Week 4- Bateys

Welcome Songs

Alexandra and the girls

Sugar cane fields- burned, cut and ready to load

Monte Coca Library 

This past week has been more uneventful mainly due to the rainy weather and the amount of homework Dale has given us. We spent all last weekend compiling our final project for Dennis, which was a movie/slideshow about our trip and what we learned. It turned out great- we each narrated a section. Dennis is the nicest, he got misty on us when it ended. We went kayaking and paddleboarding and made celebratory pancakes on his last day. He is an amazing teacher and person, even when he gave us 2 hours worth of talks about the history of kayaking- including on the water. I paddled as far away as possible, a girl can only take so much. This week our man Dale is teaching "Sociology of Labor." It is all about working in the global economy- globalization, labor conditions, implications it has for developing countries and the environment, the works. It's incredibly interesting but depressing and has opened my eyes to issues I didn't know existed- the world has way too many problems. We also watched The Price of Sugar, a documentary about the working conditions in Dominican sugar plantations, and took place 2 hours away. It is banned here because it shows so much of what goes on behind the Batey confines. Today, we saw it come alive and travelled to a Batey. Our first stop was the community of Las Pajas. Sarah, a Peace Corps volunteer met us there and gave us a tour of her community. The children were in school and sang two songs for us as a big welcome. Las Pajas was amazing, I absolutely loved everyone there. Since it is on a sugar cane plantation, it feels like a big neighborhood and everyone was so friendly and fun, laughing and chatting in Creole and Spanish. Jonathan was a guy our age and walked with us the whole time, he is one of the very few that will make it out and has a scholarship to study tourism at a university in Santo Domingo. You could tell he was such a role model there and while I was so happy for him, I also felt sad that the community was losing such a competent young man, as the community desperately needs leadership. He showed us the Barracks, which was a large building with many rooms for the workers. Each room was tiny and crammed- a bunk bed fully lined each wall, meaning that 8 people slept in one room that was half the size of mine. We stopped by the church and met the Pastor and his adorable but crazy little son who rocked a drum solo for us. Then, we went to the town clinic, which was built by a Canadian church organization. We met Jaclyn, the only doctor for the entire clinic and who is just a medical student serving there as a year long internship. She was very nice but you could tell she was in over her head. She said that her two patients right now were a little boy who severely burned himself on his stomach and a man who had accidentally cut his toe off in the fields. Everywhere we went, there were children playing baseball. Jonathan told us “kids learn to play baseball before they learn to walk.” Las Pajas is in the San Pedro province, which is the best baseball center in the world. Sammy Sosa and Alfonso Soriano and other greats grew up here and have donated multiple baseball training centers to the area. It is strange because the entire area is stricken with poverty, and then you will drive past these beautiful baseball fields with kids in the freshest uniforms using all these fancy machines and equipment. Most of the kids in Las Pajas were using sticks bats and makeshift balls, but they were still incredible, they see it as their ticket out and have dreams of making it to the big leagues. We also saw sugar cane everywhere. So many of the kids walk around with giant machetes, as many of them go to work in the fields as early as age seven. Everyone walks around chewing on a big stick of cane. It is delicious, but causes malnourishment in children and is terrible for your teeth- most of the adults had very few teeth left because the sugar rots them so badly. Sarah loves her community but has a lot of frustrations with the lack of motivation there. She said that most people expect groups to come in and build things for them and says it has been impossible to get anyone to take responsibility or initiative to work together and draw upon their own resources for village projects. She has shifted her focus from infrastructure to leadership and is working mostly with youth now to instill a new mindset so that they will be able to change the system. She is a Youth Development volunteer, and does a lot of teen pregnancy prevention, sex education, leadership training and attempts to get these Haitian children documentation. When the plantation owners bring Haitians across the border, they take their documents so that they will never be able to leave the Batey. Therefore, almost none of the adults or children “exist" and are not subject to labor laws or fair wages. Some of these children’s great grandparents came over here and their families have been here for years. Basically, they are no longer Haitians, but they aren’t Dominicans either. In order to get a birth certificate, you have to pay the Catholic church for a baptism certificate, which is absurdly expensive, and then the parents must travel out of town (more money) to pay for their child's documentation (even more money) and have proof of their own documentation (which they don't have). The impossible process can take days and at the end, there is a trial. The judge has the final say of whether or not to grant the certificate, and Sarah said that even when everything goes through, she has seen many people turned down at the last second simply because the judge said they were too dark to be Dominican or their accent was not Dominican enough. She said calling someone Haitian is a racist insult. We left for lunch in the neighboring town just down the road. A Guatemalan company runs this Batey town, known as Monte Coca. We met Tim, the Peace Corps rep there. We ate lunch with some of the townspeople, who served us chicken feet and dumplings. It was… an experience. I will try everything once, and that was the first and last time I will try a chicken foot. Tim and his three amigos Victor (my favorite), Felipe, and Roberto gave us a tour. We went to the loading and weighing field, where we saw the cut cane getting unloaded off the tractors and reloaded onto the trucks. Most of the men don’t have any gloves or shoes, and their hands get very infected because the cane is sharp and tears skin easily. They do not get paid by the hour, only by how much cane is cut, and there is a maximum of 150 pesos a day, which is about $3.00. One of our assignments was to break into teams and see how much we could buy with a day's salary at the town store. My group bought half a pound of rice, a pound of beans, and 6 eggs. For one day. For a whole family. We climbed on the tractor and it took us into the fields. They burn the entire field before going in because that makes it easier for them to cut, but it is still extremely strenuous work. Last, they took us to the Library, which is Tim’s main community project. There are five computers, a copy machine, and one bookshelf of books. They talked to us about the computer and English classes they offer there and the Young Leaders Alliance. It was clear that Monte Coca is a much more tight knit and united community than Las Pajas. The three guys take turns sleeping there because there are no paid security guards and the two older girls run the library during the day- all of it is unpaid volunteer work. We all sat around and Dale had us "interview" them to get a better idea of their day to day lives as fields workers. I asked Victor in my bad Spanish, “What motivates you to volunteer your time here?” He answered back in slow English- I think language is so cool. “I am poor. I do not have enough. I want to help others who are poor have enough. That is what this center is about. Opportunity. When you have the will to make a difference, you will make a difference.” I immediately wrote that down, I loved this guy. He asked me what the biggest difference between his community and mine back in the US. I told him that many Americans in my hometown have many things, but are very empty and sad. They do not always appreciate what matters in life. The people in Monte Coca, they may not have as many things, but they choose to be content with what they have, see the best in their lives, and love everybody. He looked so confused when I said that people act so busy that no one stops to say hello and talk on the street back at home. He said "Thats all anyone does around here!" I asked him if he ever thought about leaving Monte Coca for another town, city, or country. He said he wanted to study and get a degree, but feels “engaged” to his community. This is his home and he wants to help it become greater. He asked the others and they all nodded and smiled. It was my favorite moment of the day. I want to go back to Monte Coca, too. We dropped Tim and Felipe back at their house and headed home after dinner, we were silent for the entire 2 hours back- it was a lot to take in for one day. We leave Monday for another 5 day road trip- we will be touring factories, sweat shops, and farms around the country and interviewing the workers there.