Profe in the DR 05

Profe in the DR 05

Well it’s been about three and a half weeks since I swore in.  After only two days in my site, I ended up heading back to the capital to take Creole classes. Creole is the language they speak in Haiti, it’s a mix of French and African languages.  There are several Haitians living in Batey Isabela since the earthquake.  Just about everyone in the batey however is of Haitian decent, and so they speak Creole as well.  Unfortunately for me, they speak a version of Creole that is quite different.  It is a mix of Haitian Creole and Spanish.  So I am essentially trying to learn two new languages while at the same time improving my Spanish.  My poor brain is getting so confused that at times English or even Japanese comes out by mistake. 

 My Creole classes were going to be held in a nearby batey, but because tropical storm Thomas was on the way, and that batey was prone to flooding, they moved the classes to the capital.  The classes ended mid day Friday, but I couldn’t leave the capital until after the storm passed two days later because the streets were all flooded from all the rain.   When I got back to my site, I noticed that the storm had left large puddles of water all around the batey (which was soon followed by large numbers of mosquitoes, I have several flying around me as I type.)  It took about two weeks for everything to finally dry out.   (Mosquitoes decided to stay however.)

Peace Corps asks that during our first three months we live with a family.  This is to help us integrate ourselves better with the community.  The family Pérez is quite large.  Gustavo and his wife, Gustavo’s brother, Son’s Aumaris and Hector, daughter Augustina, and three grandsons and two granddaughters.  The house has five small bedrooms and one bathroom.

During my first three months I am also expected to get to know the people in the community, do a community diagnostic, and start only a few projects.  The community expressed desire for more organized sports for teenagers.  There already exists an informal baseball team, so I have been working at organizing one for soccer. 

So far, I have been merely playing soccer everyday with whomever shows up, to spark interest.   But already I can see that forming a team here will be far more work than doing so in the U.S.  The first day I invited a few 12-13 year old boys and girls to come out and play.  Pretty soon I had every little 5, 6, 7 year old out there as well,  then came a few teenagers on there motorcycles to check things out,  Then came a few older men leading their mules back from work, stopping to see what was going on,  everyone standing in the middle of the field, obstructing the game.   My second day started off with some of the same 12-13 year old boys and girls, but soon some older/bigger boys joined in, essentially chasing off all the girls.  (I tried to have just a girl only game, but no one showed up.  I plan to keep working on that.)  On my third day, I realized that many of the boys who were now playing soccer with me were from Haiti, and did not speak Spanish.  (Four days of Creole training did not quite get me to the point where I can tell them to stop pushing, let alone explain the difference between a corner kick and a goal kick.)  Last week, we had to move from where we had been playing because the baseball team wanted to use the field.  (I objected, but the rest of the guys playing soccer chose to move, after all there were a lot more baseball players and they had bats!)  Three days ago, we were playing when a big Hatian got angry at a younger/smaller Dominican, and wanted to kick him off his team.  All the teenagers were screaming at me in both Spanish and Creole and I couldn’t hear/understand a thing.  I finally told them how to resolve the problem but they didn’t listen to me.  It ended up with the smaller Dominican going to his house and coming back with a pistol.  He ended up pulling out the pistol while standing right next to me.  The big Haitian then ran over and tried to wrestle the pistol away from the smaller Domincan.  (at which point I decided it was a good time to leave.)  As you can see, forming teams here is no easy job.