Why I hate/love this country...

This is an exact account of my day today:

-HATE: I woke up and decided I needed to do laundry. As soon as I put my clothes in the lavadora - or washing machine- with soap and water, se fue la luz- or the power went out. So I had most of clothes sitting in soapy water, waiting to use the power of electricity to be cleaned. (On a side note: Dominican washing machines are not at all like American style washing machines. You take a hose to fill the “washing” side up, it spins in two directions for 15 minutes, and then you take it out and put it in a spinner that sort of acts like a dryer, but basically it just spins the clothes really fast causing the water/soap/strange looking fluids to exit. Then the clothes are rinsed with non-soapy water, put back into the spinner and then presto! Hang the clothes up to dry in the sun, and they’re ready in 1-12 hours, depending on the sun’s intensity and whether it’s raining or not. But without electricity, it's just one big annoying process). So yes, the power went out at the most annoying time- as soon as my clothes were nice and soapy. I didn’t even bother to do the laundry by hand either- I just drained the soap, tried to rinse it out as best I could and left them in the machine. I’ll try again tomorrow.

-LOVE: I went to Silvia’s house for lunch and she had made my favorite: la bandera, which consisted of white rice, beans and chicken. After lunch, her, Angelis (her son), Angel (her grandson) and myself went down to the neighbor’s house and watched Angelis literally climb a 30-foot tree and cut down branches of lemoncia. Lemoncia is a crazy tropical fruit which is basically an over sized seed with a thin green peel. You break the peel easy with your teeth and suck off a pinkish, slimy and stringy substance around the seed that happens to be delicious.

-HATE: After lunch, I went to my center and met up with Fausto, Selsy and Mon (my coworkers) to go to Santiago to buy books and supplies for our library. Because Fausto is currently borrowing his brother’s car from the capital, we all decided it would be perfect to go and load the car up with as many things as possible.

And that’s what we started to do. After only one store, we had $23,000 pesos worth of books and supplies in our cart, and when I went to pay for it with the bank card I opened before I left for America, it didn’t work. At first I thought I forgot the pin number, so I ran to a bank (thankfully right across the street) to try to take money out of an ATM. I frantically tried every pin number combination I could think of, but nothing happened. Fausto came and found me and we dialed the bank “help-line,” where I actually spoke to someone in English. After being on the phone with this person for 15 minutes, going through security checks to make sure I really was the person I was claiming to be, he tells me he can’t tell me my pin number over the phone.

Immediately Fausto and I rushed down the street to a branch of the bank that was still open and waited in line there for at least a half-an-hour, because there is NO SUCH THING as customer service in this country. After waiting for what seemed like forever and me glaring at the girl who had two customers ahead of us who she had not yet helped, she asked us what we wanted and then informed us that the pin machine was broken.

We scrambled again, walked back up to the store with our $23,000 peso bill already rung up, told Selsy and Ramon we had to go to another bank in a mall about 15 minutes away. Traffic was horrible, so it took us about 40 minutes to get there, and when we finally did the teller tells me I need my passport to do anything to the account.

I stared at her in the eyes for a few seconds and just started crying. I showed her my Peace Corps ID (which has my passport number on it) and tried to explain what had already happened and how I just need to change/know the pin number so we could go buy our books. The head boss lady felt sorry and took me into her office where she again went through security checks with me, looked at her computer for five minutes without saying anything, and then told me that the account was never setup properly in the first place and would never have worked anyway. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I just asked what I needed to do to make it start working. She said I had no choice but to return with my passport and basically re-setup the account.

There was absolutely no book buying done. We left the bank somber and I felt so embarrassed, angry and annoyed I barely spoke.

-LOVE: On the ride home, almost in complete silence, Mon tells Fausto to pull over at a convenience store type place so he can buy water. He comes out with two beers instead. He hands one to Selsy and me with a smile. I ask him what these are for, and he says so that I’m not sad anymore. And although I am NOT a proponent of drunk driving, Mon and Fausto share a beer in the front and Selsy and I share one in the back, driving toward sundown with the windows down and merengue in our ears.

-HATE: After dinner, I go upstairs to take my nightly bucket bath and there is the BIGGEST, UGLIEST-looking tarantula I have seen yet on this island, just chilling on the stairs. This thing was as big as both of my hands put together. I screamed, scared all the dogs and Francia, and then made her kill it with a broom that she broke in half during the process.


Oh well, I guess you win some and lose some…