After
lounging on the beach with my friends, I went to visit my best friend Lauren’s
batey. Lauren lives in the east in a batey named Monte Coca. To clarify, a
batey is a place sort of like my site, but they grow sugar cane and there’s
more of a Haitian population there than most communities in the DR. It’s always
interesting to visit other volunteers and see how they live and compare it to
how you live. For example, I live in a community of 8,000 people and she lives
in a community of 300 people. She knew everyone in her site and everyone knew
her, and she seemed very well integrated. We sat at a lot of families’ houses
and talked. I feel like I know a ton of people, but it’s such a big site that
it’s hard to feel super integrated. On the flip side, because she lives in such
a small community, people tend to talk about her more and criticize her whereas
I get that a bit less than she does. We’ve all got our pros and cons!
On Sunday,
we did a Chicas Brillantes charla in the batey next to where she lived named
Construccion. Lauren had warned me that it was a bit poorer than the normal
type of poor that we live in. I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw, and you
know that’s pretty bad when a Peace Corps Volunteer is taken aback by a really
poor community. There were only barracks for housing, and large amounts of
people lived in one tiny room. There was hardly any vegetation, just dust and
mud. Mostly everyone was wearing dirty/old clothing, and seemed very dirty
themselves. Something about the Dominican culture is that they hate being dirty
and bathe about twice a day, and they like to look presentable no matter their
situation, so that was very different to see. I’m not sure how else to explain
the community, but I remember just feeling grateful for my campo. I kept
thinking about how much grass and trees I have in my site, how I have my own
little, kind of crappy, wooden house to myself, and how at least some people in
my community have a job, even if it is driving a moto or working on a farm. Then
I was watching the little kids playing with some sticks/trash and felt
overwhelming guilty about my childhood. Here was my thought processs: “I had a
freaking POOL when I was a kid, I can’t believe how spoiled I was. AND I went
to college! Do you think these kids know how poor they are? Do you think they
know what else is out there? Do you think they know that they’ve been jipped
when it comes to privilege and opportunities in life? I wonder if it’s possible
for any of them to get out of here and make something of a life for
themselves.”
After we
left the batey, Lauren and I engaged in a conversation about poverty and being
born privileged. I expressed my anger at the Dominican government for letting
its people live like that. I said, “If Danilo (the DR president) came to that
place and saw how his people were living, he would be ashamed of himself” and
Lauren said he wouldn’t because “those weren’t his people”. I asked what she
meant and she said “most of those people were Haitian and Dominicans don’t care
about Haitians”. Which is absolutely true, the racism against Haitians here is
incredible. Her point just made the situation even worse, because it probably
doesn’t necessarily have to be like that for them, but it is because they’re
Haitian. Most of them are probably undocumented, making it impossible to get
jobs, own land, go to school, etc.
Being born
privileged and being born poor is literally like picking pieces of paper out of
a hat. It’s totally random, no one has control of the situation they are given,
and there’s nothing no one did to deserve what they got. To me, it’s ok to
spend some time feeling bad about being privileged. I need to feel bad to
remind myself of what I was born with and what I have now, but not so bad as to
let opportunities pass me by. I know my parents worked really hard to give me
what they didn’t have, and I need to feel grateful for it but not feel bad
about taking advantage of it. It’s quite the balance of feelings. No matter
what, I’ve realized that doing what I’m doing now has given me an immense
amount of perspective that I couldn’t have gained doing anything else. And
that, in itself, is something to be grateful for.
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