machetes, motos and caña

Today, I witnessed a fight in the streets of Pancho Mateo. One woman apparently slept with another woman’s hombre, and this conflict quickly escalated. When I poked my head out of the church where we were doing research, I spotted the larger of the two women wildly swinging around a machete. The skinner woman retaliated by literally stoning the woman and then left on a motorcycle. The two community members I was talking with, who were seventeen and eighteen, said that these kind of fights are common.

I played a game of pick-up soccer on the community’s basketball court. I kicked some butt with a pass that turned into an assist that turned into a goal, so I totally scored a goal by just two degrees of separation. Our goalie was a little boy, who was no more than seven or eight years old.

The children on the court were all eating sugar cane. It’s easy to get to since the sugar refinery in the nearby town of Montellano closed down five years ago. The cane is free and readily available if you just cross the highway and hack away with a machete. I still haven’t gotten used to the idea of elementary school-age children handling sharp and dangerous tools, but here they were.

These same community members offered us sugar cane. The texture is like cardboard. You bite off a hunk and chew, thereby sucking out the sugar inside, and spit out the stalk once you’re done with it. There are pieces of eaten cane all around the basketball courts because these children chew so much of this stuff. It’s also incredibly calorie-rich, if incredibly lacking in all nutritional value.

Then one of the research participants handed me the machete and the cane. Holding the sugar cane in my left hand and the machete in my right, I hacked away. One little boy ran away when I started to swing the blade and understandably so. But I didn’t chop my fingers off and everyone left with the same number of limbs that they started with, so I’m going to call this one a victory.

I met a man in the Dominican Air Force (and I know this because he was also dressed in full uniform) who offered to give me Spanish lessons and liked me because there is a WWE wrestler who shares my name. A nine-year old boy was fighting for my attention and definitively declared that I was his gringa girlfriend. I chatted with a twenty-nine year old with a seven year old daughter, absolutely amazing dreadlocks and massive biceps. I danced with a little girl, listening to music that someone was blasting from their cell phone.

So in a lot of ways, Pancho Mateo is nothing like anything I have ever experienced. The community is full of cultural norms that I find jarring. But those differences, although important, do not matter in a lot of ways. I was still able to connect with many people in many different ways even though I come from a different culture and speak a different language. Although I was in this community last year, I feel that my experience in Pancho this time around has been more intimate. I’m learning a lot, and my Spanish is going from nonexistent to simply terrible. Yes, this community needs a lot of help. But ultimately, it a community of people living and working and playing together, and that sense of togetherness and that welcoming nature is invaluable and deserves to be recognized.