Hi, Yari Jamali here, reporting for blogging duty. What is there to say about Day 3? Well...plenty, really. Today was our first day working in the Barrio Blanco, a rather poor neighborhood in Cabarete. This neighborhood, as with several others in the DR, suffers from a trash problem. It's not as if it's your average Friday morning in the US; you stumble around in your bathrobe for a cup of coffee and begrudgingly scoot all of your trash out on the sidewalk while the garbagemen come and take it away for you. Good luck with that. In the DR, you are responsible for your own trash. No garbagemen are going to come to Barrio Blanco and whisk away your trash, sadly enough. Being that there was no real way to dispose of trash, or an ideal location to put trash, the community had no real choice but to make their ideal location...wherever. In the alleyways, behind their house, or, more often than not, just the plain ol' ground. This posed a problem not only for the fact that it was litter polluting the environment, but also that kids often run around barefoot in the streets, putting them at risk of stepping on a bottle cap, or, in some cases, something worse. As Seyi mentioned, unfortunately, there was a little girl who had apparently stepped on a nail while we were there. It was jarring, but in an odd sort of way, as it made me feel more motivated to help the neighborhood with their trash problem in order to prevent things like this from happening again. The [DR]EAM Team last year came up with a great idea to transport trash, by placing wheels on the bottom of trashcans to make them easy to transport to designated areas for garbage. We followed in their footsteps today by organizing a simple trash pickup, where we walked around the neighborhood picking up trash, and also painted some trashcans to make them look appealing to the eye. The key here was not necessarily our direct actions, but how we could create a potential lasting impact on the community. For example, some kids in the neighborhood noticed us picking up trash, and asked if they could help. Eventually, if this behavior to pick up trash spreads across the neighborhood to the point where it becomes a norm, that is when we know our actions have truly made a lasting impact. It's what we strive for.
Something else that left me with a smile on my face today was my experience working with preschool kids in a school built by the DREAM Project. Last semester, in my THET285 and LING200 classes (shameless plug; great classes, I recommend them), we focused at least a little time on the concept of non-verbal communication. While this happens almost constantly as we communicate with others, oftentimes without us even thinking about it, I did not think I would get to experience how much of an impact it makes in the communication process so soon after focusing on the concept. I was working with four year olds. What do I have to offer in terms of knowledge to four year olds living in the Dominican Republic? Little to nothing. Oh, I don't doubt my own intellectual capabilities, but learning Spanish for five years in school means next to nothing when you can only understand Spanish spoken very clearly, audibly and without stuttering, almost like a robot. In other words, unlike how any Spanish-speaker actually sounds. This is the part where non-verbal communication comes in to save the day. While I was saddened at the fact that I could not engage in intellectual, philosophical debates with four year olds, I have come to learn throughout my twenty years of life that I can make some pretty funny faces and sounds, if I do say so myself. I bridged the gap between the Dominican children and myself not through Spanish, but through the universal language of laughter. There's just something magical about relating to someone else with laughter. Perhaps it's the sensation of not only enjoying yourself, which is awesome in itself, but enjoying yourself with another person creates what we call a "moment" between individuals. So far on this trip, even though my allergies have been putting me down, I had plenty of "moments" with plenty of individuals.
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