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.
