El Sei-Wha?

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Just today I was looking at a rooster’s feet and thinking how obscenely large and disfigured they were; so obviously a chicken foot has to end up on my dinner plate. Unfortunately, I was sucking its rubbery toes before I realized I was not holding a regular drumstick. I soon found out my doña had given it to me as a treat; she later proceeded to bite the shit out of it.

Welcome to El Seibo - a podunk town by American standards, but the capital of a province here, and my new home for the next four weeks. Instead of the one main road lined with Mickey D’s, BK and Walmart, here we’ve got the Domincan staples: the discoteca, a few car washes (which double as bars complete with dance floors), and a couple of baseball fields. Needless to say, the variety and excitement of the nightlife here doesn’t quite match what the Capital has to offer. AKA: Lots of Dominos at the colmado.

I have a wonderful fat abuelita for a doña, Leonida, and a bad ass hermanito, Reyi, who can beat me at basketball and dominos, as well as building massive, perfectly hexagonal kites from trash - which is the main activity here during the pre-Easter windy season. Apart from the standard set of chickens, I have a few other pets: ReenTeen (I imagine from Rin Tin Tin), Reyi’s 11 year old scruffy dog that follows me and my friends at night until I come home safe; a pregnant cat named Remejia; and Pablito, the bug that lives in my cat’s head.

But life in El Seibo wasn’t always this colorful. I was originally placed with a doña who’d only look at me like she was visiting a zoo, and then awkwardly laugh every 23 seconds or so. But she was a great conversationalist compared to her 4 niños, which I first thought were just semi-circles with eyes that popped up randomly from any given corner. To their credit, it’s hard to hold much of a discussion when you’ve got somber Christian music blaring through the house, which I soon began to pray for once I discovered the helium-voiced kitschy children’s Christian Music that obviously has to be accompanied by a background soundtrack akin to Super Mario Bros, circa 1984. Eventually, I just began to pray for power outages, but to no avail since El Seibo happens to be the only chunk of land on the whole island with 24 hour electricity. Luckily though, the doña loosened up after a few days and began to scream Jesus songs in my face complete with facial expressions and hand movements of disapproval and condemnation - which was only a warm-up to her explicit declaration of disgust for my vice-filled life. When I began to pray for a bout of Dengue Fever so I could take a one week vacation to a Santo Domingo hospital, I knew it was time to say our goodbyes. So, I told her I was Jewish and was summarily evacuated.

Things are pretty tranquil now, the only source of conflict being hordes of underage Dominican girls that I have to hack through every morning to get inside the high school we’re based at. There’s no subtlety or shame when it comes to opposite sex dialogue; these girls just stare and yell out cat calls. Chris actually got propositioned into having sex on campus and then called gay when he refused. So, instead of smiling and turning away, I think we’re gonna have to start getting vicious. But thankfully, there’s also a couple of international exchange students here - one from Finland, the other from Switzerland. So, Lori, Chris and I have decided to band together with our European brethren and start an expat club; meetings are held at least every other day at a sexy bar with a thatched roof. This exchange has become crucial in reminding us that there’s that whole world out there that isn’t completely twisted and surreal - which is easily forgotten when you go to a baseball game and a timeout is called because a horse has run onto the field; or when you drunkenly stumble upon a baby grand piano in open air, taped shut, and with a Dominican flag, a machete, and 2 sharpeners in place of sheet music hidden in the bench. Yeah, I enjoy the absurd too; but it’s nice to match that with a normal English conversation on the absurdity of the absurd.

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