Interview with a Dominican

So I've done 20 interviews at the time of writing this, on Saturday, January 19th.

I was supposed to start last Thursday, the day after I got back from Santiago, but due to some confusion which should not have been, since I specifically told them that I would be coming back Wednesday, we didn't start the interviews until Friday.

We started the interviews on time, at right about 2, which was surprising. I walked around to the houses in the part of town where I live. Telma, a member of our water committee accompanied me, and in all we did 13 interviews in about 3 hours. After doing the first couple you kind of get an idea of what all the answers will be for the ones who follow. This is because almost everyone where I live buys there water from a truck. Almost everyone will not admit to ever being sick. Although there are the occasional few who will tell you everything in detail, down to when they stubbed their toe (OK, I'm actually making that one up). I'm not a big fan of the whole health aspect of my project, as I have no background in health beyond knowing nursing terms which I learned from my sister (but I doubt that knowing if someone is A&O x 1-3, tachacardic or diaphretic is really going to help me out much here). Sure they should be washing their hands after the browns go to the superbowl (or I guess you could say super "hole" in my case). But, something like hand washing is something that has pretty much already been set in stone, and even if I was a good little volunteer leading by example washing my hands after every time I touched something, it would still have little effect on their hand washing habits.

The interviewing at times is monotonous, but it is refreshing to see just how friendly and caring these people are. Almost every house that I go to offers me something, whether it be coffee or juice, some fruit, or my favorite which was completely unexpected and I only received it at one house: hershey kisses. Those people must have been ballin' because those things aren't cheap here.

So, after we finished around 5pm, Telma told me, if I wanted, that we could start again tomorrow (a Saturday!) at 9am, to finish the couple of houses we didn't get to do around me, and then we would go down to Los Rincones and continue interviewing there. Since I was a little early the previous day and Telma wasn't ready, I figured I would give her a few extra minutes. So I read another chapter in my book, and at 9:30 I went by Telma's house so we could start. So it turned out that Telma had left earlier in the day to go to town, and had left a message with her daughter saying that there would be another Doña waiting for me to help me with the interviews, not giving me a name of who it would be or anything. Now at this point, I probably could have just went back to my house and continued reading and called it a day, but being the proactive person that I'm not, I decided to go down alone to Los Rincones and see if I could figure this out. On my way down some kids that live by me came by on a Donkey, on their way to get water, and they told me they would help me find who I needed. Luckily everyone talks to everyone about everything here. I asked the first people I ran into if there was a woman down here that I was supposed to be interviewing with, and sure enough they told me who she was and where to find her.

The kids on the donkey were passing by her house on the way to get the water, so they kindly showed me where she lived. Surprisingly (in a sarcastic tone), she was not there. So, I decided to just go with the kids to where they get the water. They get it from a little spring on the other side of the river, but fortunately, somebody already built a little system so they don't have to cross the river. Unfortunately, this spring is below all the houses in the community and I can't use it in my project. A few years back, an engineer came in and built a pump system for some of the houses, so there are a lot of people in the lower community who already have running water, but the deal with the pump is that when the electricity is out, there is no water, which is quite frequently. Also, pumps break a lot and they are expensive to fix. So, most of the people who have water from the pump system still want a tapstand with this new gravity-fed aqueduct because water will be available 24 hours a day.

So the kids finished getting the water, and on the way back the woman was there waiting for me. I guess the people that I asked went and found her for me. So a little after 10am we started doing the interviews. I got 7 completed, for a total of 20 so far. Only about 45 or so more to go. On my way back, I passed this woman's house (her nickname is Blanca, or white lady, and I'm not sure why because she's not white, but that's the case with most of the nicknames here) and every time I pass it she always yells, "Entre, entre!," which means enter, or come in. All the previous times I had been working so I was beat and just wanted to get home. This time I figured why not, so I walked up to her house and we had a little conversation with her and her husband. Her husband was a huge motor mouth. I'm pretty sure he probably only took one pause for a breath during the 20 minutes I was there. It was one of those things where I really wanted to leave and I was waiting for a lull in the conversation so that I could politely excuse myself, but unfortunately there were no lulls. So instead of leaving during a lull, I left at the change of topic, which was hard for me to pick up in Spanish. We said our goodbyes, and Blanca seemed especially happy that the white boy came to talk to her. They told me to come back again, and I told them I would be passing by everyday next week. They told me they would be saving some fruit for me to give me when I pass by. Lovely. It's a good thing I'm still living with a family otherwise all this fruit would be going to waste. With all the fruit I've gotten since I've been here I probably could have started a small produce market.

So that was that, this upcoming week I only have 3 days of interviews, since Monday is a Dominican holiday, and Friday I'm going to visit a friend on the Samana Peninsula to do some whale watching.