Dominican Republic

Dear Readers,

Sorry I didn´t post yesterday as was my duty. I was expecting reflections to end a little earlier so I could squeeze my thoughts in.

What the group did today was plant trees everywhere. Apple, avocado, lemon, and passion fruit. Then we went to a Futbol Para La Vida (FPV) meeting. The meeting talked about the way a community should support someone who suffers from HIV/AIDS. They made a game of it by having someone stand in the middle of a circle and be supported around the circle. When the people who made the circle fell out the person would fall. I have a sense that everyone in that room understood that they had a very strong community in the batey, and that AIDS was a new intruder into their ways of life.

The sense of community is utterly apparent within the batey. Most people’s doors are open almost all of the time and people go in and out of other people’s houses. The fact that people are sharing the privacy of their homes with others already speaks volumes about the fact that they feel like one big family. To many people in the group, I think that this alone gave them a bit of culture shock since we are so used to the American way of things where you lock your door 4 or 5 times just in case someone might stumble in.

Another thing that shows us the level of community in the batey is the fact that lots of the men are building the house for someone else. This sort of symbiotic relationship between the people of the batey is extremely inherent to the culture.

However, a problem is that most of the people in this community are Haitian. The Dominicans are somewhere else. This would lead us to the concept of racism and racial inequality at the Batey. However, I think I will end on this because I feel like that should be another entry.

Kareem Sayegh
University Laboratory High School
Urbana, IL