dias dos

(entry from yesterday)

Today has been crazy. This morning I woke up and went to the Esperanza offices in Santo Domingo and met a really nice woman named Katherine who spoke English with me for awhile, which was a nice break from smiling and nodding to very fast spoken Spanish. She is a school teacher for 3rd and 5th grade, and sounds like dominican are just as sneaky and energetic as their Americano counterparts. Kalie took me to the Hato Mayor office and we went on the guagua bus, which is just like the doladola in Africa. It’s a van that follows a certain route and they are pretty cheap. We rode for 2 hours, first all along the southern shore, which was beautiful with its clear blue water, rocky coast and palm trees. We enjoyed the view until San Pedro de Macoris, the capital, when we turned inland. We drove through miles and miles of sugar cane fields and saw bateys. Bateys are the little huts/towns that form near the big sugar cane company’s fields. Lots of illegal Haitian immigrants work as sugar cane cutters. Kalie told me cutting sugar cane is back breaking work that is very physically intense, and they only get paid roughly $6 a day. Even by dominican standards of living that is very little money.
It was fun to get to see the more rural parts of the Dominican. It is very lush and green. There were trucks driving by us full of pigs and bananas. The farther away we got from the city the more motorcycles we started seeing. Hato Mayor is much smaller than Santo Domingo, but then again, so is any other city in the Dominican. It is much more residential and has a downtown/shopping district of maybe 7-9 blocks. Kalie and I went to the Esperanza office there and met Tess, my new guide. I’ll be staying here until Friday. We walked around, and I met my host family, with the vivacious and loving Sofia. She greeted me with a hug and a kiss and said in her best English “I am your mother!” Her son speaks some English so he will probably be family translator. They are very kind and generous to offer their spare bed to me and have offered me fresh passion fruit juice AND cold water AND turned on the fan for me in the time that I have been sitting here typing. I have been told that Dominicans are extremely hospitable and I have experienced that first hand.
Tomorrow will be our first set of interviews, and I’m interested to see what the results will be. We will interview in the morning at their loan meetings, so then we will pretty much have the rest of the day to relax and enjoy. Tess’ host family may take us to the pool nearby, which would be wonderful because it is so very hot. My English and ability to speak is getting pretty messed up. I hear and read all this Spanish and for whatever reason my brain translates it into French and then English, Very strange. Also, today experienced the famous dominican hiss that men use when they cat call the women. Will get very annoying I’m sure. Well, that’s it for today!
Muchos besos
dobby