2010 and still going....:)

Hello everyone! I’m alive and well in this new year—I’ve just had an event-filled couple of months, per usual. I hope everyone enjoyed Christmas and that this new year is off to a great start. The last couple of weeks leading up to Christmas were busy, busy. We had activities for the kids including a spaghetti (well, espagueti) supper and a Michael Jackson impersonator. I lost a little of my motivation to make lesson plans but I think I was just overexcited for my parents and friends to visit. My parents came on the 23rd in time for festivities. We celebrated in the batey on the 24th with a liturgy and my kids’ Christmas pageant. The pageant was pretty horrible but in the cutest way possible (reading lines taped to a candle, and having to turn the candle to read it, the poor inn-keeper going out onto the stage after Mary and Joseph had skipped his part all together, etc.). The kids were happy and they looked adorable. Check out the pictures at: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2487710&id=920832&l=161ceae0cc. Then we had dinner with the neighbors and enjoyed the sounds of Los Alcarrizos all night long. On Christmas we went to mass with the sisters in the oldest church in the Americas (oooh). From there it was off to the beach. We did nothing for four days but it was great! I was going non-stop for most of my time here that I didn’t realize how exhausted I was. I literally collapsed the first day of vacation—I barely even ate (which you all know is pretty serious for me!) We lounged on beautiful beaches. The water was warm and crystal clear—it was perfect! Then we went into the city for some more relaxation and to ring in the new year. Leah and Katie came into the city to celebrate with us, and we almost missed midnight! We got back to the hotel after dinner and realized it was 11:53 so we ran up to the room to toast and see the (short-lived) fireworks. On the 2nd Leah and my friends Mary and Monica came in and my parents left. Minus some pretty lousy rain, we had a great time relaxing on the beach, catching up on lost time, and showing them around the batey. Now I’m feeling refreshed and excited to go back to work. The following is WAY too long so I figured I’d put up a warning beforehand—but I wrote it before break and I never got a chance to post it!


FRIENDS

One of the women I had planned on teaching, Melania, fell really ill for a while, so I had stopped teaching her. I had told you a little of her story (pregnancy, attempted abortion, “husband” in jail) but other people had all told me this—I hadn’t heard it from her. Then two weeks ago Melania said she was feeling much better and ready to start classes again. She had moved to a house on the other side of the street, and when I asked her why, she launched into a nearly two hour explanation of her relationship with her (now former) husband and how a lot of things had come to be. She told me of how he would beat her, how he had several affairs (once with a ten year old child, which, although I can’t look at it this way, was consensual), how she had gone to jail for him and had spent her savings countless times to bribe officials so they would send him to a better jail.

The most heart-breaking thing was listening to her talk about her children. Evelyn (10 years) has been raised by a friend living up the hill with a much better financial situation—as Melania describes it: “She drinks juice every day!” Once on a walk up the hill, she showed me Evelyn playing outside through the trees. We watched her for a couple of seconds and when I asked if she wanted to say hi she he said, “I don’t like her to see me watching her.” She told me how when her other children (now 5, 3, and 1) were younger everyone would comment on how beautiful and well taken care of they looked—new clothes, hair done nicely. It seems easy to say that nice clothes don’t matter as long as the children have food and are taken care of. But to hear a mother talk about all of the things that she wanted for her children that she couldn’t give was heart-breaking. She talked about how she didn’t love this baby to come (5 months pregnant) and didn’t want him to come into a home without love.

But even with all of the depression she’s been through, she seems hopeful. After attempts at her and the baby’s life, she’s thinking about baby names and expressed fear that her baby would be born with a bad eye because her husband had given her a black eye during the pregnancy (I assured her that wouldn’t affect the baby’s eye---it was equally hard to convince her that beer would affect the baby, even with her assuring me that it was fine because she would pee the beer out—what??). She told me how she realized that she used to beat her children because her husband beat her, and how she wasn’t going to do that anymore (although, she noted, she still has to beat them so they behave, but now it isn’t just in reaction to her husband beating her—one battle at a time). She talked about how she was close to getting documentation (she is not legal even though she was born here and has never been to Haiti), and about realistic goals to get better jobs and eventually get a passport to find work elsewhere. It was so wonderful to listen to the hope in her voice. She’s only twenty-five. She’s experienced so much but she still has a lot of time to make a better life for herself and her children. And she is really smart. This short time with her made me think a lot about how important it is to empower the women in situations like that of the batey. She is smart and wants to do the right thing, but has very little means to do it.

Since then we have been to visit her sister, Elizabeth, who I also teach, in a pica pollo (fried-chicken place) where she just started (and stopped!) working. It’s about a 15 minute ride from the batey, and it was really nice (but weird!) to leave the batey with her and not spend time “in class” ( I’ve done very little teaching, but I think the conversations we have are a lot more helpful to the both of us at this point). We sat and ate and talked. Elizabeth was working more than twelve-hour shifts with no days off. The work didn’t seem strenuous, but she was constantly serving or washing dishes, and the pay wasn’t making it worth her while. She doesn’t have other prospects for work at this time, but thankfully she’s in a situation where she can afford to turn down this degree of working conditions. She is in a much more stable situation than Melania, as I have mentioned before.

I remember being surprised during orientation when a former volunteer described many of the women in the batey as her friends. I don’t know why exactly—I had dreamt of being close to the people in the batey. But I think it was my instinct to think of true friends as standing on equal footing or being at a similar station in life. Thankfully, and for the first time, I’m beginning to make REAL friends with people in a completely different situation (not just with a different background who are at the same point in life as me). It feels a lot more normal than one might think. I anticipate a little trickiness as Elizabeth wants to go places with me (the salon, the club), and I know Melania is in no financial position to do that kind of stuff with me. But I’ll keep you posted .

WEDDING

So, I could go on and on about the wedding, but there is one thing everyone should know.
We were never told what time to get to the reception hall. The invitation said six, but the bride’s sister told us that we could get there around 6:30. We left the house at around 6:40 and we passed their (the bride’s family’s) house and noticed that nobody in the family (including the maid of honor) was even dressed for the wedding. So I breathed a little easier after worrying about being “late.” We got to the hall and waited until EIGHT o’clock to start the wedding. Most of the guests didn’t arrive until 7/7:30, plus we waited for a microphone that never came. Which was a shame because the music from the colmado outside was blasting and made it hard to hear (we couldn’t believe they didn’t talk to them ahead of time about not playing music—well, not so hard to believe I guess—this country is so loud). Aah, what a wedding.