hi

My name is Phillip. I am 24, went to the University of Texas, came here more or less from California, and will be here in the DR until mid-September. I’m here to help build the school and to help with the groups and blog a bunch.

I’ve recently learned that:

-- Walking about town without a shirt is considered an affront to the Dominican police.
-- Dominican wine is terrible.
-- My Spanish is terrible.
-- I actually, quite literally, get seasick from surfing. It’s terrible.

But really, my Spanish is hideous. I go to Tamarindo to help build the school almost every day, which is good because it takes me a week to finish a conversation with anyone. I took between ten and 13 semesters of Spanish between high school and college, and to me it’s no more discernible than Turkish. It's maddening and humbling and hilarious all at the same time.

My favorite things about the DR are:

-- The cows. The Mak house is in an upper-class neighborhood in Puerto Plata, where the houses are huge and beautiful and gated with views of La Isabela to the south and the Atlantic Ocean to the north. The mayor lives nearby. Several of the streets are not paved, there are Haitian squatters in at least three houses within spying distance, the next door neighbor takes bucket baths in the backyard, and cows roam freely. Cows! Who owns them? Can I have one?

-- Taking public (beat up guaguas [vans] that take us to and fro for cheap). We pile in. Twenty or 25 more pile in. Some with geese or chickens or lizards pile in. One driver prays out loud with his eyes closed each time he pulls back on the road. It’s hot and sticky and large men inevitably end up on my lap — and it’s the epitome of Dominican culture. Hot and humid and sweating shoulder-to-shoulder — we’re all in this together.

-- Chickens. I want to kick one. It’s wrong, I suppose, but they’re the perfect height — like a teed up football. It might mean some family might not be able to eat for a month, but I can’t make any promises. I also hear the mayor of Chichigua has some for sale – some gallitos (roosters) muy furioso y peligroso! My cockfighting dreams may yet come true.



-- That this place is wonderfully, terribly, wildly stimulating. En serio, can you believe this place? It’s so unpretentious, so perfectly unkept, so delightfully disordered. So raw, so spoiled, so dynamically beautiful. It’s so impractical yet so resourceful. It’s so hopeless, so helpless, so humbling -- so human. Isn't the heartbreak just fantastic? There’s so many problems to solve, so much room for solution and so much impossibility. Too much impossibility -- the crushing weight of which hangs in the salted air. There’s so much of nothing to do at so many perfect beaches.

Can you believe this place? It’s enlivening.

I hopped into a guagua my first morning here and the world exploded into action. Cars drive on the wrong side of the road, and no one gets in wrecks. There’s trash everywhere and all I see is the mountains. Chickens cross the road. Big dead pigs get strapped on motos. There are people everywhere on donkeys. Donkeys! There are no men on donkeys in Texas, and that is a problem.

The plumbing can’t handle toilet paper (it goes in a trashcan). We don’t refrigerate our eggs (found one with a feather). Gas is almost $5 a gallon. Lunch stops turn into dance clubs at night, and you can do laundry and wash a car at the same place with a swimming pool. The drive-by fruit man with a loudspeaker sounds like he wants to start a revolution. There are cows in the neighborhood. Why is this?

Why is this country so left behind, yet so for ahead of Haiti on its immediate left? Why is Chiquito so left behind? Why is Papito so pensive? Why is Dominic so forgotten? How are kids like Ruben so smart yet so already stuck?

Why is naturalized citizenship impossible for the children of Haitian immigrants? Why aren’t the sugar companies going to harvest the cane this year? Why is homelessness so hidden here — so much less obvious than that in Austin or San Francisco? Do they realize that people live like the Haitians do? How do people keep track of their chickens? When will I learn Spanish? What do you do when a mother of six kids gets HIV? Why does this just one of a 1,000 similarly desperate places around the world? Why are the human elements of pride and selfishness and greed the same in each? Why isn’t Americanization the answer? What do we do? How do the Haitians sing Merci over and over and over in their comfort-less church? Why do I feel it too? Who created these mountains but forgot about jobs for the poor? Does this poverty even matter in war-torn Africa? Is this -- this place, these problems, this time for me -- real? When do I stop asking questions and just serve?

I’ve been here two weeks, and already there’s a thousand of them.

Can you believe this place? It’s exhausting.

But exhausting in all the right ways. It’s why we all came. Here, then, is a beautiful baby we call “Toad”: