Jess finally writes!

(huelga=a strike or protest)

Jennie keeps telling me I should write a blog post, and today I said, "If school gets cancelled because of the Huelga, I'll do it!" We did have school till 1:00 but afternoon language classes were cancelled and the library is closed for the day. I probably would be doing what we did yesterday if there were electricity but today's march is more serious than yesterday's so the luz (electricity) is already gone. Yesterday when we hurried home at 2:15 after Ukelele Club to avoid being caught in the 3:00 pm march, we did all the fun things that you can do when it's advisable to stay inside AND you have electricity. We watched 4 hours of Arrested Development, ate Haagen Daz coffee ice cream and drank sparkling white wine with a strong hint of pamplemousse (see French appendix). Because today there is no way to indulge such luxuries (though we did finish the ice cream before it melted), all that's left to do is write a blog post. Not that I've been procrastinating, but there is just so much to say...

What is the Whelga?
As you may have heard life here is TRES CHERE (that's French again). It would be one thing if prices, rents, and salaries all evened out to an affordable day-to-day kind of situation. We moved a couple months ago to a second floor apartment to escape the legion of cucarachas, and that means we pay rent now instead of living in the free volunteer house, which now that there is a lovely 60 year old living in it, has become sparklingly clean (as opposed to when we were there) but still the creepy crawly crunchy roommates persist. Anyway, we pay rent and with being real grown-up tenants, comes the responsibility for the electric bill. Now here's where this blogpost departs from the kind of "I-can't-pay-my-bills" kind of message you might be fearing, complete with a paypal button on the sidebar. The point is THE ELECTRIC BILL.

Luz y Fuerza
This is the name of the distributing company for electricity here in Las Terrenas, which translates to "Light and Power." The head of the company, a Dominican named Orsini, has reigned for the last decade with an emphasis, not on Light, but on Power, as in "Abuse-of-Power." There is a Dominican electricity law that says that the generating plant and the distributing company cannot legally be owned by the same person. You can see how that would be a problem, no? The plant sells the electricity to the distributor, who marks it up to cover their costs (and pay top dollar to executives) and sells it by the kilowatt to the individual community members. In our house, where we do not usually watch 4 hours of internet-streamed TV, and just run a fridge, fan, and a couple light bulbs, that shakes out to 2,800 pesos a month, roughly 65 US dollars, which is about 14% of my income. If that ratio held true (can you tell I'm teaching middle school math?), I would pay $400 a month for electricity at home. WHAT?!

Huasn't I supposed to be writing about the Huelga?
As I was saying, Las Terrenas has the most expensive electricity in the country, and one of the highest in the world. Porquoi? (I'm also trying to brush up on my French.) Orsini, the "Abuse-of-Fuerza" guy at Luz y Fuerza, also not-so-secretly owns the plant that makes the electricity! So he sells the electricity to himself at 17 pesos a kilowatt and turns around and sells it to the people, rich and very poor alike, at 18-22 pesos a kilowatt. To compare, in nearby Sanchez, customers get their luz at 4.5-8 pesos a kilowatt. If we moved to Sanchez (which we won't because it's not on a beautiful beach or in a town full of wood-fired pizza, oh, or near our work), we would pay about $20 for our electricity. Sanchez is only 25 minutes away riding in the back of a pickup truck. How can we tolerate such a discrepancy? Thus the peaceful marching, the not-so-peaceful burning of electrical poles and cutting of power cables, and jails full of protesters.

The Back-Story
If you are scanning ahead to see if there's more math, don't worry, I've included all the politically contextualized math I taught this week already. The people of Las Terrenas have been personally and politically pissed off for a good ten years (that was a number but I spelled it, so you wouldn't stop reading if you were feeling math-phobic). There have been countless peaceful demonstrations, even a group of treinta y tres people who walked for trois days to the capital to draw attention to the cause. The cause is that the government refuses to enforce the electricity law that is designed to prevent price gouging. Last month a judge finally voted to suspend Orsini's presidency of the company to allow a French investor, Dartout to take over to run an audit to see why none of the investors were getting any money (and presumably it would come out why prices are so high for the common folk too...). That really made Orsini mad, so mad that these things all happened since then:
1. Orsini set up a "secondary office" where people were encouraged, via false mailers and bullhorn-on-the-top-of-the car advertising to pay their bills.
2. Orsini paid police from Nagua, another nearby town with low electric rates, to break into the original office, guns-a-blazing, and take the records he forgot the first time.
3. Orsini sent out bills with bold printed text denouncing the French guy and warning people not to go to the original office because it won't be applied to your account and your electricity will get shut off.
AS IF THAT WAS SUCH A BIG THREAT BECAUSE...
4. The Frente, non-violent organizing group, threw in the towel after a decade of completely calm demonstrating with no results, and in steps the confrontational element, including many 16-18 year-olds.  And then...
5. Friday night the power went out at 10 pm and didn't come back till Sunday afternoon. I cried on Sunday and we both moaned a few times on the other days. We did go to a brunch buffet on Saturday at a hotel that has a generator. Highly recommended for visitors in the next few months. It turns out the power was out for so long due to the burning of one of the main light posts in town.
6. Sunday night the lights went back out at 7 pm. Luckily we had taken our first real shower of the weekend, and even gotten out to the beach since the roads were cleared of burning tires and palm fronds. The power went back on around 2 am. We didn't sleep much. There were truckloads of police officers from all over the country but people still managed to cut a couple power lines. Power to the people! (But not to their houses!)
7. Monday was the day of the ice cream and wine and TV binge at our house. In the outside world there was a peaceful march with huge attendance in the afternoon, and some shenanigans at night that put the power out at 8 again. This time Jennie cried. We slept, sort of. Power came back on after midnight.
8. Today is Tuesday and the power has been out since 2:30 pm. There was a big protest that started gathering force right around 1:00 pm, which gave me the hours of free time to write this blog post. We went out to stretch our legs at 4:00 and it was very very quiet on the street. Today's protest was definitely the biggest yet so we'll see what happens tonight...

UPDATE: It is now Friday. There was plenty more action in between Tuesday and today, including more power outage, more craziness in the streets, and a day off school. Things have calmed down a bit. Lights are back on (yay!) and trash is being cleaned up from the street where pissed-off protesters flipped dumpsters and lit them on fire. There maybe has been some kind of compromise reached? Hard to say. ANOTHER UPDATE: The aforementioned 60-year-oldvolunteer who was living in the cockroachy-but-clean volunteer house got so freaked out by all the huelga action that she hopped a plane back to upstate New York. Hopefully she avoided that crazy-town snow storm. I'll take huelga over 6 feet of snow any day. ONE MORE UPDATE: We're off to Cincinnati tomorrow for the week of Thanksgiving, where presumably the power will be on, the water will be flowing from the pipes, and the electricity bill won't be fueling an enraged citizenry. We are thankful for all the things.

Week Whatever (time has no meaning; it's the Carribean!)

Guess I'm not so great at this blogging thing since we've been here for two months already and I haven't written since week 1. I will try to do better! That is my Halloween resolution.

Jess is enmeshed, immersed, and entangled in Last Terrenas International School teaching middle schoolers how to be conscientious consumers and other things muy importante for tweeners to know (I'll leave it to her to describe how it's going at school since she has the first-person perspective, and I don't want this blog to sound like a Christmas letter). I started taking Spanish classes twice a week with a German woman who has lived in Las Terrenas for over 20 years. It's possible that when she moved here there was no electricity since that is how recently electricity came to town. Now we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world! Wouldn't you think that young and inexperienced electricity would cost less? Kind of like an intern fresh out of college? It certainly acts like an intern--bright and eager to please one minute, and then cutting out of work early and taking the water with it the next minute!

Anyway, it's maybe a little strange to take Spanish from a German in a country full of native speakers, but she was highly recommended, and if I'm honest, she is much easier to understand than Dominicans (for me as a novice, anyway). I am having a hard time deciphering spoken Dominican Spanish. If only when people spoke big text bubbles came out of their mouths! I'd be fluent in no time. Can Google glasses do that for me?

This is kind of how I feel when I'm trying to understand what people are saying.

I've been volunteering at the library, which is part of the school, for a while now. We're only open in the afternoons, and since it had been closed all summer, patrons are slow to return. Unfortunately, the library and school are down an alley off the main road and so passersby are not likely to stop in because it's invisible. Probably I should get a sandwich board made or something. Or maybe neon lights... There is a lot of visual stimuli to contend with on the main road, so getting people to notice a sign, decide they want to use the library, walk all the way down the alley past the strange man who spends all day picking up dead leaves from the dirt in front of his house, past the pack of semi-owned, semi-wild dogs, past Esther the well-meaning but screechy second-grader yelling "You're crazy!", through the entrance of the school and way down to the left where the library entrance lies hidden by curtains of bougainvillea seems like a tall order. I'm thinking maybe we need to station someone at the entrance of the alley with a bullhorn--that's much more how people roll here.

Jess painting all the faces at Etnomix

Why, no sir, we do not have hamburgers. But, can I interest you in a small cup of cherry cough syrup flavored gelatin with rum?

Thanks to Jess the fluent and incredible social butterfly, we made some actual Dominican friends! We spent last weekend working at a festival on the beach selling cookies and Jello shots all in the name of fundraising for the school. It was supposed to be an "Ethnic" sharing festival and our booth was the good 'ol US of A. Represent! And what is more American than chocolate chip cookies and rum jello shots? Nothing, that's what.Unfortunately, it didn't catch on because all people wanted were hamburgers and hotdogs. Anyway, long story short, our booth was not the hit we hoped it would be, but we did make friends with the lovely gay Dominican guy (not an easy thing to find around here, btw) working at the Mexico booth next door and his very, very tall Amazonian friend (known to everyone in town as "La Grande"). They were horrified to find out that we had never been to the waterfall at El Limon, which is nearby and is a big tourist draw in Samana, and kindly offered to take us.

So, the following Monday, Columbus Day, which Jess had off from school to celebrate the glory and the majesty of el senor Colon (in truth, it was a day off to recuperate from Etnomix with the excuse that it was sort of kind of an actual holiday, though a reprehensible one as we all are aware) we hopped aboard two vespas and raced off to the waterfall. Most visitors to el Limon ride horseback up the trail to the falls, but we decided to hike instead because, you know, we're Oregonian and that's how we do...and more importantly, it was free that way (except for the 200 pesos we paid to the little boy who offered to guide us up the trail and who the minute we stepped onto the trail reached into his pocket, pulled out a small radio, and cranked up the bachata music...so much for a peaceful nature hike!). So over the mucky muck trail, across the same river twice, and up the slippery rock path we went. When we got to the top we were rewarded with a beautiful view of the falls and the green hills surrounding them. And we met a hungry, hungry kitten who spurned the only food we had to offer--leftover chocolate chip cookies from Etnomix. Down what seemed like a thousand steps we went, and, finally we were at the falls!

We're so happy to be alive after our helmetless Vespa ride! And, please God let this clean-seeming water really be clean.

We've had many other adventures that are worth recounting, but this post is already too long by our modern short attention span standards, so I'll save those for another day. We remain Safe, Sound and Very, Very Sweaty.

Week 1

Jess and I arrived in Las Terrenas three days ago and are settling into our new house. Our friends Josh and Rebecca and their awesome kids drove us here from where they live about two hours away. We took the bus to their house from Santo Domingo and stayed overnight with them. They started a community library in their city (San Franciso de Marcoris), so we went and checked it out (ha! "checked it out, get it?), and discovered they have a maravilloso collection of books. Josh and I took a walk through town to visit their competition, the "public" library of San Francisco (where you can't actually check books out and take them home, and where all the books are at least thirty years old). We fell asleep to the "soothing" sounds of the music from the bar across the street blaring until 2 am, and then drove to Terrenas the next day. Had a plato del dia Dominican-style lunch with Annette and Jose (the people who run the school) and their two kids then went to the beach and swam in the insanely clear, blue water. We ate dinner at a restaurant on the beach—best pizza I’ve had in years, dead serious. Not cheap…but delicious nonetheless. In fact, things here are not quite as cheap as one would have hoped. We should be able to make it work considering that our main source of entertainment (the fantastical beaches) are free!

We seriously live here...

Our house is called Casa Paz. Las hormigas and las cucarachas are our roomates, but I think we’ll be able to scare them away…hopefully? All the windows have screens (which is lucky because they don’t have glass!) so the mosquito situation isn’t bad in the house at all, thank god (have you heard of chikungunya? Look it up…). Jess is happy because the roof is made of tin, so when it rains it sounds soothing.

We live right in the middle of town, so walking everywhere is not a problem (a walk to the beach takes a mere cinco minutos!). Annette and Jose live in a lovely house across the street. They have a starfruit tree in their yard! (I thought starfruit were created in labs, that's how delicious they are.) Our neighbors are very sweet Haitians with adorable kids who all live in a tiny, run-down house and who hang out on the street most of the day playing some pretty damn good Haitian tunes pretty damn loud on their stereo. We can buy plantains at a colmado (small store) on our side street (also toilet paper!), or we can get anything we need at any of the seemingly hundreds of stores in town. There is a French bakery about a block away with some wickedly good pastry. Who would’ve thought? It’s all a very strange mix of super poor people and European expatriots riding four-wheel ATVs and Dominican tourists and foreign tourists and stray dogs and stray cats and moto-taxis and dudes hanging out in the street playing dominoes all day and fruit stores and picture-postcard beaches and lottery shacks and palm trees and blaring music (did I mention the blaring music?) and ants and mosquitoes and nice hotels and tons and tons of small restaurants and churches and pretty much everything under the sun. I think we’re going to like it here…if I don’t get eaten by a giant cockroach.

I know we look tasty, Cucarachas, but please let us live!

Now, if I can only learn Spanish quick enough so I can talk to people! I want to talk to the people! Jess is lucky, and I’m jealous that she can talk to all the people. I just stand there looking mute and stupid. Good motivation to work hard, I guess.

This is me working hard.

 

Underwater camera! Super smart purchase.

Well, that’s the news from Las Woebegone, where the cucarachas pay half the rent, the bananas are plentiful, and the avocados cost 15 cents each.