Que paisito

No he llegado a Africa. Unfortunately life intervened. Pero si he llegado a un pequeno rincon de Africa llamado la Republica Dominicana. Now, I have not been to all of the black countries of the world (I wish I could, but there is no way I can get that much more money from Harvard) but I can say with Harvardian arrogance, that there is no greater group of self-hating black people on the planet than Dominicans.

I arrived in Santiago last Tuesday. I remember when coming to the Dominican Republic was an event. We would arrive late at night and there would be a bus full of relatives to pick us up. For days afterward my sisters and I would sit in our grandmother's living room and our relatives would simply stare at us, as if they couldn't believe that we really existed. They would monitor our every move and follow us around the house. I guess now with (corporate-led) globalization the world really has gotten smaller. This time around a visit here felt damn near routine. My one cousin picked me up (no entourage this time) and we drove the fifteen minutes to my grandmother's house. Once there every one acted like they had seen me a week or two ago instead of almost two years ago. It was nice, but since I had been gearing myself up for awkward stares and questions it was a slightly disconcerting.

Moca seemingly never changes. Everyone complains about how terrible the economic situation is. Everyone is fatter. Everyone is working the same jobs as before. The pace of life remains SLOW. When I went to get a shape-up on Thursday, there was no one in the barber shop. The barber was actually next door having a beer. Que pueblecito!

After three night and two days in Moca, I was ready to leave. It´s a comfortable existence, reading for several hours a day, getting stuffed with food, talking with the my grandmother and aunts and hearing them complain all day about how women nowadays are just no good and are willing to leave with their boyfriends without a chaperone (of course, they never mention how the men have never been held to the same moral standard, the dog-like behavior is simply expected here) and sleeping a lot. Now that "development" has allowed for greater material wealth more people in my family have inverters securing the electricity supply and more of them have running water and toilets. Still if I stayed I would never do anything more exciting than a trip to the local internet cafe so I had to go.

Friday morning I took of for Santo Domingo. I was glad to see that the vans that took me from Moca to Santo Domingo in 2005 have been replaced by nice, Greyhound-style buses. The bus ride was comfortable and cheap ($4, beat that Chinatown bus!) but of course they had to turn the air-conditioning up to the point where all the passengers where shivering in their T-shirts. Though I must admit, that I do miss the vans that used to make the trip before. Riding in those was always an adventure. There was no schedule, the bus would leave only when filled, and they meant filled. My favorite part was that after cramming in with at least twenty passengers into a 12-passenger van, the driver would still stop to pick people off the side of the highway. I could never imagine a bus driver picking people off I-95 between NYC and DC.

When the bus arrived to Santo Domingo I immediately remembered the controlled chaos (paradox or oxymoron?) that is a Third World (don´t hate on the word, I still think it has much relevance and is better than all of the other euphemisms, like "developing" which imply that shit is actually getting better and that the measure of humanity should be the incredibly-fucked up United States of America, and what else should we say "dirt-poor country," maybe "peripheral"?) metropolis. No one obeys traffic laws and simple rules like lanes and redlights simply aren´t followed here.

My cab ride to Dave Bayne´s place in El Portal was a case in point. My cabdriver backed up into traffic at least three times when he learned that he couldn´t turn left a couple of times because of construction for the Santo Domingo subway. He cut several people off and cursed out at least three other drivers in the course of 45 minutes. Then of course near the university (UASD) he saw one of his girlfriends and gave her a ride supposedly in the same direction as I was going. Then to top it all of, he ripped me off on the price. I knew it was too much, and when I protested he said that the price of gas was really expensive and the economic situation was rough. I gave him the money anyway. Que paisito!