The other side of the island

At the beginning of March I went to the Dominican Republic with my parents to visit friends from Virginia who are living in Santo Domingo for two years on a state department posting. I took the bus from P-au-P to Santo Domingo, but I made the newbie mistake of trying to travel across the border on Thursday…which happens to be market day. Fail. So I paid for that by spending over four hours crawling through the border, moving about a bus length every 20 minutes. But I didn’t have it so bad, it was actually the most comfortable bus I have ever been on, and we got to watch a bunch of movies. Four Jim Carrey movies in a row (dubbed in Spanish), then No Country for Old Men (Spanish subtitles), and then German crime thrillers dubbed in Spanish with English subtitles. Quite the experience.

 I was rather flummoxed by the whole customs system at the border. It’s so random and inefficient I think they would actually be better off not even trying to regulate things. It’s not for the faint of heart. The bus stops next to a building that doesn’t look any different from the others, everyone is ordered off the bus, and the driver has all of your passports (or so you’ve been told) so you’re standing in no-man’s-land between countries with no passport. Nerve-wracking to say the least. Then you see a large group of young men shouting and arguing in Spanish and Creole, hauling all the luggage off the bus. You run over and finally establish that they’re just porters, trying to grab your bags and carry them inside for you…for an exorbitant fee. I told them very firmly in three languages to unhand my baggage because I wasn’t going to pay them, and carried my things inside, where a man (supposedly a customs official, with no ID or uniform) directed me to place all my bags on a table, then he dumped them all upside down, roughly searched through the pile, and then tried to convince me to pay him for his trouble. First he asked in Spanish, but I was listening for Creole and didn’t understand. Then he tried Creole but now I was trying to listen for Spanish, and didn’t understand again. He gave up, so I just packed up my things and went back outside, to see that about half of the passengers had simply collected their bags and were waiting by the side of the building. No one seemed to notice or care that they were skipping the customs building entirely. Eventually all the luggage and passengers were chaotically bundled back on the bus, and we crossed the border, although I still had no idea who had my passport, if they had shown it to the proper official, or whether I was entering the country illegally. A few hours later the driver’s assistant finally got around to handing back everyone’s passport, and I saw that it had been stamped. So at least one part of the border crossing was semi-regulated.  I guess they just trust that the passenger on the bus is really Cecelia, not a 50-year old Indian man named Jamil who’s stolen her passport.

Immediately after crossing the border it was like being in a whole different world, not just a different country. Hard to believe it was the same island. Just so much more developed, and not so devastatingly poor. The courthouse and police headquarters in a little podunk town about an hour after the border was bigger and nicer than many of the national government buildings were in Port-au-prince…before the earthquake. After 10 hours on the bus we finally started coming into Santo Domingo, which was so much larger than I expected. As I told Dad when I got off the bus, “I didn’t realize Santo Domingo was, like, a real city, with roads and buildings and stuff!” Yes. Not so eloquent, but really, I was surprised by roads without potholes, and skyscrapers, and shopping malls. Also parking lots! Those don’t exist in Port-au-Prince. 

I had a wonderful time with my parents and our friends the Conaways. We stayed in their lovely apartment (enjoying the 19th floor ocean view), toured the state department offices where Mary Sue works, and visited the orphanage Vern works with (Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos, the same organization that runs the children's hospital where mom works in Haiti). There we got spoiled with yet more adorable children, toured the bakery and got fresh bread, visited the special needs house, and then got invited to tea with a bunch of the volunteers at the house of the orphanage director, who happens to be Irish, so the tea was wonderful. I got to meet several of the orphanage volunteers, as well as some peace corps volunteers who live in the area, and hear about what they do.  

Kattia, in the special needs house at NPH Casa Hogar in the DR.

After all that, we headed to Vern’s favorite restaurant, which happens to be on a beautiful beach.  I’ve been looking at the Caribbean ocean every day for six months and FINALLY got to actually touch it! We did a lot of snorkeling; in one 20 minute swim I found at least 30 kind of fish, lots of coral, a sting ray with ruffly edges, and a 3-foot long sea snake. The next day we joined a very international group (Spanish, French, German, Danish, Russian, Dominican, and Haitian) for a boat ride out to an island called Catalina where we spent the afternoon snorkeling. Dad and I were standing on the empty beach talking about how this would be a perfect place to take some Captain Jack Sparrow pictures, if only we had a bottle of rum…and we looked down at our feet and there was an empty green bottle tucked into some seaweed at the waters edge. Many silly pictures followed.

Captain Jack Sparrow..."but why is all the rum gone?"

Caribbean! Beautiful, blue, very warm water.

Sunday we walked around the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo. Lots of very old buildings built by Columbus, or someone related to him. In a church where lots of famous people were buried, we stopped to admire a fresco on the arched ceiling. A tourguide jumped in to explain that this fresco represents hell on the left side, and heaven on the right. “When I die, heaven is where I want to go so I can be with John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Michael Jackson.” An interesting trio, no?

We also visited a big fort (apparently I didn’t notice the names of any of the things we visited). We walked the walls and turrets, climbed on the cannons, sat on the more modern tanks and machine guns on display, and explored the castle at the center. Later, at the impressive ruins of the oldest hospital in the Western hemisphere we saw more pigeons than I have ever seen in one place, ever. And consequently, no one actually wanted to walk into the ruins for fear of being pooped on.

At the end of our walk we met up with a large group of the Conaway’s friends to have dinner at a restaurant where all the waiters were dressed like pirates. Lots of fun, and fantastic food. The next day after dad left for the airport, mom and I returned the colonial zone and just wandered around window shopping, eating ice cream, visiting the amber museum, enjoying the sunshine, and walking home along the ocean. It felt more like Europe than the Caribbean, and a whole world away from Haiti. That night we decided to go see the movie Rango. We sort of forgot that of course the movie would be in Spanish, but honestly I think it might have been even funnier in Spanish than it is in English. I’ll have to watch it again when I get home and compare. Despite not understanding most of the dialogue, mom and I still laughed our heads off and had a great time.

On Tuesday we took the bus back to Haiti with a ridiculous amount of luggage (Mom brought all sorts of supplies for the children’s hospital and therapy center), and enjoyed the beautiful drive through the mountains to Port-au-Prince. The border crossing was much faster without the market day crowds, and this time they didn’t even bother taking the luggage off the bus. Mom spent a few days with me at the orphanage, and then went over to the NPH hospital in Tabarre, where she did pool therapy and started to train some of the Haitian employees in pool therapy as well. I went to visit her right before she left, and had a great time playing with kids in the pool, playing with the kids in the abandoned baby room at the hospital, and later going out for drinks with several of the amazing NPH workers. Our group consisted of an Irish physical therapist, two Argentinian physical therapists, a Canadian nun/occupational therapist, a German social worker, two Haitian girls my age, and then my mom and I. A ridiculously fun group of people, and I could totally see myself being them in a few years.