A Day in Shoes...

It’s hard for me to believe that my time here in the Dominican is halfway over. Each day passes by so quickly. There is a lot of work to be done each day, but it’s really pretty much a paradise, spending my days hanging out with people that give me a glimpse of what it is truly like to have nothing, to suffer, and how to depend upon God and his Grace to make it from one day to the next. I get to read, write, spend a lot of time thinking, and even learn a new language during the process. While I don’t want my time here end, I am also anxiously awaiting the end to near, because the end of my time hear means one glorious week in MT with my family, friends, and girlfriend, Cristen. After that, it’s on to my last year of school at Point Loma Nazarene.

It’s about 6:00am here right now. This is my time, I love it. The incessant reggatone and bachata music (a Dominican special that’s really pretty terrible) that blasts from front porches or distant bars is nowhere to be found. Waking up at about 5:30 each day, I seem to have the Dominican to myself for about an hour or so. I spend this time reading or writing over a strong cup of coffee made on a little Italian coffee pot. The only thing we have to cook or heat food with, is the propane stove, so I make little adjustments like heating my milk in a pot rather than the microwave to make my latte. Then I go outside to watch the sky start to light up from our front porch. It’s sort of looking out of a well-placed cell on Alcatraz, peering upon a lush green mountain through the cell-like bars that enclose every courtyard and window here. Nonetheless, it’s great, and is one of my favorite parts of the day.

I spend my mornings in the office, catching up on emails, perhaps writing a short grant proposal for an independent, woman entrepreneur, and writing up stories for Kiva. If you’re not familiar with Kiva.org I’d encourage you to check it out. It’s a website that allows anyone around the world to become involved in Microfinance by presenting the stories of individual entrepreneurs or small groups of people that form the microbanks. Lenders can then invest amounts as small as $25 in someone’s business in a developing country. Six months later, they get the loan back (without interest). It’s a pretty cool way to take money that would just normally sit in a checking account and use it to truly impact the lives of others, and pretty risk free (I think it’s at least a 99% payback rate). So that is one of my main responsibilities here. I will interview the leader of the small groups of woman that form together to receive their loans (usually of about $150-250), hearing her story, background, and the details of her business. Then, I write a short story, snap a photo, and post in Kiva for people around the world to see and invest in, providing one of the major funding sources for Esperanza.

My morning work is usually broken up by a trip to the bathroom pictured here. In typical fashion here, you would NEVER through your TP in the toilet... I’d recommend folding versus crumpling on this one. This toilet is special though because to flush, you scoop water from the bathtub and pour it into the toilet until you’ve cleared your goods. Every man has, instilled into his human nature, the instinct to put up the toilet seat before pouring liquids into the toilet. After thousands of years of being chastised by angry wives, it has basically become a sixth sense in us. Unfortunately, I work with an office full of women. And it still has not occurred to them that, while they may not need to put the seat up while taking care of business, they should do so when pouring buckets of water down the toilet. This lack of consideration has caught me off guard a number of times as I sit down, only to find my ass thoroughly soaked from the previous flushing. TP doesn’t make for a great material to dry off either. Oh well, live and learn. I now do a much more prudent inspection of the turf before going to play. The beauties of another culture.

Some mornings, I will go with one of the loan officers out into one of the surrounding communities. I always love this, sitting in a dimly lit house (usually just 1 room, maybe with an adjacent kitchen) with floors of dirt or cement and ceilings of corrugated tin. About 10 women sit in a circle with their small booklet holding the records of their payments with their biweekly payment (usually about 500 pesos or 15 dollars) in one hand and a young baby in the other. Breast feeding certainly isn’t a private activity. Actually, there is a pretty neat patience and unity that exists among the women here as they help one another to care for a baby, endure the crying, or maybe leave for a quick spanking of the kid outside the doorway. When each woman has 3-10 kids, it’s understood that the kids can’t be stuffed in the nearby daycare while they carry on with their “careers”. It takes a village to raise a child; this saying is pretty literal here. Each of the community meetings begins with a prayer and is often accompanied by a teaching on HIV awareness or perhaps just how to arrive to a meeting on time. As many of the poor communities that we work in are primarily Haitian, the woman all jabber amongst themselves in Creole. Only one of our loan officers speaks Creole, so we are usually left to depend upon the one or two women in the group that can speak Spanish as well to translate the dialogue. Even, though I don’t understand what they’re saying, I love to see the women laugh, joke, and argue together. After finishing one loan meeting we will hop on the back of a motorcycle and head off ten minutes to the next village. It’s a pretty liberating feeling to be hauling-ass along a dirt road, watching the green fields pass by, filled with chickens and donkeys, passing along row after row of small wooden/tin homes patched together, dodging stray dogs, and just praying that the motoconcho driver knows what he is doing. Well, that’s my typical morning. I’ll save the afternoon for another day.