Marriage

Last week I went into the capital for various reasons, but one of them was because a fellow Peace Corps Volunteer married her Dominican boyfriend. She has been dating him since about the time she arrived in country (Summer 2008) and will finish her Peace Corps service this May. Although I’m not sure if she always dreamed of having her wedding in the Dominican Republic, marrying him now helps to ensure that she can take her now husband back to the states by May or soon after May.

Peace Corps Volunteers marrying Dominicans happens much more often than I ever imagined, and I know this will not be the last marriage I celebrate before I leave in May 2011. It’s strange, because being here has brought marriage to my attention in so many unexpected ways. PCV’s are marrying Dominicans, PCV’s are marrying each other, young Dominican girls are running away to “marry” older Dominican men and even me, as an American woman, am asked repeatedly from Dominican men to marry them so they can come back to the states with me. The list of goes on and on….

There is a girl from my town named Noemi. She took my first English class and did fairly well. Well enough that she passed my test to move onto the second level of English starting this week. Noemi, however, will not be taking my second English class, because one night in the middle of January, she went out and never came home the next morning. In our American culture, this of course would cause worry, but most people would probably assume she was causing some trouble and stayed out all night with her friends. Here in Dominican culture, it means only one thing: marriage. Noemi never came home that night because her older (I still have yet to discover how much older) boyfriend picked her up and took her to his house, which means Noemi chose him over her family and is now officially “his woman.”

Have I mentioned yet that Noemi is 13-years-old? When Noemi decided to not come home that night, it told everyone, her family, the community, the school, that she was a married and had given everything in her old life up. There is no piece of paper, no legal document needed to prove this. She left and never came home. A 13-year-old girl married, dropped out of school, living in a nearby town with most likely a man at least 10 years older than her.

This is marriage in the Dominican Republic. Noemi is not the first and she definitely will not be the last.

But what about a Peace Corps Volunteer marrying their Dominican boyfriend or girlfriend in a hurry to take them home to the states? In this situation, you have two people who love each other (hopefully) but really live in two different worlds, although for a brief moment in time their worlds are one on a beautiful Caribbean island. When the time comes and the PCV is supposed to return to their previous life in America, I can understand the pressure to make arrangements so the relationship does not have to end. I respect this and admire it in some ways. If you love someone, you should do whatever it takes to make it work. Even if that means uprooting them from everything they now, bringing them to a place where, most likely there are very few other Dominican –Americans (let’s say everywhere outside of New York City and Miami) and telling them to start a brand new life in a place completely new and foreign. What’s the difference between this situation and Noemi’s? Legality? She gave up everything too, is living in a new place away from her family. Granted it’s not America, but in her mind if she loves this man, she is just as noble as the American and Dominican signing legal documents to make one of them a legal citizen.

Last week, Angel, the three-year-old boy who is apart of the family I eat lunch with daily asked me why I don’t have any kids. He was actually fairly perplexed by it, because why wouldn’t I? I am the same age as all the other women in town, including his mom, who have kids. It only makes sense in his mind that I would have kids. And plus, if I did, it would be someone else he could play with. What is most important about his question, however, are a couple of things, 1) Angel was not the first little kid of the week to ask me this question. My neighbor girl, who is either three or four, a few days previous, asked me the same thing. Why I don’t have kids? Do I want kids? 2) Neither one of these little kids asked me if I had a husband. Just kids.

I can’t help but feel liberated when I tell them no- to both the kids and the husband question.

When I tell them that I’m 24 and still don’t have kids or a husband, that’s when the old ladies of my town start to worry. They tell me I need to start having children so I’ll have someone to take care of me when I’m old. I agree with them and tell them I hope to have kids one day and even a husband (Si Dios quiere or God willing), but on my own time. That never goes over well. They just remind me that my time is slipping; I’m already 24 (practically ancient, really) and if I want to get a good man and have kids, I need to get started.

I guess it’s the rush that gets to me. Noemi, at thirteen-years-old, volunteers rushing to marry Dominicans in order to finish paperwork and me feeling the pressure to procreate before my body parts stop working properly.

Being here and seeing marriage in ways I honestly never had before thought about, gives me so much appreciation for my life. And every time a three-year-old or an older lady ask me about marriage, or even a Dominican man asks me to marry him for a visa, I will take great pleasure in the simple word, no.