Matt and I returned from a 16 day vacation in Nueva Yol this Saturday, and in a single epic day of traveling, managed to get from the very appropriately named JFK airport in NYC to our site, which in my opinion is the furthest place possible from Santo Domingo in the country, in a mere 14-and some hours.

Our trip home was a perfect reminder of many of the reasons why I simultaneously love this country yet am often extremely frustrated with its inherent dysfunctionality (it is, after all, the developing world). We blazed through customs without so much as a by-your-leave and arrived very cheaply thanks to a pre-arranged ride with a friend of a friend (technically against the rules since he isn’t a licensed airport taxi) in downtown Santo Domingo with enough time to hit up the office before catching the last bus out to our site. Utter lack of concern about rules and regulations and the awesomely ubiquitous Dominican informal economy totally working for me here.
We get to the bus station and, of course, the last bus that day to our far, far side of the country is completely sold out. No other bus goes anywhere close that day, and the other bus company’s last guaguas to the region have already departed. Lack of sufficient public transport, not to mention decent roads to our site, kind of getting me down here. Fortunately, now that I have lived in this country for 10 months, I know that the rules really don’t apply quite as strictly as a gringo Americano would normally think, so I put on my desperate and irascible gringa act and beg the driver and his helper to let us on the bus, telling them how our campo is so far and they are our only option, etc etc. It turns out the driver lives in the last stop on the line (our stop), as does his female helper, they know all about where we live (our town has a reputation in the region as being a huge pain in the culo to get to) and after some finagling they agree to sell us standing room seats despite the bus company’s policy against this (they really try and keep up appearances of NOT being like the other, more ghetto bus company, Transporte del Cibao, where you can take your goat on the bus if you want and there is always, ALWAYS room for one more).

Bueno. So here we are, standing on the bus, thinking that we are going to spend the next 7 hours parado but hey at least we are going to get home that night. Two men in the back row who are engaged in rapidly emptying a bottle of scotch wave us over (excellent, we thought.. we have to stand here AND talk to these borrachos the whole time), but no, they just want to give us their seats because they say we look tired. At the beginning of my service I would have thought that this was a clear attempt to try and rob us once we fell asleep, but now that I know how baggage is stowed on these buses (there is no way of telling whose is whose) I know that these guys are actually just being nice (contrary to popular belief, not everyone in a country poorer than America is a ladron), and we got to catch up on some sleep.

We get to our stop and lo and behold, our other pre-arranged ride is there, proving once again that in this country you really can rely much more on personal relationships than so-called professionals. This is extremely frustrating when you are new in the country, or trying to work in a new region or with folks or organizations you are interacting with for the first time, but once you get the hang of it, doing business informally or personally can be a lot of fun.. maybe even charming.
In other news, our cat made it out of our absence very much alive and well thanks to the efforts of our saint of a landlady and neighbor, Chila. Sure, most of the other work we left with people was lost or forgotten (I mean what do you expect, it was Christmas), but the one thing I really cared about; my cat, made it through fine.

Crunchy numbers

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2010. That’s about 6 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 35 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 95 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 55mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was February 3rd with 118 views. The most popular post that day was Pre-Staging Mania.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were peacecorpsjournals.com, facebook.com, mlsugie.wordpress.com, mail.yahoo.com, and refworks.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for odisea dominicana, peace corps volunteer in elias pina dominican republic, everythinghaitian, avenida bolivar gazcue santo domingo zip code, and neapolitan women.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Pre-Staging Mania February 2010
3 comments

2

About January 2010
2 comments

3

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait January 2010
3 comments

4

On the Ethics of “Doing Good” and the Occasional Merits of Ignorance November 2010
3 comments

5

La Vida Surrealista November 2010
2 comments

Yesterday Matt and I were on our way down from giving a workshop on Cholera to the small community in which we work but do not live. It had been a rough morning with our farmers’ group in our primary (residential) village; having had Peace Corps volunteers on and off since the 1960s has instilled in some community leaders a sense of entitlement that is unfortunately enmeshed with the extreme resistance to change. Basically, these particular individuals feel that we are obliged to make them our #1 priority and do whatever they ask of us, but then when we offer our advice, it is often promptly forgotten or completely rejected if it involves alteration of their ingrained behavior. Case in point; we were solicited by this particular group to consult on sustainable agriculture practices. One of the easiest practices to implement (that is also required by the particular grant that funds our reforestation project) is making dead barriers in the field to prevent erosion using the organic matter that you cut down to clear land for planting. These barriers need to be correctly spaced to function, and Matt and I know where they need to go. The group knows that we know this… in fact most of the men in the group knew how to do this long before we got here because the Peace Corps Volunteers that have been here since the organization started working in this country all taught them the same thing.. but lo and behold some of the people in the group still do it incorrectly (or don’t do it at all), even when we are standing there offering to help them move or construct the barrier, simply because I guess they feel it is too much work to vale la pena (be worth it).

It isn’t always a complete disaster with this group.. although sometimes the slowness to change or the way in which your advice gets twisted around and backfires makes you want to tear your hair out.. For example, after talking to the group about how they need to respect the opinions and contributions of women, the group has always insisted on including females on the various committees they form (and oh, do they LOVE their committees. This group of 23 people has at least 4 different committees for various functions). Progress? Definitely… but instead of selecting one of the female Dominican members of the group for these positions of relative “power”, they always insist that I do it, and question my commitment to help them when I suggest that a Dominican should serve in my place. White privilege rears its ugly head again… this is definitely not the kind of female empowerment I was trying to foster during my service. *sigh*

Anyways, we had spent all morning enduring another one of these endless meetings during which we ask ourselves what the hell we are doing here, so we were really hoping that our work with the Mother’s Club in our other town would reaffirm our faith in the value of development work, which it generally tends to do.

Although chaotic como siempre, the cholera talk was a resounding success (we think.. we’ll see how much people remember if G-d forbid cholera enters the region). Afterwards we had a half-hour meeting with our project partner from that town in which we actually managed to discuss and resolve everything we came to talk about (new DR record!). Our mood was finally starting to lift when a German volunteer we know who actually lives in this particular village began recounting to us the latest in campo gossip… I know that every village, especially the small ones, have dark secrets or a seedy underbelly of some kind. I know that spousal abuse, infidelity and the visiting of prostitutes are endemic in this society.. but I had lulled myself into thinking that this one particular village was “different” from the rest of the DR in this aspect.. but no, apparently the men of this village spend an exorbitant percentage of their income on hookers and booze and come home drunk and smelling like other women and demand sex from their campo wives, just like many of their compatriots.

Unlike most Peace Corps Volunteers, Matthew and I aren’t told the majority of gossip in either of our villages. Whereas most volunteers could fill volumes with the insidious goings on of their towns, we live a life with blinders on in this regard. I am not entirely sure why this is.. we are as well integrated as we can be into our community, and people respect us.. perhaps too much. While other volunteer’s kids at conferences seem to treat them as equals, mine call me “Señora” (ma’am) without my asking and do not share with me the difficulties of their lives like my kids did back when I worked for AmeriCorps. I’ll have to check in with the other married PCVs but I think that our status as a couple with a stable, respectful relationship in which housework is shared and the husband doesn’t have another woman on the side is well.. off-putting to many people. I don’t know if they think we are going to judge them or what.. but it certainly does mean that we don’t get enlightened about where the local whorehouses are.

I am ok with this…. I am happy to live in relative ignorance about who has extra families on the side and who wastes all of their money gambling when they have five kids because it makes my job a hell of a lot easier to do. The nature of my work does not allow me to pick and choose who to help on an individual level. I work through already established community organizations, and these inevitable include people whose character I find abominable. It does not make it any easier to walk five miles in the blazing sun to sit in a meeting that takes two hours to do what should only take fifteen minutes when you know the people it benefits have some unforgivable character flaws.

My feelings about this revelation reminded me of a particular session of Hebrew school I attended over eleven years ago.. the only one that sticks in my mind after all of this time. During this particular class we learned.. if I remember correctly.. about the Jewish ethical hierarchy. All good deeds, or mitzvahs as they are called in Hebrew, are not created equal. The relative “goodness” of each mitzvah changes depending on your motivation for doing the deed and who it is done for. Although I can’t remember the entirety of this stairway of ethics (Stairway to Heaven? *badum tschhh*) I do recall that the most ethical actions.. the best deeds were those that you did not knowing who would benefit from them. This means that, according to this particular hierarchy, (which I don’t even know is the actual Jewish hierarchy of ethics.. again people this was over 11 years ago and I didn’t exactly study under Maimonides) it is better to do a good deed knowing full well that it could go to aid someone who you dislike or disagree with on an ethical level than to do an act and be guaranteed that its beneficiary met your standards of a decent human being.

I am now wondering if maybe there is an even higher rung on this ladder… to do good deeds that are guaranteed to benefit those you find morally reprehensible. If you believe in the ennobling qualities of spiritual suffering, this would certainly fit the bill; although to do something that you know will make you suffer in order for you to benefit in some way metaphysically through this anguish (i.e. doing penance) would make it a “less ethical” act because you would have ulterior motives for your actions… but I digress.

The point is that everyone who makes it through their two (or more) years of service needs to have some kinds of tools to deal with the fact that they will be working to benefit people they know they don’t like. If you morally disagree with working to better the lives of unethical people, then any kind of development work is definitely not for you, much less in a different culture than your own where you are bound to find many ingrained and accepted practices abhorrent. Readers, correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that most major western philosophies include some sort of justification for aiding the reproachable along with the “deserving”. All of us who do this kind of work have committed ourselves to this, but having high-minded ethics and actually living by them 100% of the time are two completely different things… which is why in my darker moments… no make that the vast majority of the time… I prefer to remain in blissful ignorance of the transgressions of the people I am trying to help.

Matt and I were finally released back into the wild as of Sunday the 7th, not a moment too soon as we were starting to feel the adverse affects of hotel buffet food and the $200 peso vouchers for the hotel casino only go so far to provide an evening’s entertainment. I did manage to win 20% of my monthly salary (this isn’t that impressive, as I earn very little… in pesos.. whose value continues to slip against the dollar), however I spent the majority of that on sparkly taupe pants, jeggings (glorified denim pantyhose) and a lace-front shirt cut to my navel in order to better integrate with Dominican society. This is what happens when you let campesina volunteers out into the big city.. we make it rain like hurricane season because we know when we are stuck back in our campo without cash for transportation we won’t be spending a thing.

Not that we don’t live pretty rica by campo standards on occasion… the afternoon we were consolidated Matt made baccalao (salt cod) risotto using all ingredient available at your local rural colmado, excepting the canned clams that we bought in the big city.

In other breaking campo news, our village was mostly spared the brunt of Tomas’ force, the only major casualty (aside from people losing a lot of banana, plantain, and rice crops due to high winds) being the electrical tower for our “street.” In a blinding show of Dominican efficiency, the people who came with a crane to fix the pole (who amazingly arrived the SAME DAY as the tower was knocked down) could not, for whatever reason, reconnect the electricity, so everyone had to wait another day for a separate team to come to reconnect the power, which the community ended up doing anyway. The great thing about countries where nothing works is that everyone, by necessity, develops a great mechanical aptitude so if the officials who are supposed to take care of the utilities don’t pull through, people can generally make things happen on their own.

Speaking of cash-money and self sufficiency, at the beginning of our service, Matt and I taught all the regional Clubes de Madres how to make Mistolin, the local preferred, heavily perfumed all-purpose cleaner (for the rest of you hispanohablantes, this is the Dominican version of Fabuloso). As you had to go all the way to Santiago to get the ingredients to make the cleaner, it took a while for the project to actually get off the ground, but finally this week one of our clubs managed to get all of the ingredients and we had a fabulous time this Tuesday evening playing with dye and caustic chemicals and we made our first batch.

So, as many of you probably know, hurricane/tropical storm Tomas (Thomas?) has all us region 3 volunteers holed up in an extremely nice (by PCV standards.. meaning it has hot water and I can eat in bed without it turning into a hive in five minutes) hotel in the middle of the country to wait out the storm. So far we’ve had scattered showers with mostly sunny skies, so it’s been an exercise in patience and self control as we try to amuse ourselves without spending all of our meager monthly salary. I’ve been doing pretty badly so far.. I purchased a pair of jeggings and sparkly taupe pants and a lace-front shirt cut down to my navel so that I can fit in better in my campo. No, I am not being facetious, that’s really how people dress here and the Peace Corps packing guidelines did NOT make that very evident, so I came with all the wrong clothing and am gradually making up for it using the Peace Corps office’s free box and money I should be saving for something better like food.

At any rate, this week has been an excellent example of how bizarre a PCV’s live truly can be, particularly here in the Caribbean or any other region where a large part of the economy relies on tourism. Most of the time, I live in a pink shack with no plumbing where I amuse myself with the antics of subtropical insect species:

Yes, that butterfly is feeding on one of Matthew’s sweaty t-shirts… and that other bug has taken quite an interest in the Persian empire.

I also fill my steadily dwindling campo free-time by trying to grow exotic chinese vegetables where they don’t belong, namely in holes in my patio filled with coffee grounds. The long beans worked out pretty well:

For the last few days, however, we’ve been residing in an air conditioned tourist-friendly palace where we have nothing else to do than watch cable tv, make sure we get to the buffet on time, and finish up on those grant applications if we are feeling really diligent. All of these security measures seem positively absurd right now given our current weather, but I suppose these things can be unpredictable and with the added threat of cholera the Peace Corps really doesn’t want to mess around. Of course this comes just as things are really picking up steam in terms of projects for me and Matthew… in fact we were minutes from leaving our house to hike up to our other site to give a cholera prevention lecture when a moto pulled up with an emergency message from Peace Corps to get the heck out of our site and into our consolidation point (we have no cellphone service at site so if the PC wants to get in contact with us, they have to send an actual human being. This makes me feel terribly important). No, natural disasters never are convenient, but I am glad to get the chance to finally get to know other volunteers out of my training class. One of the volunteers who just swore in had the genius foresight to grab his Settlers of Catan set on his way out the door, so Matt and I have added this fabulous game to our long list of nerdy past times. I know where at least $35 of my readjustment stipend is going!

We just had our regional Brigada Verde conference and although it was no Slow Foods tour, a delicious and educational time was had by all.

This year’s conference took place at the same center run by Plan Sierra (a Dominican environmental NGO) at which I had my 3-month in-service training high up in the mountains, smack in the middle of the country. Fun fact: the nearest major pueblo to the center, San Jose de las Matas, receives the most remesas (money sent to this country by Dominicans living and working in the United States) of anywhere in the Dominican Republic. All of this extra cash exhibits itself in architecture that has an eerie similarity to much of that found in certain parts of Long Island (i.e. lots of columns with fake gold leaf, lawn art, “fancy” metal grates over everything… you know what I mean, Strong Islanders.

Doing youth-related work here in the Dominican Republic is incredibly different from and much, much easier than in the United States. Perhaps it’s that the kids we work with here aren’t all automatically from terrible backgrounds and are in our programs either for therapeutic reasons or to keep them off the streets. It could also be that the complete lack of litigiousness in Dominican culture allows us to have a lot more fun without worrying about getting sued by someone’s parents. However, more than anything I feel that the poor quality of the Dominican school system actually (and tragically) works to our advantage. Dominican kids go to school at best a few hours of the day, most of which are filled by the teachers just trying to keep the kids under control. For volunteers, this means that any kind of educational activity we try and do with youth is met with their rapt attention. I am constantly surprised by how enthusiastic my Brigada Verde is to simply go around the room and read to each other out of our handbook. I mean, can you imagine a group of American adolescents fighting over who gets to read more passages about global warming on a Saturday night? At the end of our conference, we were all surprised to hear that the only negative criticism our youth had is that they wanted MORE lectures.

As part of our “sustainability” themed conference, we took a tour of an organic coffee farm named KARMOA Cafe run by a Danish guy and his Dominican wife. Although the fact that this farm is foreign-owned and that it employs mostly Haitian labor is a sobering reminder of the Dominican Republic’s constant struggle with truly domestic economic development, it was great for the youth to see that it is possible to run an incredibly successful not only organic, but also contamination-free farm. This operation makes all of its fertilizer with lombriculture utilizing the coffee pulp to feed the worms. It also roasts the coffee and does all the on-site cooking with biofuel made from waste from coffee processing and, get this, excrement from the workers who live at the farm. Talk about a zero-waste operation. As part of the tour we feasted on delicious pastries and drank ridiculous amounts of gourmet coffee, and although it may seem like a terrible idea to give 28 adolescents as much coffee as they can drink, that kind of thing is pretty par for the course here. Speaking of which, at my nutrition class last week I saw a woman give her baby hot coffee, which it drank with gusto.

Anyways, after the tour it was back to Peace Corps Reality with a vengeance, as we had a 2 hour ride in the back of a pickup truck on one of the worst roads I’ve had the privilege of using, in a torrential rainstorm. Luckily the kids were in an enclosed guagua (minibus), so spirits remained high despite the fact that one girl had a sudden onset of appendicitis and had to be rushed to the hospital (yes, she’s fine, and she also has a brother living in Babylon, Long Island so medical expenses shouldn’t be too much of an issue either). Just your average weekend in Peace Corps DR Environmental Sector, folks!

Here are some photos from the weekend:

Giving an AIDS charla with Claire (why are we giving a lecture on AIDS at an environmental conference? Because it was funded by a PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) grant.. that’s why!). In case you can’t see it, the slide reads: Sangre, Semen, Secreciones Vaginales y Leche Materna. Now you know the four bodily fluids that transmit AIDS… in Spanish!

Fun with worm ranching

Recycled art. The girl on the far left is from my community, and she received a special award for leadership during the conference. Que orgullo yo tengo!!

Turns our my kid Chulito (his nickname) is a great artist.

There can never be enough arts and crafts time.

Almost forgot. My kids gave their first in-school charla last week. They planned, organized, and presented the whole thing themselves, I just provided the materials and used my “important foreigner” status to get the teacher to allow us to take class time.

System for making liquid fertilizer from coffee pulp

Macadamia nuts! My fellow fronterista (border-land resident like myself) Andrea making the weird face.

Guess which kid has the most relatives who live pa’lla (in America)? Yep, you are correct, the one in front.

Also, our garden is finally starting to produce something other than lettuce. It looks like all that backbreaking labor trying to turn a kitchen floor into an organic garden is actually going to pay off with veggies that I can eat raw without soaking them in bleach first.

First cucumber. Interestingly this is one of the plants whose stem broke during a hard rainfall, yet managed to heal and keep growing and now looks like it is going to be our best-producing vine. I had heard that gently breaking a tomato plant will cause it to regrow stronger and produce more, but never had the nerve to try that myself.. so who knows, maybe it works the same way with cucumbers:

Okra plants in bloom

As inspired by my tech-savvy colleagues in the IT sector, Odisea Dominicana is now available on facebook. Now there is no escaping our pithy musings on the surreal life in Peace Corps, Staten Island regardless of your social networking platform.

The High Holidays are coming up and I want to go to shul. This is not a good sign.

The only other occasion on which I felt the need to sit quietly in a pew in order to feel more Jewish was my freshman year of college… probably the last time I felt anywhere near as culturally disconnected from my surroundings (and utterly, helplessly surrounded by goys – I was the only Jew in my dorm) as I do now. I made the mistake of going for Yom Kippur services and suffered through the utter misery and stultifying boredom that is a Conservative (as in the sect of Judaism, not the political flavor) Rabbi on the Day of Atonement.

I don’t know exactly what brought this on.. Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur were never big holidays for my family. We put much more emphasis on what is essentially the Jewish Thanksgiving; Passover (typical, as gluttony is our foremost and favorite sin). Probably some combination of missing my family, being the only Jew west of Puerto Plata, and recently having been told by a respected member of the community I consider my friend that Jews are less advanced because we didn’t accept the New Testament (at least he didn’t try and tell me that my people killed Jesus, as happened to a fellow Heeb volunteer).

This is not to say that religion is a constant source of strife for me here. I live in an easygoing Catholic community whose only religious request of me and Matthew so far is that we help find money to fix the pews in church (apparently the past volunteer had a devoutly Catholic family back home in the states that was a source of money for our local chapel. I think I will try and hit up the board of the Catholic hospital on which my abuelo serves). I could have it much worse… a friend of ours here was inadvertently converted from Catholicism to Evangelical Christianity in one of those intensely creepy laying-on-of-hands ceremonies, completely against her will I might add. She was only trying to get out more and socialize with her community, but apparently once you set foot inside a prayer meeting, no ceases to mean no. The best part about her story, if there can be anything good about a forced conversion, is that during all the Gloria-a-Deus-ing two dogs started humping each other in the middle of the room. Ah the Dominican Republic, a delicious batida of the sacred and profane.

The old cliché that you never appreciate what you have until its gone is nowhere more true than in the life of an outsider… an extranjera. I am unhappy because I can’t be bored to tears in a room full of old Jews once a year, and my friend is upset because even in a country in which she is the majority religion, people can use linguistic and cultural barriers to trick her into having something taken, if in name only, from her.

I do not want to live in a majority Jewish society. You don’t see me hankering for the next plane to Israel or Crown Heights. I have realized that I can’t happily make my home in a community with any kind of overwhelming homogeneity, even if the dominant culture is my own.

Matt, Claire, and I have had the great privilege to get to know an amazing man named Leocardio out here in the boondocks. Leocardio is an incredible font of the traditional knowledge that is quickly being lost in 21st century Hispaniola, where the younger generation is fleeing the campo in search of better economic opportunities and have little interest in the crafts of their ancestors, especially when those crafts are Haitian in origin.

About a month after Matt and I came to our site, Leocardio presented us with a gift of an incredible bamboo basket. We’ve been pestering him since then to teach us how to make one, and finally this afternoon we all managed to get together for a workshop with the master. The fact that we had all been awaiting this event with great anticipation all week should give you an idea of the pace of life here.

I’ll let the photos speak for themselves, since words can’t do justice to the fun of basket weaving. I have no idea if I would have found this so enjoyable back in my American life, but I did used to flint knap for recreation on occasion so… I think my standards for excitement have always been rather prehistoric.

Judy (one of the socios in our grupo) works on a nearly completed basket.

Leocardio’s daughter and grandson.

The gentleman across the “street” kept throwing his chicken feed corn at passing motorcycles. I love the design of his house. Matt and I adapted it to make our compost bin.

And what afternoon on la frontera is complete without freshly squeezed cane juice? The guys running the press told me they use these contraptions in Haiti to grind everything.. coffee, chocolate, you name it. The Haitian dudes make it seem easy, but dang that thing is a workout. All us gringos tried it much to the amusement of the Hispaniolans. Using one of these is called “bajo culo” en español, which translates roughly as gettin’ your booty down. And as we volunteers quien saben always like to say.. todo es mejor lo que fue hecho con amor….. y culo.

Sometimes I forget that part of doing development work in the Dominican Republic is having your and your colleagues’ opinions and offers of assistance rejected solely because you are female.

Today the president of the farmer’s association with which we work most closely announced during our weekly meeting that he wanted Matthew to oversee the group’s quality control committee (or, more hilariously grandiose in Spanish, “Comité de Vigilancia”), and explicitly stated that he wanted neither me nor Claire (the third volunteer that works with this group) to give any input whatsoever. Despite working alongside this group’s farmers for months, giving technical lectures, and translating their United Nations grant contract into language they can understand, Claire and I are still less capable than my husband of telling someone how to plant a tree. It would be one thing if we were working in a culture that had some kind of deep seated belief that allowing women in the field would cause irreparable harm to the crops, but no… our dear Presidente is more than happy for Claire and me to break our backs laboring in the tree nursery, but god forbid we take it upon ourselves to do the job we were solicited for and give advice.

Back in the United States, I never encountered sexism in my professional life, probably because I worked in a female dominated field. My Peace Corps recruiter warned me that if I worked in a Latin American country, I would likely have my opinions either given less value than those of my husband’s, if not completely discounted. I suppose I was lulled into a false sense of security (and success) during my first six months here because I experienced (to my great surprise) no male chauvinism directed at me…. but perhaps now that we are thought of as a part of the community I can have my skills and contributions treated like garbage just like those of the other (two) women in the group. Hooray for assimilation.

Fortunately our dear leader seems (for now) to be the highly unpleasant exception to the other farmers here. I am treated with respect by the men of the community, and can even convince a group of teenage boys to uncomplainingly pick up trash. However, sometimes I wonder how much of that has to do with my being the wife of a respected foreigner who is a good head taller than everyone else in town. Claire has a much more difficult time corralling people into meetings in her village, likely because she is a young single female. I hate to think that so much of my success in getting people to work with me in my community is riding in on Matthew’s coattails, but I have a feeling that I wouldn’t have nearly the kind of traction I do now were I a single gringa. After all, Matthew was recently informed that I was still a girl, not a woman, because I hadn’t yet had children. Does that mean I would be treated as one were I not married?

I have to remember this situation every time I feel happy that I am given a more comfortable seat on the guagua or relieved of carrying a heavy load because I am female. Temporary physical comfort is not worth the pain of being treated like a child.