Cabrera, The Dominican Republic  

December 2003  

Dear Friends and Family,

When I was in the United States in June, I was impressed by how big the houses were. In the Dominican Republic, large families live in small houses. I began to think about how the house itself affects the family that lives in it. When lots of people share a small space it forces them to be with one another all the time. I think that children growing up in such an environment are automatically more social and more people-oriented as adults. Dominicans in general can't stand to be alone. They're unhappy if there aren't lots of people around. I'm basically the opposite and find myself seeking places which aren't so crowded. This probably has something to do with growing up in a big house with my own bedroom.

I have a friend in Cabrera who is an architect. Talking to her made me realize the importance of good housing design. Suddenly, I was obsessed with architecture. I bought a notebook of graphing paper and began filling up pages with bedrooms and kitchens and baths. I regretting not having gone to architecture school, and thought of maybe enrolling myself somewhere. I was convinced that American houses are too large, and dedicated myself to the efficient use of space. I designed tiny little houses with not a square foot wasted. Hallways were my ultimate enemy. Eventually I burned through this little phase of mine, and now the graphing paper notebook lies on a shelf untouched. I am not researching architecture schools.

The process, anyway, convinced me that I don't want to live in a big American house. I want a small house that will, by virtue of its design, draw people together and make them be together. It has become sort of a goal of mine, which might be good for me. Unfortunately, I don't have any money at all (stock market dive, 2000 and 2001). Perhaps I will get a fat paying job and save up and accomplish this goal. Yet while the idea of building my own house delights me, the idea of accumulating gobs of money makes me ill. I'm also philosophically opposed to debt. So I don't know if the beautiful tiny little house will ever get built.

I would want it to be beautiful though. Rich people's homes in America are generally big homes. But if I had X amount of money and were going to build a house, I would half the floor space to make every square foot twice as beautiful, if I could. Human beings are attracted to beauty. I would want a home that attracted people, made them feel welcome, made them want to stay as long as possible. I would use the best, most expensive building materials available. All this is dreaming, you know.

I am fascinated by beauty. Despite being a hard core anti-materialist who believes that owning things ruins your life, I find myself compromised if something has aesthetic value or potential. For instance, I spent quite a lot of money on a camera and high end lens before coming to the Dominican Republic, because I wanted to take beautiful pictures. And although my first year here in Cabrera I spent in a completely unadorned, almost stark house, in the second year after I moved I bought an expensive artsy flower pot to show off the flowers on my balcony.

Peace Corps volunteers generally live in countries which are not as productive and work-oriented as the United States. We have a lot of time to sit and think. I have done a lot of thinking about beauty. There are all kinds of beauty, and not all are visual, like flowers or a hardwood floor. Music, of course, is beautiful. So is loving someone. People themselves can be beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with their physical appearance. I can think of two volunteers I know here who are beautiful people in the sense that when you are with them, you feel peace. One is a guy I play the guitar with, the other is a woman whom I have only spoken to twice. The woman, when you talk to her, you feel like you can see all the way to her soul. This kind of beauty is more valuable than any flowerpot or expensive home. It doesn't cost any money and you can take it with you wherever you go. Yet it's so rare and hard to come by. I'm not talking about being a nice person or a good person, even, but about something more profound. I don't know where this kind of beauty comes from.

In a certain sense, I could claim I did another tour in the Peace Corps because I wanted my life to be beautiful. Things don't always work out the way you expect. I was trying to go back to third world Asia, and instead landed in middle-of-the-world Latin America, in a town with lots of nice cars and drug money. To anybody who thinks that Peace Corps volunteers live in poverty-stricken villages and work to improve the health conditions or educational systems of needy and abandoned people, I can say that many volunteers do exactly that, but some of them don't. I'm one who doesn't.

So what is it I do then? This year I am concentrating mainly on teaching computers literacy to primary school teachers in the local school system. The Peace Corps' plan was that volunteers would teach high school teachers how to use the computer lab with their classes in other subjects. However, I could never manage to get the high school teachers to come to a computer class. They would sign up but never show up. So after a year of that, I opened up a course to every single teacher in the district, regardless of what level they teach. I now have about 35 Dominican primary school teachers who come Monday through Friday to learn how to use a computer. Right now I'm teaching them how to make graphs in Microsoft Excel. Some of them are good at it, and some of them are completely hopeless. There aren't any computers in the primary schools for these teachers to use, but some of them are pretty rich and could easily buy a home computer. So, basically, I'm giving free computer literacy classes to adults. It's not saving the world, but it's OK.

Apart from computer literacy for adults, I'm also the computer teacher at the afternoon shift in the high school. There are three shifts (morning, afternoon and night). The afternoon shift is the newest. Mainly we have the students who were kicked out of the morning for discipline problems or for getting pregnant. The students are not happy about having to come in the afternoon since all their friends are in the morning. But since there are fewer of them in the afternoon, they actually get a much better education. Plus, they get me as their computer teacher! What could be better than that?

Working with high school students, especially with delinquents like I have, you have to be clever. Each kid has a different personality that you have to deal with. You have to learn what buttons to push with them to get them to sit down and learn something. I feel like, indirectly, I've been learning a lot of psychology. I am known as being an especially mean and tough teacher. The computer teacher before me would let the students do whatever they wanted, which usually meant sex chat with prostitutes in Mexico via the Internet. We don't have Internet here anymore, for which I am sometimes thankful. It was hard to change the mentality of the students from "the computer lab's where we entertain ourselves" to "the computer lab's where we have to do what Andrés says" (I'm Andrés). I had to yell at a lot of kids and humiliate them. The students don't realize that you're just a person like them. I sometimes worry what would happen if they knew that I'm not really any different than they are, that we are temporarily filling roles, that my filling this role of being in charge and ordering them around is circumstantial. Some of them are older than I am (the afternoon is where adults who never finished high school can enroll themselves too). Yet for this period of time in the afternoon we fill these certain roles and they don't know what a weak, kind person I really am. As long as they don't know, I can manipulate them. So I manipulate them to make them learn.

School is only part of the day. My days are easy. I don't even have to cook anymore. When I am hungry I go to someone's house and they feed me. I occupy myself figuring out how to juggle where I am going to eat. Maria Isabel expects me every Sunday, although I always get a lot of other invitations that day too. At Marina Garcia's I can pretty much wander in whenever, but if her daughter Karil is visiting from Santo Domingo she will come by my house looking for me to go to the beach (especially if Karil's friend Joanny is with her--read between the lines) and we'll end up at the Garcia's house afterwards with a nice plate of fish or rice with coconut. Then there is Luis Blanco, who has a cook that cooks for him. The food at his house is excellent. I can get tired of Dominican cuisine, but Don Luis is Cuban, and he's taught his cook how to make Cuban dishes which I enjoy very much. Unfortunately, Luis usually invites me on Sunday when I have to be at Maria Isabel's or she will get upset. It's hard to keep everyone happy. Daisy expects me to eat at her house every single day of the week, and even though I explain to her about Sunday at Maria Isabel's and about Karil sometimes being in town, she still saves an entire plate of food which sits on her kitchen counter waiting for me. I'm nervous about when my friends Lucas and Esthel come back from Canada this month, because if I am at their house a couple of hours within suppertime Esthel wants me to stay and eat with them, which is not going to go over well with Daisy.

Despite so much variety in where I eat, there is almost no variety in what I eat. It's rice and beans and chicken and viveres, day after day. Once and a while I get fish, but Dominicans basically don't eat vegetables. When I get back to the United States, I may become a vegetarian just because I miss vegetables so much. When I do cook for myself, it's because I need to eat something different, something with tomatoes in it or carrots. Writing this, I just remembered about broccoli and how wonderful it is. My kingdom for a head of broccoli!

I was sick for the entire month of November with an amoeba. The downside of eating around town as I do is that certain people aren't careful about their food preparation. It's not that they aren't careful, exactly, but that they are ignorant. If I tried to explain to them why they shouldn't rinse out my glass with tap water before filling it with juice, they would be offended, so I keep quiet. Then I get diarrhea and I am so sorry that I consider never sitting down at a Dominican dinner table again.

These days I get lots of news about friends getting married or having babies or graduating from medical school or advancing in their careers. It always makes me look at myself and wonder what am I doing while all these important things are going on. Because meanwhile that so and so just got a big raise and named a first child, I find myself teaching mouse clicking skills for free. Sometimes I feel bad about that, like my life isn't amounting to anything.

Some Dominicans appreciate what I do and some don't. When I was sick, a lot of my adult students brought me home remedies to help make me better. I couldn't eat most of them because of my stomach pain, but it really is the thought that counts. Then there's quite a few Dominicans who are suspicious of me, this American without a washing machine. A lot of foreigners live in Cabrera, but they are all rich and into pleasure. I am the only foreigner who actually works and who isn't going to bed with a lot of Dominican girlfriends. Since it's so rare to see a foreigner here who isn't interested in the sex and the booze, the consensus about me is that I'm a gay CIA agent. This is not the impression a straight Peace Corps volunteer hopes to make.

I try not to analyze my situation too much. Wherever you find yourself, you should do the best you can and try to be happy. That's what I am doing in Cabrera. Merry Christmas.