Monday, October 22, 2007

Work Retreat

I went on a work retreat this weekend. It felt so good to go away from the house and away from Santiago to do something. My health held up pretty well. I just got lighted headed a couple of times after standing or walking a lot with out water. This was definitely the most activity I have had since I was sick. As frustrating as it is to get tired before I should I was pretty happy with how my body handled the weekend.

We worked with a Peace Core volunteer in a batey only about an hr from Santiago. First a batey, originally constructed by sugar cane companies to house its workers during the harvest. The workers were not strictly but usually Haitian, and other foreigners. This was work that Dominicans don’t do. Considered modern day slavery, the men work 6 or 7 days a week 12 hrs a day, get paid about $2 for every ton of cane they cut. Barracks were constructed to house one man in every room. Now there are whole families living in each. Over the year the immigrant Haitians didn’t return to Haiti and so little towns grew in these bateys. Some of them still have harvest but in the last decade the sugar companies have plummeted. The world doesn’t use it the same any more. There are artificial sugars, and the US has such a big low sugar diet campaign. The DR use to produce almost all of the sugar for Europe but now they get some from other places and use other types of sweeteners. So the harvest have been less frequent or none at all. These towns were/are not constructed for the permanent residence that it has and the racism towards Haitians has lead to the government or anyone for that matter thinking these people even deserve better living conditions. This is poverty. The one we went to doesn’t have running water. Recently got electricity although only sometimes, and they pay more for it than the average Dominican. There are all kinds of health issues.

The Peace Core guy is a health volunteer. We worked with him to construct latrines. %60 of the people go to the bathroom in the cane fields which causes all kind of health concerns, namely from the back tracking that occurs because there isn’t any real designated location. We made six latrines on Saturday. Not exactly easy work in the sun but once we figured out what we were doing it picked up and in the end of the day we were successful. And some of the little kids would try to help, holding wood and nails. We had a lot of help from several of the guys who lived in the batey. We just built the latrine casitas, a group of men there dug the holes, and will continue to finish putting it all together. I was pleased with the project that we worked on. I really think this is something that the people want and will use. If they don’t understand or care about the health concerns, it is so much more convenient and closer. I have become critical of service type work like this. It is a lot harder to give valuable aid than it seems. It takes a lot of work to decide what the people really need and then to go about doing it in a way that will actually benefit them. There is so much more that needs to be done than building a latrine. If they have it but have no sense of ownership, it won’t get taken care of. If they don’t understand the value of it, it won’t get used. We only worked on a very small portion of this project, the easy part.

The whole situation was a little odd at times and I still don’t really know what to think about it. We get there the first day and pile out of this guagua nicely dressed with cameras. Jonathan, the Peace Core guy, gives us a poverty tour of the batey. I am interested in learning how they live, but I feel like I am exploiting their living situation for my own learning. As much as I can benefit from the experience it doesn’t seem right. Why do I deserve to be on this side of the glass in the situation that I am in? It doesn’t make it any better that I am horrible at small talk, in any language. The whole weekend was more for our benefit of the experience than the actual good or help we were giving. Those guys could have made the latrines in probably a quarter of the time, but they were suppose to let us to some of the work. Mostly the service we provided was donating the materials for these latrines. So much of volunteering is just this. The people volunteering are looking to benefit from the work, and this gets in the way of what they can actually give. Would it have been better for use to just donate the materials? At what point do people have the right to benefit from the life experience? I don’t know the answer to that, ‘cause I think that something like this can be very eye opening and there are a lot of people in the US, in the world that should probably have an experience with poverty. I want to spend my life serving, and I am more and more interested in working in developing countries, but it’s awkward, and hard. It’s a lot to think about, much from just living here, but new things from this weekend. I am inspired, skeptical, curious, confused.

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