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Published: April 2nd 2006
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I can´t believe I´ve only been in the DR for two weeks. The cold and wet of the English winter and sleepy little Winchester seem a million miles away. The time has gone so quickly and we´ve managed to pack so much in that it feels like I´ve been here for two months already.
My first full week at the school has been great fun, but the longer I spend with the kids the more I realise just how difficult their lives are. Most foreign visitors to the Dominican Republic stay in one of the all-inclusive resorts, far away from the poverty of normal Dominican life. There are plenty of very wealthy people in Santo Domingo, as witnessed by the number of massive 4x4´s on the roads but for most people life is quite hard. It´s true that life here is laid-back, music pumps out of every doorway and the weather is great but it would be too easy to romanticise the lifestyle when the reality is much more gritty. For example, you rarely see anybody over the age of 60 because people simply don´t live that long and many of the kids at school have already lost one parent
or are orphaned. Families are massive too, which only compounds the poverty and poor health because with so many mouths to feed, most families can only afford the poorest quality food. Sugar, for example, is in everything (even the pizzas!) as it´s grown here and is relatively cheap so the kids at school are constantly eating sweets. Not only does this mean their teeth are pretty bad but they´re on a permanent sugar high which makes them very difficult to teach. School dinners are only available for the very poorest children and there´s not much nutritional value in what the school can afford to provide. We were invited to stay for lunch twice this week: the first time for habichuele (rice with beans) and a chicken´s foot and the second time for spaghetti with sweet tomato sauce, both times washed down with squash and followed by a handful of biscuits. It was pretty ropey fare but we felt obliged to eat everything because it would have felt immoral to leave what for the children would probably be their main meal of the day. One little girl even wrapped some of the rice up in a piece of paper to take
home which was quite heartbreaking to see.
On a much lighter note, a few of us took a trip out of the city this weekend to a small town about three hours west of Santo Domingo called Barahona. We travelled by bus, which gave us plenty of time to get our first look at the Dominican countryside. It´s very beautiful - surprisingly green and fertile with mile after mile of banana/plantain plantations and other crops. We managed to pick up a random American student at the bus station in Santo Domingo, who sort of attached himself to our group for the remainder of the weekend. Luckily he spoke more spanish than the rest of us put together so he was quite a useful presence on occasion. There´s not a lot to do in Barahona itself but it´s a good base for getting to some of the towns further down the Perdenales peninsula. We stayed in a budget hotel that cost us 350 pesos each for two nights (that´s about 7 pounds). It was basic to say the least but I feel like I´ve now had my first real taste of the authentic travelling experience. The main purpose of the
trip was to get to a beach so we took a gua-gua about 20km south to a small town called San Rafael. There were about 350 people in the gua-gua, which listed quite alarmingly to the right and was mostly rust, so I spent the whole journey in the foetal position to squeeze into my 4 square inches of space but the amazing views of the caribbean made it all worthwhile. The beach at San Rafael is a bit pebbly, rather than the pure white sand we´d been hoping for, but we still managed a paddle in the sea and a bit of a sunbathe. The sea is exactly the right shade of turquoise and the temperature of a warm bath but there was quite an undertow and we decided that as none of the locals were actually swimming we´d stick to the pools that have been created from a small river at the back of the beach. We had a bit of a scare on the way back to Barahona, when the gua-gua we were in was stopped at some sort of checkpoint by a lot of men with very big guns. They demanded to see our papers (which
of course none of us had with us) but we feigned total incomprehension and came over all English so after about two minutes they just gave up and let us carry on with our journey. Something they don´t tell you in any of the brochures about the DR is that everybody carries a gun. We only realised this on the way back from a night out when our taxi driver told us the reason nobody stops at a red light after dark is because bandits hijack cars, not just for money but for the guns that all drivers carry with them!
Despite this small adventure it was a pretty idyllic weekend and a very welcome break away from the city.
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Jim
non-member comment
I do like to be beside the seaside!!
Hiya, Noted the bit about the poor. It certainly makes you think how lucky we are! Reminds me of the kids begging on the streets in Venezuela with just a pair of tatty shorts and a big smile... Anyway, glad to see the teaching is coming along great and that you seem to have made some good mates already. Watch out for the big guns (and little ones, for that matter) ! Jim