resolved (sooner or later...while in Cuba...it is much, much later!) But, oh my gosh! As if I were in Cuba while I was reading your article. Nothing different. Except the availability of having "pesos" to go buy at the super-market. We have been planing to visit Santo Domingo from last year, and since we cannot go to Cuba this year, we have made a deposit to visit DR in May. If it is as I was reading your article, my husband (whom just recently arrvied from Cuba) and my father will "feel right at home" on "your" island. Thanks for taking the time to write so many details and "writing it as it is". There is nothing wrong with that. We do a lot of traveling, and when we travel, we like to be with the "locals" because, we are that way, low-laying, same-kind-of-people as everyone else. I take it you like living there. Thanks for the article.
I thoroughly enjoyed the story. So much so that I printed it and brought it to my sister to read.
As a Dominican growing in the DR in a very comfortable home where we didn't lack anything and had all the comfort anyone would ever want, I find your story fascinating. I have always known that those who are less fortunate in the DR have to endure all sorts of hardship and adversity, but the story has allowed me to actually have a real feeling for it.
Everything is explained with such detail that I can easily picture the scenes in my mind as they happen.
The story also is quite amusing. As I read, I find myself laughing histerically.
There is something I don't understand, however. What in the world attracted Dan to this woman? I looked him up on his website and it looks like he is an educated man with an interesting career. I don't mean to be judgemental, I just want to understand how a man with his background ends up living in Villa Mella :surprised and under such austere conditions.
Dan, if you care to comment, I would appreciate it.
As a Dominican growing in the DR in a very comfortable home where we didn't lack anything and had all the comfort anyone would ever want, I find your story fascinating. I have always known that those who are less fortunate in the DR have to endure all sorts of hardship and adversity, but the story has allowed me to actually have a real feeling for it.
Everything is explained with such detail that I can easily picture the scenes in my mind as they happen.
The story also is quite amusing. As I read, I find myself laughing histerically.
There is something I don't understand, however. What in the world attracted Dan to this woman? I looked him up on his website and it looks like he is an educated man with an interesting career. I don't mean to be judgemental, I just want to understand how a man with his background ends up living in Villa Mella :surprised and under such austere conditions.
Dan, if you care to comment, I would appreciate it.
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Santo Domingo Diary Chunk 3
KIKI GONE?
Kiki has now moved out, with his clothes this time, back to Pizarete and is living with a cousin named Fermin in Fermin?s little house and they seem to be getting on well. Altagracia and I brought him a folding cot and about 300 pesos worth of rice, habichuelas, sardines and so forth. Fermin appears to be about 60, tall, gaunt and nearly toothless and told us he served some hard time many years ago but has since lived a clean life. What occasioned Kiki?s move was a problem in the barrio with Herman, a local tiguere. Evidently there were 8 joints and when Kiki and Herman divided them evenly it came out to 5 and 3 in favor of Herman so Kiki took a couple of jabs at Herman and blackened an eye and bloodied his head so now Herman has sworn revenge and has been seen cruising the neighborhood in a car with two friends which means that they are looking to first kidnap and then kill Kiki and it is generally believed that they are serious and so Kiki, prudently, left.
So it is, for now anyway, quieter around here-- although it is possible that Jhoanglish is rising to fill the vacant niche in the social ecosystem of the house as he recently stole Chavela?s point and shoot camera and gave it as a birthday present to a girl he had met two days before-- and food lasts longer in the fridge although Chavela still prepares a small bowl of food for Kiki every day and leaves it on the counter in case he comes back unexpectedly. Jhoanglish usually eats it.
FOOD
The staple meal in the Dominican Republic consists of rice, habichuelas (beans) or guandules (dried peas) and chicken, and is affectionately known as the bandera or flag of the country which also has three colors, and is to be eaten at midday which is one of few laws here that is regularly observed. For sale in Ol? are three piece plastic dish sets for personal servings which include a large bowl for rice, a cereal sized bowl for the habichuelas and a smaller fruit cup sized bowl for the chicken. In reality, in many households chicken is only eaten a few times a week because of the cost. The lunch special in almost any comedor will sometimes offer stewed pork or beef as an alternative to chicken although the very first question you should ask when entering a comedor is ?Hay comida? (Is there food?). If there is a written menu it is likely a waste of time to read it, best to ask and find out the price before you order.
To eat rice is obligatory for Dominicans-- Altagracia, as well as Kiki and Chavela, cannot sleep if they have not eaten rice at least once that day. Once after a day when the only starches had been spaghetti and yuca, late at night, I heard Chavela get up to cook just enough rice for herself so that she could sleep. When there is no meat a side dish of some kind is desirable which may be stewed eggplant or tayota, a squash like thing, pasta or a salad of iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber and maybe some shredded cabbage and sliced avocado when in season. One of the few acceptable substitutes for rice is platano, which is a large starchy banana which is always cooked before eating. Green, or unripe, platanos are either boiled (as may be green bananas, here called guineos) and eaten as is or mashed with garlic and oil to make mang? or-- to make tostones-- the platoanos are sliced into rounds and fried in oil, removed from the fry pan and smashed flatter with the bottom of a glass coke bottle (or with a special tool that consists of two blocks of wood connected by a hinge), refried, salted and eaten like french fries. Ripe platanos may be either boiled or sliced thinly lengthwise and fried and are slightly sweet. Because platanos grow like bananas on rather fragile, top heavy and very broad leaved small trees they are susceptible to wind damage and so, because of the huricanes this year, the price of platanos is very high, sometimes reaching 8 pesos (or 24?) each and so we do not buy them very often. In a food article in a recent Dominican newspaper it was opined that platanos are the only food that Dominicans can be served every single day without complaining, but, from what I have seen, that is more true of rice. Mashed potato is another popular starch but, in my house at least, and like spaghetti, is more likely to be served alongside of than instead of the rice.
There are many roots and tubers utilized as starch foods including yuca, pipiota, yautia, sweet potatos, ?ame and maybe a lot more that I have never heard of. They all look like brown lumpy roots to me in the supermarket. Yuca, known in other tropical countries as cassava or manihot, is the most popular and there are many varieties, some people can tell where a yuca was cultivatd by its flavor and texture. Most of these root vegetables are simply peeled or debarked, cut into pieces, boiled in salted water and eaten but also are added to stews such as sancocho and some are mashed and eaten and some may be ground into flour and fried into various kinds of dough balls or fried or baked breads.
If you have tomato paste, sopita (enhanced bouillon cubes containing significant amounts of monosodium glutamate), onion, garlic, cilantro, salt, green peppers and oregano on hand you can cook almost any Dominican dish whether it is moro, which is rice and beans cooked together, or a stewed meat or vegetable dish. In my house neither hot spices nor black pepper are ever used while sopita and plenty of salt are mandatory.
There is a whole aisle dedicated to canned tuna fish in Hipermercado Ol? so I was surprised when my family's collective jaw dropped the first time they saw me mix mayonaise with it. I was pleased when Altagracia, after tasting some on a cracker, said that it was delicious, but she has since politely declined to eat any more. The two younger kids really like this exotic combination though. I got the same reaction the first time I made poached eggs and they are now referred to as huevos crudos or raw eggs and nobody will even try one because they think the runny yolk is repulsive.
While chicken is the most popular meat by far and can be bought live or cooked everywhere, pork is a close second. Villa Mella, in fact, is still famous for its chicharrone venders, although in past years they reportedely lined the streets much more numerously than today, but there are still more than a dozen found over the last few kilometers of Avenida Hermanas Mirabel approaching Avenida Charles de Gaulle. Often when I tell a cab driver where I live he sighs, ?Ahhh, la chicharone de Villa Mella?. Chicharone is fried pork skin and fat with a little meat attached, sometimes fried to popcorn dryness and sometimes left moist and juicy and sometimes includes ribs and costs about 140 pesos a pound which is not cheap compared to uncooked chicken at about 30 pesos a pound.
Although the economy is no longer based on sugar cane as it was for hundreds of years it is still, in many ways a sugar based culture. The five of us consume almost one pound of unrefined granulated sugar per day. Coffee is drunk black and very sweet and sugar is added to fruit juice and milk and used to help brown chicken when frying and when small children visit they are often given a fistful of sugar as a treat. Also chunks of sugar cane bought from the guaguita that cruises the street much like an icecream wagon might in an American suburb are very sweet and very cheap making them very popular. Strolling vendors sell hard candies and other sweets through the windows of guaguas in stalled traffic and, at long red lights, might hop on the guagua to sell in the aisle. The most talked about traditional holiday food is habichuela con dulce, or sweet beans which is habichuelas pureed with sugar (at least 1 pound of sugar to 1 pound of habichuelas) coconut milk, sweetened evaporated milk, sweet potatos, raisins and vanilla with crackers added just before eating. We prefer it chilled, I don?t know how other households like it-- in fact if I eat much of it hot I get a kind of acid reflux stomach reaction.
MOMENTITOS, OBSERVACIONES
--There is a big tree right across the street from the house that always has at least a few and sometimes many small, white cherry blossom-like flowers. One drizzly day when occasional petals were spiralling toward the ground I watched a small barefoot boy dancing back and forth under the tree, looking upwards, catching and eating the falling blossoms in his mouth.
--Early this morning while walking with Altagracia to the bus stop a barefoot woman dressed in a dirty white knit dress stopped us and pointed to a lumpy burlap sack closed with a knot at the top and abandoned near the side of the road and excitedely explained that there was a dead dog in it and that it stank.
--People walking by the house frequently sing snatches of popular songs. The phrases I hear most these days are-- ?I like the gasoline, give me some gasoline?, ?Lean back mama, lean back?, ?Bad stick, bad stick? and ?I love this darned thing?. These clips all sound better in Spanish.
--I can?t think of any way to verify this, but I think that Dominicans accidently drop more things than North Americans like fruit in supermarkets, cell phones in guaguas, plates and glasses in the kitchen, small change, earrings and I don't know why this might be true. As I just finished writing that last sentence Jhoanglish walked past and dropped his comb.
--There is much public picking of noses.
--It seems to considered de rigeur for some men to maintain a grasp on their crotches while walking and men of any age may make blatant adjustments in this area in public. Women may spontanaeously adjust or pat into place the breasts of other women, or their own, and may reach inside to do so.
--While the streets may be filthy, the people are not. How can seven people wedge themselves into an un-airconditioned Toyota Corolla at 4 PM on a 90 degree day in slow city traffic and everybody still smell great after a half hour? I have an aunt who, while in nursing school, learned to inspect ears in Washington Heights in New York City, a predominantly Domincan neighborhood, and, after inspecting the ears of Dominican women for 3 months was moved to a different borough and was horrified when she first saw the piles of detritus in the ears of native New Yorkers. Altagracia cleans hers often and often with bobby pins, leaving nothing behind.
--My cocker spaniel's name is Chloe and she is better known in the neighborhood than I am. Early the other morning as Chloe and I were walking back to the house from the bus stop down a yet deserted side street and still blocks from the house, a motorcycle comes speeding up behind us and flies by with La Rubia on the back, dressed all in red to match her hair, returning from a night in the discos and she is yelling ChloechloeChloechloeChloechloeChloechloeChloechloe and she is going fast enough so that the frequency is higher as she approaches than as she disappears around the bend in the street ahead like the doppler effect of a passing train whistle.
--Sounds right now
The Papa of Titi chiseling concrete across the street; the ear splitting blast of the air horn of the garbage truck; murmurs of conversation between La Rubia and chicken buying customers; an approaching motor scooter with a bad muffler; many chirping house sparrows in the big tree across the street; a subdued groaning sound as the breeze sways the neighbor??s mango tree which rubs on the metal roof of the galleria; the clucking of chickens; men?s voices talking with the Papa of Titi as he works; another motorcycle with another leaky exhaust; Chind?n, a local hipster greets Jhoanglish with the hipster greeting of ?Que lo que? which is popularly translated as Wasssup? and Jhoanglish answers with the formula answer of Tranquilito or Really calm, man; a mingling of distant radio bachata from the south with a romantic ballad from the east; the sounds of recess at the day care center from around the corner; some barking from the house right next doorand then the quick whistle of a broomstick through the air and the shrill kee-yidling of the dog it hit.
KIKI GONE?
Kiki has now moved out, with his clothes this time, back to Pizarete and is living with a cousin named Fermin in Fermin?s little house and they seem to be getting on well. Altagracia and I brought him a folding cot and about 300 pesos worth of rice, habichuelas, sardines and so forth. Fermin appears to be about 60, tall, gaunt and nearly toothless and told us he served some hard time many years ago but has since lived a clean life. What occasioned Kiki?s move was a problem in the barrio with Herman, a local tiguere. Evidently there were 8 joints and when Kiki and Herman divided them evenly it came out to 5 and 3 in favor of Herman so Kiki took a couple of jabs at Herman and blackened an eye and bloodied his head so now Herman has sworn revenge and has been seen cruising the neighborhood in a car with two friends which means that they are looking to first kidnap and then kill Kiki and it is generally believed that they are serious and so Kiki, prudently, left.
So it is, for now anyway, quieter around here-- although it is possible that Jhoanglish is rising to fill the vacant niche in the social ecosystem of the house as he recently stole Chavela?s point and shoot camera and gave it as a birthday present to a girl he had met two days before-- and food lasts longer in the fridge although Chavela still prepares a small bowl of food for Kiki every day and leaves it on the counter in case he comes back unexpectedly. Jhoanglish usually eats it.
FOOD
The staple meal in the Dominican Republic consists of rice, habichuelas (beans) or guandules (dried peas) and chicken, and is affectionately known as the bandera or flag of the country which also has three colors, and is to be eaten at midday which is one of few laws here that is regularly observed. For sale in Ol? are three piece plastic dish sets for personal servings which include a large bowl for rice, a cereal sized bowl for the habichuelas and a smaller fruit cup sized bowl for the chicken. In reality, in many households chicken is only eaten a few times a week because of the cost. The lunch special in almost any comedor will sometimes offer stewed pork or beef as an alternative to chicken although the very first question you should ask when entering a comedor is ?Hay comida? (Is there food?). If there is a written menu it is likely a waste of time to read it, best to ask and find out the price before you order.
To eat rice is obligatory for Dominicans-- Altagracia, as well as Kiki and Chavela, cannot sleep if they have not eaten rice at least once that day. Once after a day when the only starches had been spaghetti and yuca, late at night, I heard Chavela get up to cook just enough rice for herself so that she could sleep. When there is no meat a side dish of some kind is desirable which may be stewed eggplant or tayota, a squash like thing, pasta or a salad of iceberg lettuce, tomato, cucumber and maybe some shredded cabbage and sliced avocado when in season. One of the few acceptable substitutes for rice is platano, which is a large starchy banana which is always cooked before eating. Green, or unripe, platanos are either boiled (as may be green bananas, here called guineos) and eaten as is or mashed with garlic and oil to make mang? or-- to make tostones-- the platoanos are sliced into rounds and fried in oil, removed from the fry pan and smashed flatter with the bottom of a glass coke bottle (or with a special tool that consists of two blocks of wood connected by a hinge), refried, salted and eaten like french fries. Ripe platanos may be either boiled or sliced thinly lengthwise and fried and are slightly sweet. Because platanos grow like bananas on rather fragile, top heavy and very broad leaved small trees they are susceptible to wind damage and so, because of the huricanes this year, the price of platanos is very high, sometimes reaching 8 pesos (or 24?) each and so we do not buy them very often. In a food article in a recent Dominican newspaper it was opined that platanos are the only food that Dominicans can be served every single day without complaining, but, from what I have seen, that is more true of rice. Mashed potato is another popular starch but, in my house at least, and like spaghetti, is more likely to be served alongside of than instead of the rice.
There are many roots and tubers utilized as starch foods including yuca, pipiota, yautia, sweet potatos, ?ame and maybe a lot more that I have never heard of. They all look like brown lumpy roots to me in the supermarket. Yuca, known in other tropical countries as cassava or manihot, is the most popular and there are many varieties, some people can tell where a yuca was cultivatd by its flavor and texture. Most of these root vegetables are simply peeled or debarked, cut into pieces, boiled in salted water and eaten but also are added to stews such as sancocho and some are mashed and eaten and some may be ground into flour and fried into various kinds of dough balls or fried or baked breads.
If you have tomato paste, sopita (enhanced bouillon cubes containing significant amounts of monosodium glutamate), onion, garlic, cilantro, salt, green peppers and oregano on hand you can cook almost any Dominican dish whether it is moro, which is rice and beans cooked together, or a stewed meat or vegetable dish. In my house neither hot spices nor black pepper are ever used while sopita and plenty of salt are mandatory.
There is a whole aisle dedicated to canned tuna fish in Hipermercado Ol? so I was surprised when my family's collective jaw dropped the first time they saw me mix mayonaise with it. I was pleased when Altagracia, after tasting some on a cracker, said that it was delicious, but she has since politely declined to eat any more. The two younger kids really like this exotic combination though. I got the same reaction the first time I made poached eggs and they are now referred to as huevos crudos or raw eggs and nobody will even try one because they think the runny yolk is repulsive.
While chicken is the most popular meat by far and can be bought live or cooked everywhere, pork is a close second. Villa Mella, in fact, is still famous for its chicharrone venders, although in past years they reportedely lined the streets much more numerously than today, but there are still more than a dozen found over the last few kilometers of Avenida Hermanas Mirabel approaching Avenida Charles de Gaulle. Often when I tell a cab driver where I live he sighs, ?Ahhh, la chicharone de Villa Mella?. Chicharone is fried pork skin and fat with a little meat attached, sometimes fried to popcorn dryness and sometimes left moist and juicy and sometimes includes ribs and costs about 140 pesos a pound which is not cheap compared to uncooked chicken at about 30 pesos a pound.
Although the economy is no longer based on sugar cane as it was for hundreds of years it is still, in many ways a sugar based culture. The five of us consume almost one pound of unrefined granulated sugar per day. Coffee is drunk black and very sweet and sugar is added to fruit juice and milk and used to help brown chicken when frying and when small children visit they are often given a fistful of sugar as a treat. Also chunks of sugar cane bought from the guaguita that cruises the street much like an icecream wagon might in an American suburb are very sweet and very cheap making them very popular. Strolling vendors sell hard candies and other sweets through the windows of guaguas in stalled traffic and, at long red lights, might hop on the guagua to sell in the aisle. The most talked about traditional holiday food is habichuela con dulce, or sweet beans which is habichuelas pureed with sugar (at least 1 pound of sugar to 1 pound of habichuelas) coconut milk, sweetened evaporated milk, sweet potatos, raisins and vanilla with crackers added just before eating. We prefer it chilled, I don?t know how other households like it-- in fact if I eat much of it hot I get a kind of acid reflux stomach reaction.
MOMENTITOS, OBSERVACIONES
--There is a big tree right across the street from the house that always has at least a few and sometimes many small, white cherry blossom-like flowers. One drizzly day when occasional petals were spiralling toward the ground I watched a small barefoot boy dancing back and forth under the tree, looking upwards, catching and eating the falling blossoms in his mouth.
--Early this morning while walking with Altagracia to the bus stop a barefoot woman dressed in a dirty white knit dress stopped us and pointed to a lumpy burlap sack closed with a knot at the top and abandoned near the side of the road and excitedely explained that there was a dead dog in it and that it stank.
--People walking by the house frequently sing snatches of popular songs. The phrases I hear most these days are-- ?I like the gasoline, give me some gasoline?, ?Lean back mama, lean back?, ?Bad stick, bad stick? and ?I love this darned thing?. These clips all sound better in Spanish.
--I can?t think of any way to verify this, but I think that Dominicans accidently drop more things than North Americans like fruit in supermarkets, cell phones in guaguas, plates and glasses in the kitchen, small change, earrings and I don't know why this might be true. As I just finished writing that last sentence Jhoanglish walked past and dropped his comb.
--There is much public picking of noses.
--It seems to considered de rigeur for some men to maintain a grasp on their crotches while walking and men of any age may make blatant adjustments in this area in public. Women may spontanaeously adjust or pat into place the breasts of other women, or their own, and may reach inside to do so.
--While the streets may be filthy, the people are not. How can seven people wedge themselves into an un-airconditioned Toyota Corolla at 4 PM on a 90 degree day in slow city traffic and everybody still smell great after a half hour? I have an aunt who, while in nursing school, learned to inspect ears in Washington Heights in New York City, a predominantly Domincan neighborhood, and, after inspecting the ears of Dominican women for 3 months was moved to a different borough and was horrified when she first saw the piles of detritus in the ears of native New Yorkers. Altagracia cleans hers often and often with bobby pins, leaving nothing behind.
--My cocker spaniel's name is Chloe and she is better known in the neighborhood than I am. Early the other morning as Chloe and I were walking back to the house from the bus stop down a yet deserted side street and still blocks from the house, a motorcycle comes speeding up behind us and flies by with La Rubia on the back, dressed all in red to match her hair, returning from a night in the discos and she is yelling ChloechloeChloechloeChloechloeChloechloeChloechloe and she is going fast enough so that the frequency is higher as she approaches than as she disappears around the bend in the street ahead like the doppler effect of a passing train whistle.
--Sounds right now
The Papa of Titi chiseling concrete across the street; the ear splitting blast of the air horn of the garbage truck; murmurs of conversation between La Rubia and chicken buying customers; an approaching motor scooter with a bad muffler; many chirping house sparrows in the big tree across the street; a subdued groaning sound as the breeze sways the neighbor??s mango tree which rubs on the metal roof of the galleria; the clucking of chickens; men?s voices talking with the Papa of Titi as he works; another motorcycle with another leaky exhaust; Chind?n, a local hipster greets Jhoanglish with the hipster greeting of ?Que lo que? which is popularly translated as Wasssup? and Jhoanglish answers with the formula answer of Tranquilito or Really calm, man; a mingling of distant radio bachata from the south with a romantic ballad from the east; the sounds of recess at the day care center from around the corner; some barking from the house right next doorand then the quick whistle of a broomstick through the air and the shrill kee-yidling of the dog it hit.
Hooked
Can someone please explain to me why the heck i"m hooked on this thread?
Keep up the good work. Love the writing style.
Can someone please explain to me why the heck i"m hooked on this thread?
Keep up the good work. Love the writing style.
Dan, you have something to say
... and this is the most important thing for a writer: to simply tell the truth. Your writing is not contrived at all, just honest. Not many writers can do this.
The beauty of humor in a work like yours is that it juxtaposes against the serious and even frightening sections to make each that much more potent. One becomes a release for the other, so you are making the most of tension, and so on.
You would benefit from some editing, as does every writer. But not while you're writing. Later, lots of time for that later. Don't even think about it now. Just write.
I'd say not short stories, but a novel, woven loosely from these episodes would be the proper format when you've said all there is to be said ... for starters, though, you could try a wonderful and prestigious radio contest in Britain, from BBC. The winning stories are read by well known actors to a huge radio audience and are also published in a beautiful literary magazine-- coincidentally, this magazine specializes in writers from Caribbean, Africa, etc. Your subject fits perfectly. I have to think twice to recall the details, but will be glad to dig them up if you're interested.
Take an excerpt-- think carefully of what story within the story has some sense of completion, although completion in a literary sense isn't like the "and they lived happily ever after, The End" drivel of some popular fiction.
I think you'll get plenty of notice for this work. you need to get it seen, and submitting to the better short story competitions, the prestigious international ones, is the way to get it seen.
Then, I believe they will find you. The publishers, that is.
I didn't have time to read everything, but I will be back for more.
Whatever you do, keep on writing! Glad I saw this tonight.
... and this is the most important thing for a writer: to simply tell the truth. Your writing is not contrived at all, just honest. Not many writers can do this.
The beauty of humor in a work like yours is that it juxtaposes against the serious and even frightening sections to make each that much more potent. One becomes a release for the other, so you are making the most of tension, and so on.
You would benefit from some editing, as does every writer. But not while you're writing. Later, lots of time for that later. Don't even think about it now. Just write.
I'd say not short stories, but a novel, woven loosely from these episodes would be the proper format when you've said all there is to be said ... for starters, though, you could try a wonderful and prestigious radio contest in Britain, from BBC. The winning stories are read by well known actors to a huge radio audience and are also published in a beautiful literary magazine-- coincidentally, this magazine specializes in writers from Caribbean, Africa, etc. Your subject fits perfectly. I have to think twice to recall the details, but will be glad to dig them up if you're interested.
Take an excerpt-- think carefully of what story within the story has some sense of completion, although completion in a literary sense isn't like the "and they lived happily ever after, The End" drivel of some popular fiction.
I think you'll get plenty of notice for this work. you need to get it seen, and submitting to the better short story competitions, the prestigious international ones, is the way to get it seen.
Then, I believe they will find you. The publishers, that is.
I didn't have time to read everything, but I will be back for more.
Whatever you do, keep on writing! Glad I saw this tonight.
- Status