It's been awhile since I've had the luxury of sitting in front of my keyboard and monitor to spew my inconsequential garbage. Sometimes I think I've lost my ability to find humor in everyday situations, but it's more that I don't have the time to write it down.
We just returned from a month long vacation. Instead of going thru all the glorious details of the entire 30 days, I'll recount the highlights from the last one-third of our trip which was spent in the Dominican Republic. In planning this venture, I must admit that I had some reservations about taking my 3 kids to a third world country. Cholera, dysentary, yellow fever, malaria, dengue fever, lack of proper car seat/restraints, machete accidents-these words flashed across my mind like the NYSE symbols flash across the botton of screen on CNBC. My brother spent 3 years in the DR as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 2000's and it was while he was there that he met his wife; my current sister-in-law. Actually, Bill did all of the planning for this trip. I simply provided him with my credit card information so I could continue to accrue debt. Bill tried to get me to come visit him when he was living in the DR, but I was either pregnant or nursing a baby the entire 3 years he was there so the timing was never quite right. This trip, the one that just occured, was to be a big family trip; his family, my family and our mom. I'd been promising him for the past decade that I was gonna go to this country that he loves, so now was the time.
We arrived in Puerto Plata on July 19th. At this point we're almost 3 weeks deep into our vacation and, proudly might I boast, not a one of us amongst the 5 wanted to kill anyone else. We'd just spent 9 days in Western Pennsylvania at Lee's mom's compound and it was heavenly and serene and peaceful. Bucolic days spent fishing and hiking and swimming and paddle-boating and bb-gun shooting and fresh garden vegetable eating. Lovely. Hard to imagine anything more divine.
The first 4 days in the DR were fairly uneventful. Bill had booked rooms at the RIU Mambo, an all-inclusive resort on the Atlantic coast. I had never been to an all-inclusive resort, but they are akin to a cruise in the 'buffet meals and in your face constant entertainment' aspect, only on land. Any time you turned around someone named Rocky or Mama Mia was trying to get you to take Merengue lessons or do aerobics in the pool and there was practically 24 hour access to the Dominican version of pizza and burgers. No one was questioning your decision to have a pina colada at 9:30 am. As a matter of fact, if you looked around there were about 500 Germans in poorly fitting bikinis (men and women) there to join you. So, we swam and ate and drank and had a merry ole time watching nightly shows on the beach or on the stage (fyi...if you are disappointed about the King of Pop's show cancellation due to an untimely demise, the RIU resort in Puerto Plata has a guy that does a spot on impersonation-moonwalk and all-for an entire hour show. You would have thought it was Michael himself.) During these 4 days we had a couple of outings; a near-death experience on the "Teleferico" and a trip to the "27 Charcos" (27 waterfalls-or more literally-27 pools of water below the falls). With the former fore we took a ski-lift like gondola to the top of a mountain to give us a grand view of the island's beaches. The fact that there were ominous cloud formations providing near zero visability should have been our first clue to abort the mission, but perpetually the optomists, we tarried onward. Once we reached the top of the mountain, the skies opened and the flood waters commenced. We spend about an hour and a half inside tourist shops seeking shelter from the rain all the while trying convince the shopkeepers that we didn't need any of their wares. Realizing the rain was not going to stop, we made our way back to the gondola to take us back down the mountain. Operations had been suspended due to high wind velocity and thunder and lightning. After waiting in the lobby for a reasonable delay they decided to let a car full of fools go back down the mountain. We almost lost one whole branch off the family tree that day. About a third of the way down, the gondola started swinging with the wind and seemed to jump off the cables. This happened several times as the 10 of us and 35 + of our our closest Dominican brothers and sisters chuckled lightly all the while hoping we weren't about to plummet to our death. As we finally reach the bottom of the mountain with the gondola station in full view about 200 yards away, suspended about 100 feet above the parking lot, the gondola looses power and we must wait for the back up generator to kick in. We finally made it and I have a great series of photos that I have labeled, "The Faces of Fear".
The 27 Charcos were incredibly cool. The Rio Damajagua spills down the mountain creating 27 waterfalls with giant pools of water beneath them. After hiking about 3 miles to get to the base of the falls, we ascended the falls with our 2 Dominican guides, Lioney and Yunior. The smaller of the 2, Lioney, looked like the equivalent of Zac Efron size wise. At least Yunior appeared to be able to bench press more than his own body weight. But these 2 guys hoisted us up the falls (we only did the botton 7 due to time constraints and b/c my mom was stuck at the bottom with the 2 littlest kids who couldn't go up) with the agility of gazelles. Those 2 could shimmy up a rock faster than any mountain goat this side of the equator. Once we got to the top of the falls we got to slide, swim and jump all the way down. I felt like I was in one of those old Mountain Dew commercials where they have all those young, cool, good-looking kids jumping of rocks.
The badness starts about day 4 of our trip. Somewhere in the buffet line, despite the hand sanitizer offered by women lurking around in maid uniforms as you enter the dining room (or as you enter and exit the bathrooms), some fecal-oral contaminant crossed paths with our family. My middle son was the first to fall almost simultaneous with his grandmother. You name it and it was likely coming out of an orifice. We did the parental thing and comforted him and gave him appropriate hydration and as he improved we waited for the next victim to fall.
Back to my brother, the one who introduced us to the island of Hispaniola and the country of the Dominican Republic. As one might imagine, his time in the Peace Corps was not spent at all-inclusive resorts. He was actually commissioned to help a small mountain community referred to as "El Campo" develop an aquaduct system for farming. This is where he really wanted us to visit. I thought of a million and one reasons in my head as to why this was not a good idea. But, I didn't want to seem like a prissy little girl who was too scared to take her 3 white kids to the mosquito infested mountain jungles of the DR while driving on a narrow gravel road to get there. My mother has been to the campo before. Her initial suggestion was that we stay in the campo for a week. Wisely, my brother decided to curb her enthusiasm down to 2 nights and 2 days. When doing the planning, I had suggested to my brother that we go the campo initially, before the beaches and other sight-seeing. However his reasoning for going in the middle of our trip was justifiable. He wanted to on the weekend when more people would be in from the fields and it would allow more time for visiting. I was hesitant to agree to two nights, but I didn't want to disappoint my brother and Lee and I felt like it was not complete negligence in the parenting department.
As we leave the highway and begin to travel up the mountain on the small and winding road I am not anticipating that one of us might fall victim to the intestinal ailment that had afflicted my son. The drive up is beautiful. Everything is lush and green and much like one might imagine the Garden of Eden to have been. My son is 85% recovered at this point and when we reach our destination, he hops out of the car ready to explore. After introductions are made, Lee leads the kids down a mountain path to a creek and I remain up at the home of our hosts to play dominoes. As we are playing I realize that something is not quite right. I don't really feel nauseous, but I just don't feel right. My sister-in-law had been helping with meal preparation. The campo is very different from the resort. There are no buffet lines. The kitchen is in a small wooden building separate but adjacent to the main house. A wood burning stove is used to cook the food and there is a sink, but the water that is used in the sink is pumped in from water collected in barrels. It is for cleaning but it isn't drinkable. The house is constructed of cement and there are cement floors and a tin roof and interior walls with rooms partitioned off with thin ply wood. During the day, the sunlight lights up the house, at nite electricity is available, but it is minimal and it is provided by a solar panel and used sparingly. There is no plasma screen TV with a satellite connecting you to over 300 channels and a DVD player. It is a modest 4 room home with 3 rooms used has bedrooms and one room used as a combined dining-sitting room. It is sparse, but neat and it has all the essentials that a shelter should provide. It is someplace to lay your head at night and it will keep you warm and dry. My kids had been primed for this experience, but it is hard to sell something when you've never seen it before. They, nor we, really had no concept of what the campo was going to be. As soon as we arrive and my daughter sees the primitive accomodations to which she has been subjected she is appalled and eager to leave. She sees no reason in extending our visit any longer nor does she see any point in the educational/cultural/humanitarian component of our visit. In preparation for our trip we decided to bring gifts for the kids who lived in the campo. I decided that one way my kids could contribute to this effort was to forego the plastic toy in their kids meal for the kids in the campo. My kids have been 'suffering' the loss of their kid's meal toys for about 6 months and my daughter has been the number one proponent and the most generous, happily handing over her goods to me. Now that we are there to deliver she is happy to just drop the goods and go. I can see that her future humanitarian efforts will end at the US border.
My sister-in-law preparred a typical Dominican meal for the campo; fried salami and boiled green bananas. I can eat anything. ANYTHING. But, I took one look at this stuff I was supposed to be cutting up for my kids and I knew it wasn't going to happen. I called my mom to the rescue and our hosts kindly showed me to their room where I commenced to rest supine upon their bed for the remainder of my time at the campo. Supine, that is, when I wasn't up running to the latrine (as in outside the main house, in a separate walled off structure, Little House on the Prarie style, outhouse) to have things coming out top and bottom side of my body. All night, in the dark, without air conditioning or indoor plumbing this happened. Only to be worsened if I even so much as thought about a sip of water. At one point as I was making my way down the path to the latrine, I felt so dizzy that I thought I was going to pass out so I lay down on the path. It mattered not to me that I was laying in my own vomit with my shorts half way down my legs. At that point I just wanted to die. I moaned form my brother, the last person I saw before I walked down the path, and he, along with my husband, scooped me up and propped me up on a rock. But not before he pulled up my pants for me. Of all the mortifying things a man has to do in his life, perhaps the most is to see his older sister's flabby half-moon showing and to have to eclipse it for her.
As if the night couldn't get any worse, lying there underneath the mosquito net hoping you can wait at least one more hour to get up to go to the latrine again, I can hear it-wretching and it is not me. It's my husband and he sounds 10x worse than me. Everytime he vomits I think certainly this time he has ruptured his esophagus. Lee is not a friend of this latrine and refuses to use it. Instead he spends the night in the rental van getting up and sh_tting down the side of the mountain every time he needs to go. By morning, I am spent but I am starting feel somewhat human again. But, by this point the commander-in-chief has made up his mind. We are going back down the mountain and going to a hotel so at least if we have to vomit we can do it in air-conditioning into a toilet that we can flush and watch cable tv in the interrum. When he says we have to leave I get a bit mopey and try to think of reasons as to why we should stay. First and foremost, I don't want to disappoint my brother or the generous hospitality of our hosts (who had to put up with our wretching al night long). Lee is adamant though and so we say our goodbyes and head down the mountain which is a good thing because I'm not as well as I think I am and spend the next 24 hours in bed with a fever, but not before I drive us down the mountain and rapidly over a few speedbumps just to make Lee groan a little louder as punishment for making us leave.
One thing I forgot to mention. In the midst of establishing the campo as our very own vomitorium, we had a little mama drama in the mountain jungle. Our host family serves as the mayor and first lady of the community and the are often called upon to help resolve other family's disputes, regardless of the time of day or nite. As I lay there I hear the shouts of domestic violence in Spanish. Apparently the town drunk, who is in his 30's and still lives with his parents decides that he wants to try to kill them by beating them with a chair. All sorts of shouting and yelling and negotiating is happening in Spanish. Finally someone comes and yells outside the windor of my host family and they jet out bed and solve the dispute (by telling the 50+ yr old parents that they are to beat their son for acting the way he is).
Now that we are back and mostly well and all of this is a joke, the thing that I can say about our trip is that it was very humbling. Upon witnessing the generosity of the people in the campo and elsewhere, I can't help but be impressed by the lack of complaint and the gratitude that is displayed by many of the Dominican people and many who are willing to share so much even though it may seem so little by our standards. I just want to remember (and I want my kids to remenber) that most of the world lives with so much less than what we have. Not only do we need to be cognizant of that disparity but we need to live our lives with respect towards it reminding us to do our part not only in word, but by our actions.
