Loss/gain analysis: March 22, 2012

GAIN: Appreciation for abbreviations and shortening words. Oye, rubia cuidaoooo tú ‘ta loca. No’ va pa’ comer ya tú sabe’. Would have been indecipherable to me a few months ago. Still often indecipherable. Learning.

LOSS: Ability to communicate coherently in Spanish or English. Spanish words keep popping into my head and then I can’t find the English words to replace them. I almost just forgot how to spell the word “English”. It’s all a gran lío in my brain right now. Grammer fracaza.

GAIN: Coffee addiction. It’s so delicious, strong and dark, but always with lots of sugar. Mmm. I need to stop drinking it at night, but I can’t resist.

LOSS: My formerly flat(ish) stomach. Finally claiming my father’s inheritance, I have a boych for sure thanks to massive amounts of arroz, fried chicken and empandas on empanadas on empanadas. I wish I had more long empire waist shirts.

GAIN: Mango addiction. I have eaten at least 2 a day for the past week. Now having to remedy with lots of bananas (if you know what I mean). I pass at least 3 fruit carts on my 4 block walk to class, and now they all call me with “mango?”

LOSS: Any sense of personal space. It is a luxury that I had to let go of after a week of thrice daily gua gua rides with a stranger sitting on my lap or alternatively on top of the gear shift.

GAIN: A new appreciation for music in my life at all times. I love hearing the salsa, merengue and bachata blasting everywhere. I’ve even learned to sleep with it (hint: less coffee with dinner). I dread returning to the quiet public spaces of gringolandia.

LOSS: My sense of self-conciousness/pride. I’ve accepted the fact that living in a less-known culture will only aggravate my already present inability to be smooth. So if I make a mess (often), do the wrong thing (oftener) or say something stupid (every other sentence), I laugh it away and hope the other person isn’t too unhappy with me.

 

Well, that about sums it up. All in all I’d say this has been a good quarter.

Rain and sand

[Santo Domingo] is most beautiful in the rain.

–Woody Allen, Midnight in [Santo Domingo]

I wish this movie would get made. So much ripe ground for humor. Woody Allen would die walking the streets here, neurotic people do not survive unscathed in this country, as I’m being forced to learn.

It’s been raining a lot this week, and for some reason it’s changed the whole city. I don’t know how to explain it, but I love the difference. Love love love. I actually just want to write love over and over. It’s such a different mood. On the one hand, it calms everything down, there is less noise and pollution in the air and hot sticky humidity. One the other, everyone’s actually rushing to try to get in and out of the rain. Otherwise, people are holed up inside, where there is a nice cozy feeling in the air.

Anyway, this weekend I went to the most beautiful farm with a beach attached. A black sand, private beach, attached to a mango (and other irrelevant things) farm. Sometimes I get frustrated living here, but then there are other times when I know I made a great choice. It was a wonderful weekend where all I did was eat coconut rice with fish and fresh mangoes and sleep in the sun. Myself and my friends Sarah, Andrea and Deborah were invited by our friend Dany, who is close friends with Alex who owns the farm.

We also had some interesting conversations with some friends of the owner of the farm about race and gender relations. That was a pretty frustrating experience. I feel like a lot of my conversations with Dominicans about race and gender have left me feeling this way. On the one hand, there are so many things that people sometimes say that I just don’t agree with, but I also know that I am the outsider, and I may not understand why they are saying this thing I disagree with. The onus is on me to try to understand and listen, but it’s frustrating. This weekend I really felt that, in that many of the other guests, and the owner of the farm, were constantly saying really sexual, sexist things to me and my friends. In many conversations with men I am made completely aware that I am a women and either objectified completely or talked down to and treated as a child. There are numerous times when I and other female friends are told what to think or believe, even about ourselves. For example, “you don’t really like/want that thing you just said you liked/wanted”. Men often yell unsolicited advice to me on the street, such as “Blancita (white girl), walk in the shade!” Well, this side of the street has less open man-hole covers, thanks. This segues nicely into the other big elephant that is constantly in the room, here and in the US as well: race. I’ve been meaning to write about race and racism here for a while, but it is a pretty daunting task to try to represent accurately, and I’ve been getting a bit overwhelmed every time I try. Basically, I am constantly made aware of my whiteness here, which is different from living in the US where I am usually surrounded by predominantly white bodies. Along with whiteness comes privilege, which is another thing I’ve been made highly aware of: the privileges that come with my whiteness, but also my nationality and class status, which give me security, mobility, and basic comforts, along with a whole host of other things. So, keeping that in mind, it is really hard for me to conceptualize race here, the constructions are very different than in the US. I want to get into specifics later, but it makes it really hard to know if I should call people out for saying things I construe as highly offensive and racist, or whether that is a way of asserting my values and being ethnocentric, since I may not understand them. Anyway, these are things I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I’m sure they’ll come up again, but now I need to go to bed, good night blogging world! Here are pictures of the waves to lull me and you to sleep.