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.
