november smiles hello

It feels like it's been a while since I've touched this blog. Life here gets busy pretty quickly, especially for someone with such an undefined schedule. And this month is starting out beautifully, for a variety of reasons. I'll put some of them down here.

Firstly, I got to spend time with the fourth Fulbright student here, who is living out in the northern part of the country in a batey. She came to the capital last weekend with a friend for some meetings related to the group with which they are working, an innovative organization that uses sports to teach HIV prevention to youth in the community. I had so much fun while they were here, and I really got close to her friend as well. It was great to finally see her after having been in the country for two months without crossing paths yet. That weekend also included Halloween. In our uncreative spirit, we went out as confused gringas, which meant that we pretty much just wore regular clothes. Actually, I decided retroactively that we were confused gringas. But lots of Dominicans wore costumes.

Anyway, after not sleeping (much) for several nights that weekend, I came down with a flu-like cold. I'd assumed that the sinus infection that I typically get when summer fades into fall in the States would not crop up in a country where winter practically doesn't exist. But I was very wrong. My flu-like cold quickly became an angry sinusitis. Only the antibiotics I recently started seem to be making any sort of difference.

It actually has been getting cold of late (okay, by "cold" I mean that it drops to 75 instead of 85 degrees at night). Anyway, it's cold to me. I am starting to notice that there are actually moments in the day in which I am not sweating profusely, and I sort of crave warm showers at times (if it's possible to make my shower warm, I haven't figured it out yet...but something tells me that it's just not possible). To me, it's now pretty much freezing. I'm returning to the U.S. next week for medical school interviews, and I'm already wincing at the thought of the 40-degree weather my parents have described. Oh, Virginia, and her tundra-like climate! If it hasn't become abundantly clear, my body is taking on a Caribbean physiology - not to mention my speech, though that's old news (word to the wise: do not practice your Spanish with me). As if people here don't already (both jokingly and seriously) claim that I'm Dominican.

With respect to my research, the changes that I described in my last post on the topic have further evolved. I'm now planning to focus only on tuberculosis, comparing tuberculosis interventions implemented by several different NGOs here. I'm looking for methods of gender integration and then comparing these strategies with the lived experiences of community members. By "lived experiences," I mean the perceptions, beliefs, experiences, and stigmas felt and expressed by women and men in the target communities. I may also interview patients with tuberculosis in order to obtain qualitative data on the group of epidemiological interest. I also want to explore the links between TB and HIV/AIDS, since tuberculosis is the number one cause of death for AIDS patients around the world. Lately I've been having meetings right and left - with doctors, public health workers, and people in the NGO sector. Each meeting seems to generate at least three new contacts, another novel aspect of my research to consider, and several offers of food, research help, and general Dominican hospitality. One woman I met with the other day (during one of the oppressive black-outs that hit the Colonial Zone recently) sat with me in the heat of her darkened home, explaining everything she knew from her 40-year career in public health here. At the conclusion of our formal conversation, she invited me to use her house as a second home, to browse her extensive health-related library at any time, use her computers and home office space, and stop by for dinner, a chat, or anything else I might need. When I finally left in the pitch blackness, I felt like I had yet another host mom here.

Part of the reason I've been so feverishly making contacts and arranging meetings for my research is that these last few days before I depart for my hiatus up North will be spent mostly doing clinical work. A group of doctors from the States arrived to run a 10-day clinic in the community where SOMOS works. As the only SOMOS alumna on Dominican soil at the moment, I have stepped in to organize interpreters for the physicians (who don't speak Spanish) and also help out however I can. This type of thing - long clinic days and rapid Spanish descriptions of how to take medicine after medicine - is my original DR experience. It's what introduced me to this place, what made me ultimately decide to pursue a medical career, and what now feels like habit to me. The doctors remarked how tiring it must be to translate for 8 hours while sick children continuously coughed, cried, and sneezed on me. Tiring? I thought, I guess it could be. But I felt as though I could honestly say, "I'm just getting started. You all don't understand tired until after you've finished a week of clinical days interspersed with late, late nights in plazas and other random places that we won't talk about here. Until you've danced for hours at colmados or with Dominican pop stars, had life chats in la Zona Colonial at hours when only the dogs are left on the streets, talked about love till 3am at the taco place with the taco guys until they kicked you out, and returned to the hostel at 4am only to jot down a few notes from community interviews before you forget it all. Try getting up for the clinic at 6am after that. Five days in a row." Now it feels like nothing for me.

I truly do feel like the community is, in part, my home. When I walk down the street, people call my name and ask about my family, my studies, my SOMOS familia back at William & Mary. There are children whom I first met as newborns who are now two or three years old, who are now walking and talking. Having seen them grow up over time solidifies this feeling of belonging. While taking measurements on toddlers to gauge malnutrition in the community, several people told the doctors with me, "she knows this community well; she's practically one of us!" I realized that people I used to struggle to understand now make perfect sense, and communication - in all senses of the word - with community members seems clear and easy.

I find myself getting defensive about the least offense to anyone in the community or in the Dominican Republic as a whole. For this reason, I can barely even read travel guides to the DR anymore without bristling at what I think are inaccurate or demeaning descriptions of this country and its people. My Fodor's guide claims that this is an "emerging country." According to whom, I wonder, and when, pray tell, will this place finally have fully emerged? Do they think that part of the island is still underwater and that maybe one day the rest of it will appear? "Perhaps you've heard about the city's Zona Colonial [...] and want the ambience and romanticism of such an old-world setting." Yes, "ambiance" was spelled incorrectly. The really old world was destroyed when the Spanish arrived, but should we even bother to acknowledge the Tainos? They got rid of them all, anyway. Shall we even discuss what happened in the romantic "ambience" of this old-world setting? Yes, slavery is very romantic. Let's all remember it as we happily stroll past the beggars that are left behind because the global economy hasn't changed much in the past 500 years - now we just have better euphemisms for human rights abuses. Not to burst anyone's bubble, but if you wanted to come here for the old-world ambiance or perhaps one of the all-inclusive resorts in which you can completely avoid speaking to or even seeing any actual Dominicans, please don't tell me about it. Thanks. I don't mean that I think tourism is completely useless or that no foreigners should come here. If you come here, though, please come with an understanding of the history, with an open mind, and with a willingness to get to know Dominicans and their beautiful and diverse country. It's not an amazing place in spite of its status as a "developing" country; it's amazing because it is what it is, whatever you want to call it, and that should be both accurately understood and fully appreciated.

Anyway, that's my life at the moment! Tomorrow is another 8am clinic day. I'll use the few days that the doctors are taking off to get as much in-country research work done as possible before I have to endure the culture/climate shock of the Philadelphia airport.

and the music didn't stop till 6am

Or possibly later, to be honest. But I think 6am was about the time that I fell asleep on Sunday morning, in a sleeping bag full of sand and still wearing my jeans.

On Friday night, I went to a poetry reading here in la Zona Colonial that was part of the Dominican Republic's second annual International Poetry Festival. It began with a very well-coordinated, ridiculously cute musical/dance act by students of the public schools in Guachupita and Capotillo (two particularly marginalized barrios in Santo Domingo). After the fanfare of eight-year-olds dancing in colorful colonial garb and some incredible drumming, noted poets from Brazil, the DR, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Cuba read selections of their work. I'm glad I was able to catch part of the festival, thanks to a tip-off from a friend here, which featured events from October 20-25. After that, I stopped for some chocolate/vanilla/mango/guava goodness and a chat with the nice Cuban lady who, with her Italian husband, co-owns the homemade ice-cream place by my house. I made it home just in time to avoid a 20-minute downpour. When the rain ended, my roommate and I went out to La Espiral for una noche de palos, where some of the Spaniards (of the commune in our previous apartment building) had congregated. They invited us to come to Juan Dolio, a beach about an hour from the capital, on Saturday for an overnight fiesta. I agreed to go, though my roommate declined (she had a cold and lots of work to catch up on).

What I thought was going to be a small gathering of the Spaniards and a quiet night on the beach turned out to be one of the most amazing parties I've ever been to. There were about 30-40 people whom I had never met in my life, though most of them were from what I'll refer to as the "International 20-Somethings NGO Crew." By "international," I mean that I met people from the DR, Spain, France, Guadeloupe, Honduras, Italy, and the U.S. By "20-Somethings," I mean people that were old enough to have meaningful conversations about feminism, machismo, public health, music, research, and culture, all while tearing up the dance floor until dawn. By "NGO," I mean that if you ask most of them what they are doing here, the answers range from working for UNICEF and the Red Cross to installing irrigation systems in remote mountainous communities in the country's interior and environmental work.

We swam in the Caribbean, had a cook-out (a girl from Texas and I marveled at the first hot dogs we'd seen in a while), sang and danced to live music, merengue, bachata, reggae, salsa, reggaeton, and techno, lay on the sand and counted the shooting stars that seem to be remarkably common in this part of the hemisphere, talked (in Spanish, English, and the tiny bit of Italian I was able to muster) on the beach at who knows what hours of the morning, and found patches of floorspace on which to catch a few hours of sleep in the completely unfurnished beach house that we were renting for the night. Good thing I brought my sleeping bag and yoga mat. When I woke up, I went swimming and then fell asleep again on the beach until several of the Spaniards decide to pack up around 2pm. We went to an oceanfront seafood restaurant before heading back to Santo Domingo.

Saturday night/Sunday morning highlighted one of the main reasons that I love traveling - the people you meet. While it is a wonderful experience getting to know the people of the country where you are, I have come to appreciate getting to know other travelers as much or more so. I've found that those who choose to travel, live, and/or work abroad are predisposed to be much more open-minded, mature (in some cases), and cultured than the general population (of any country). People who set out to know the world in which they live from other perspectives - geographically and mentally - are a select group. Admittedly, there's an inherent privilege in being a part of this contingency, but not all those who are privileged necessarily choose to explore, challenge themselves, and expose themselves to new places and cultures. Those who do, as was demonstrated this weekend and in numerous late-night conversations in hostels and clubs throughout South America during my semester in Peru, are some of the most amazing people I've ever met. Perhaps the fleeting nature of such acquaintances adds to this. If you have a life-changing conversation with a complete stranger at 2am in a hostel in Bolivia, somehow the knowledge that you may or may not ever see that person again makes the interaction all the more meaningful. And even if you do (which, in our increasingly small, globalized world, is not entirely unfathomable), the transient feel of traveling makes you somehow appreciate it more in the moment. Of course, the good thing about hanging out with people who are living here in the DR, as opposed to just visiting, means that there is more time to hang out with such an awesome bunch. :)

on research

Maybe it was the fasting earlier this week, but I’ve gotten a significant amount of work done in the past few days. I’m not sure if it was a function of the fast itself or if I simply had more focus because of not having to think about what to eat every day, but my thoughts were particularly lucid this week and I’ve been reading, writing, and reading for hours each day (which is awesome, because it was basically one of my life’s dreams to get paid to read and write all day, preferably in another country). Also, I was trying to avoid going out too much this week, in part so that I wouldn’t black out from hypoglycemia on the streets of Santo Domingo and in part to avoid seeing any hint of food. Irrespective of its root cause(s), I am getting a lot done, and to tell the truth, it began the moment I got here. I stepped off the plane and hit the ground running.

The sheer amount of literature review I have been doing since I arrived here (and well before that) has had the effect I’d hoped for; I now look at everything with a gender perspective. I have, effectively, gender mainstreamed my own brain.

What I mean is that in looking over USAID materials, reading articles about health issues, and learning more about gender and health here in the Dominican Republic, I have noticed that I now view things from a gender perspective automatically. When I read about the major problem of what is termed “patient noncompliance” in the extensive treatment regimen required to cure tuberculosis, I immediately wondered, “Do the rates of compliance for female and male patients differ? If so, what characteristics of their lives create this disparity?” Noncompliance is a serious issue when it comes to tuberculosis, since not finishing a course of antibiotics can cause resistance and lead to multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB), an intimidating demon with which Dr. Paul Farmer (of Partners in Health, Mountains Beyond Mountains, the Harvard School of Public Health) has relentlessly waged war in the slums of Lima, Peru and the prisons of Russia. So whether or not gender – more specifically, the expectations, duties, and social roles assigned to men and women based on their sex – plays a part in rates of noncompliance is an important question from both a public health and a social justice perspective.

In our (mostly Fulbright) writing group, it was my turn this week to turn in a “chapter” – well, for those writing dissertations or books, it’s a chapter, but for me, it was a disorganized, half-beefed-up, somewhat distracted, glorified outline, with enough introductory information to define the essentials of my research question without promising too many answers as yet. It was like a sulking teenager who is starting to resemble the adult he will become but doesn’t yet know how to be comfortable in his own rapidly growing skin. After my writing groupies applied their pens and glorious brains to my halfway Thing, I found myself shoved headlong into another set of thoughts like an underwater tunnel. When I came up for air, I was in an entirely different body of water.

What if I focus only on infectious diseases – specifically, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, since the two often interact to create significant health challenges here and in many “developing” countries? What if I don’t begin with gender mainstreaming as a framework? What if my framework is simply how gender affects the diagnosis, treatment, and experiences of these diseases for marginalized people in the Dominican Republic? What if I expand the sample population of marginalized people from impoverished communities where USAID-funded organizations work to prostitutes, Haitian immigrants and Haitian-Dominicans (who experience incredible, systematized discrimination and racism here), and adolescents (though that brings me back to the drawing board for IRB)? What if I identify possibilities besides gender mainstreaming as sustainable, comprehensive ways to address TB and HIV/AIDS in these marginalized populations? …And suddenly I have an entirely new Thing on my hands.

It’s a process – is always a process – and most of the good stuff comes from the process, not from the end.

eating, not eating

It’s the end of Day 2 of my (more or less) week-long fast. As my third day of ingesting only natural fruit juices, water, and tea approaches, I find that fasting – so far – is not as difficult as it sounded when I began. As long as I avoid looking at food and don’t go up the stairs too quickly, I haven’t noticed much change.

Not having to think about what I will eat and when – and then not eating – also frees up a considerable amount of time, and for the most part I have found this to be a benefit to my work. I haven’t felt much less energetic than usual, and after cutting out a significant portion of my daily time expenditure, I find it easier to concentrate on my research. I am also even more appreciative of food than I normally am; if you know me well, you know that’s a tall order. Yesterday I had to stop myself from getting distracted multiple times with thoughts of chicken, sushi, peanut butter, biryani, pasta, chocolate, tofu, yuca chips, salad, beans and rice, stir fry, sancocho…

Of course I am hungry, but it’s a comfortable hunger; it’s the hunger of a well-nourished body with very little to lose from a few days without food. I am increasingly aware of the privilege that is inherent in my very decision to fast. I am so privileged that I can choose to fast. I enjoy the health benefits of fasting because I am ordinarily over-nourished. For me, this is a fun frolic into the realm of alternative preventive health and an outlet for my social justice tendencies (if I told her about my fast, imagine the reaction of the elderly homeless woman on El Conde with whom I shared my excessively large, home-cooked dinner a few weeks ago). For me, not eating is a deliberate choice; for others, not eating is a result of global disparities that widen annually. When the top 1% of the world’s wealthiest people shares the same amount of wealth as the bottom 57%, more than one child will go to bed without dinner. And that’s already one too many.

In a world of increasing disparity, it is hardly surprising that human beings of the twenty-first century typically face two distant extremes. If you’re an elite member of the upper-middle-class in “developed nations,” you’re faced with the corporate conglomerations that control mainstream food production – that’s Big Farm AND Big Pharm. Don’t forget that the latter counts on your body to start malfunctioning after decades of consuming trans-fatty acids, partially hydrogenated oils, and pesticides. If you’re in that 1.02 billion I cited in my previous entry, then you face the other extreme. On a daily basis, you may have no idea where your next meal will come from. Most likely your income is less than a dollar a day – if you’re in Nicaragua, for instance, that’s just enough to buy this much, according to Women Thrive Worldwide director Ritu Sharma Fox. If you’re a child, you might be significantly small for your age because of chronic malnutrition, which affects not only your stature and weight, but also, it has been shown, your brain’s development and by extension your very human potential.

How do we combat these extremes? Here’s my recipe for global food security:

1. Read. If you’ve already made it this far, chances are you’ve already been doing this crucial first step, which is to educate ourselves. Being aware of what is happening in our world is the first step to understanding what needs to change.
2. Appreciate. We all need food to survive, but there’s food and then there’s food. Learn to appreciate truly fresh produce. Learn what it takes to make a really good meal. Learn to appreciate the work that goes into producing delicious, nutritious food. And support those processes – not the ones that deliver empty calories, artificial taste, minimal nutritional benefits, and food insecurity and small farm bankruptcy to the rest of the world.
3. Act locally. In The Boston Globe Will Allen called it The Good Food Revolution (I would especially like to emphasize Allen's point that in the U.S. access to good food must expand from the rich suburbs to the inner cities, where many marginalized citizens may have access only to Food Lion or Kroger - a farmer's market is a fairy tale in downtown Detroit or Southeast DC). If you’ve completed Step 1, you should know a thing or two about how food is produced and what sorts of resources are required (the U.S. beef industry alone uses one-fourth of all water consumed in the country). You should also know about the alternatives to the often wasteful, unhealthy, and environmentally destructive mainstream means of producing food. Support small, responsible restaurants, co-ops, and local farmers’ markets. Read the label. Choose organic foods. Lower or end your consumption of meat.
4. Act globally. We live in a theoretically free market economy – at least, supply and demand work to some extent. So vote with your dollars. Make conscious choices about whom to support and how based on their global conduct. If you’ve done your homework, then maybe you’ll hesitate before buying a can of Coca-Cola (do your homework), a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, or a not-so-happy meal from McDonald’s. These choices affect more than your personal health; they are a means of consumer resistance towards the global structure of food production. If that isn’t activist enough for you, call your local Representative to demand change.

And that’s only Day 2.

world food day

According the World Food Programme, there are 1.02 billion undernourished people in the world today. Hunger and malnutrition cause more health problems than AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Conflicts, natural disasters, poverty, environmental devastation, and poor agricultural practices combine to create food insecurity, which is an increasing cause of violence and disputes. For example, in April 2008, violent riots in Haiti were sparked by a lack of food.

Hunger has increased as a result of the worldwide recession, and the international political economy that favors high-cost input farming practices has decreased the viability of agriculture and food production in many developing countries. But many people are hungry all over the world, from the US to the Dominican Republic, from Asia to Africa, from toddlers to the elderly. 

Today is World Food Day, and this weekend marks the beginning of a week-long fast that my roommate and I are undertaking. It’s something she’s done in the past as a means of detoxifying and renewing her system, and it consists of ingesting only water, natural juices, and tea for the duration of the fast. Aside from the health benefits of fasting, we are giving ourselves more motivation by pledging to donate all the money we would have spent on food next week to an (as yet unknown) non-governmental organization that works with hunger and poverty issues.

Here's more information from the World Food Programme: 10 things you can do on World Food Day. In addition, we are challenging our friends and family to match our pledge, either in full or in smaller sponsorships of one meal's worth of money or one day's worth.


I *love* food, so this will be a challenge for me. Wish me luck!

beyond Santo Domingo

I may as well warn you: this is going to be long. But this weekend was the first time I finally went to the beach after living in the Caribbean for a month (I know, something is clearly wrong with me), and the first time I escaped from the bustle of Santo Domingo for the countryside.

On Saturday I went with some friends to Guayacanes, a beach about 35 minutes outside the capital. It was nice, but my standards for beaches are impossibly high after spending time on the Samaná peninsula in the north and on the southwestern coast of the country on previous trips. The best part about Guayacanes was hanging out with some buena gente and getting to know the cousins of one my friends here. We mostly played football/dunking and jumped around yelling every time one of those 10-minute Caribbean rainshowers passed through. You don’t realize how warm the ocean is until a curtain of cold rain washes past, turning the surface of the water into beautiful silver pinpricks. And we ate beach food, of course – pescado frito (deep-fried fish), tostones (deep-fried plantains), and yaniqueque (deep-fried dough). There seems to be a recurring culinary theme.

I thought I was too exhausted to go out on Saturday night, but as usual I was wrong. My roommate, her visiting friend, and I went to see a live merengue band playing (and dancing) furiously in a plaza in the Colonial Zone. When that ended, we headed to La Espiral, a club/bar a few blocks away. La Espiral was definitely one of the coolest places I’ve been to in Santo Domingo. They play pretty much all of my favorite Bob and Damian Marley songs, plus a good blend of hip-hop and dancehall. The crowd there is a unique mix of foreigners and Dominican youth who have opted for an alternative to the techno-blasting, hyper-air-conditioned lounges of the Colonial Zone that sometimes ask for identification if your skin is too dark (it’s happened to me). The events that La Espiral hosts and publicizes are also a bit outside of mainstream culture in the capital. On Saturday we saw a live performance of palo music, which, if you can ignore the fact that the musicians are singing in Spanish, sounds like something straight from West Africa. It was definitely one of the coolest musical performances I’ve ever seen – and La Espiral has palo nights on a weekly basis!

On Sunday we started The Grand Move into our new apartment. We’re already planning the obligatory housewarming party, though we haven’t actually finished moving everything into the new place. Previously undiscovered perks are that I can see the ocean from my bedroom windows and that there is a little shop a block away where a couple makes all-natural, homemade ice-cream. Good thing there is also a gym a few blocks down! Sunday night found us once again at the outdoor son concert, which is always a lot of fun. Imagine a huge crowd with people of various ages, complexions, and nationalities all dancing and singing along with the band, which has its own memorable personality. There is nothing like this in the US.

On Monday, my roommate, her friend, and I left Santo Domingo for the countryside. We went with a friend who is a fellow William & Mary alum and a current Peace Corps volunteer here. He lives in Canoa, a small, dusty town outside of Barahona, which is the largest city in the Dominican Republic’s southwestern region. Until we got outside Santo Domingo’s city limits, I’d forgotten how *beautiful* the Dominican campo is. In Canoa everything moves more slowly. I’m always fighting for my right to walk down the street in the capital, threatened on one side by speeding guaguas and motorcycles, and on the other by more out-of-control vehicles and also men (see my Sept. 17 post). But in Canoa, we walked in the middle of the street without a problem. The barrage of smells that I am accustomed to no longer accosted my senses (garbage, cigarette smoke, excrement – mostly from donkeys and dogs, but you never really know, exhaust fumes, etc.). And it was quieter – not silent, though; my theory on the Dominican Republic (that silence doesn’t exist in this country) still holds true, as I could barely fall asleep to the nocturnal cacophony of what sounded like dying cows and every dog within 10 km barking at the top of its lungs.

But the campo is indeed tranquilo, for the Dominican Republic. We walked to the canucos (small plots of farmland) at sunset, where many residents of Canoa raise plátanos (plantains) to sell. We sat outside (disgustingly covered in Deet) and talked to my friend’s host mother. We sat outside and ate sandwiches. We sat outside and drank soda at a colmado. We sat outside and listened to music at an outdoor bar. Then we sat outside and looked up at the stars. Much of the social life of Canoa (as well as the DR as a whole) revolves around sitting outside in various locations, typically in white plastic chairs. But the sky was beautiful. I saw 7 shooting stars! Maybe it’s my nickname, or maybe I just keep my neck craned longer than most people do, but I always see an uncanny number of shooting stars. Luckily the electricity didn’t go out until I was almost finished my bucket shower, and by then I was sufficiently acquainted with the “bathroom” that I was able to feel around for my towel. You hear “se fue la luz” (“the lights went out”) a lot here; it’s a national problem that has become a fact of life in this country. Where we live in the capital, we’ve been lucky to have lost power only a couple of times, for just a few hours each time. But there are some places, like Canoa, where blackouts are a daily occurrence. OH, and I got some amazing peanut butter, thanks to my friend. Another Peace Corps volunteer has been working with a women’s group making peanut butter. I’m not really overly into peanut butter to begin with, but this is the most amazing stuff I’ve ever tasted…I’m totally addicted.

The next day we set out for la Ciénaga, a small town along the southwestern coast. A couple of guagua rides through the gorgeous coastal mountains, and we finally arrived. A fellow passenger asked us, “who do you know in la Ciénaga?” We confessed that we knew no one, and she replied “well, now you know me. It’s better to walk around with someone you know.” Our amazing new friend then let us keep our backpacks in her house while she accompanied us to a beautiful nearby river, to lunch at a little restaurant on the side of the road, and to the beach. The beaches of the DR’s southwestern coast are incredible. My first experience with the region was on a trip to Paraíso, another small town outside Barahona, almost three years ago. The coast was even nicer than I remembered, and the area is virtually untouched by tourism. I have trouble understanding why, when the water is so blue that I could have sworn I’d walked into a painting. Rivers leap out of the mountains and trickle down between palm forests until they reach the sea, whose waves are significantly more commanding than the calm, languid waters of Guayacanes and Boca Chica, near the capital. Accompanied by our friend and her daughter and nieces, we swam in the river and in the ocean, and tried not to trip over the many small pebbles that line the coast instead of sand. Thanks to the didactic demonstration of my young hosts, I learned how to recognize the wild almonds that were strewn across the beach and how to pound them open with rocks to reveal the freshest, most delicious almonds I’ve ever eaten. I tried in vain to capture everything from behind my camera lens, but as usual I found this a futile exercise. Words are scarcely better to describe the incredible generosity of our new friend, who made us feel so at home, and her adorable daughter and nieces, who demanded photo after photo (again, my little Canon point-and-shoot is incapable of capturing the essence of their beautiful smiles). Our new friends have extended to us an open invitation to return whenever we want, at which point we’ll get to see the larimar mines (larimar is a light blue precious stone that is found only in the DR) and be fed a large amount of fish.

We were loathe to leave, but we wanted to return to Santo Domingo on Tuesday night. After all, I am getting paid to do research, and my William & Mary workaholic sensibilities are well-ingrained; with so much to do on my research, it’s hard to justify more than a few days’ reprieve. Lately I’ve started to consolidate into prosaic form the pages of literature review that are steadily accumulating. Thus I will not look up in a panic one day with a hundred pages of lit review notes and nothing actually written. Additionally, organizing my thoughts and notes into an outlined paper format forces me to constantly reconsider and revise basic research questions that are easy to lose sight of when you’re mired in endless (and sometimes only tangentially relevant) sources. So yes, I’m still doing my research.

Now it’s back to the Santo Domingo routine…which is not really a routine, but more like this quote from Che Guevara’s character in The Motorcycle Diaries: “the method: improvisation.”

a letter

In light of my being a mad-as-hell pre-med student, I want to share this letter to President Obama from the Mad as Hell Doctors of Oregon. Let's hope our Nobel prize-winning President finds in his selection for the award the strength to continue the fight against private insurance and our broken "health care" system.

I'll comment only on the following aspect of the letter: where Dr. Hochfeld contrasts the agendas of those on the "right" and the "left," I must point something out. The partisan framing of the health care debate has distracted us from the basic question at stake. Once again, I refer to T.R. Reid, who states in his book that the first question a country must answer in seeking to reform its health care system is a moral question. Do we value human life or private profits more? Do we believe that the right to health care access trumps the right to private property?

The answer is not a function of siding with the red or the blue; the answer is a function of what we as a nation believe is our ethical imperative towards our fellow citizens, neighbors, families, and friends. Once we start framing the debate thusly perhaps our national values will shine through a bit more clearly; only then will we be able to reach a reasonable conclusion that should reflect what the majority believes. And after all, isn't that the whole point of democracy?

transnational feminism

So this gender policy/feminism thing has me thinking. I’ve been contemplating the difference in what defines feminism and women’s movements in a variety of countries, cultures, and socio-economic settings – how one person’s feminism can be another’s source of oppression when skin color or income level is changed. Criticisms abound of so-called "first wave feminism," the women’s suffrage movements of the early twentieth century and "second wave feminism," the continuing exploration of women’s sexual, reproductive and labor rights through the 1970s. Many critics point out that these notions of feminism are distinctly circumscribed by an assumption of whiteness and upper-middle-class status.

If being a feminist, for instance, means avoiding housework and pursuing one’s own career, then who will clean the house? Certainly not the husband, who’s off on his own personal vendetta to make sure his wife doesn’t end up out-earning him. So a maid is hired, and the structure of oppression shifts the weight from upper-middle-class housewife to a lower-income, (most likely) woman of color. Can the maid still be a feminist, even though all she does is cook and clean in someone else’s home before returning to her own to do the same thing?

Here’s another example: most "Western" feminists consider prostitution the antithesis of women’s empowerment. But what about a woman who has no alternative economic choices, children to feed, parents to take care of, and no prospects of getting an education? By doing what she can to make sure she can take care of herself and those around her, and by using the objectifying and patriarchal culture around her to her own advantage, is she automatically doomed to the non-feminist contingency?

Feminism, then, like most things, is a function of many cross-cutting factors, including race, socio-economic class, nationality, age, etc. This is why it is so challenging to create what I term “transnational feminism.” But there has to be a way to translate ideas about women’s empowerment, women’s rights as human rights, personal responsibility and love for self and others across the bounds of these cross-cutting factors. I’ve been thinking about getting involved in an organization centered on women’s (especially young women’s and girls’) empowerment. Empowerment enables people to create more choices even in limited situations. Empowerment would help to combat those ridiculous men on the street who somehow think yelling or whispering weird things to women is an acceptable way to address them (I’m considering trying a tactic passed on by a friend – when someone yells at you, pretend to be one of the really obnoxious fruit vendors that pound the pavement and start yelling indiscriminately "plátano! tres peso’ lo’ plátanos! aguacate bien rico! bien grande el aguacate! a diez peso’! diez pesito’!"). Problem is that I haven’t found such an organization yet. If anyone knows of one here in Santo Domingo, please let me know! If not, I might just start my own.