Press Release!!!

Today, (23.01.2007), at 09:35 am, urban grassroots organisations in Santo Domingo had a press conference at Club Manoto Tavarez Justo, a local culture and sport club located just next to the Francisco del Rosario Sánchez Bridge on Ozoma River.

The place has consciously chosen, as the current extension project of the bridge poses a great risk of forced eviction to many houses and businesses. The construction of metro, also, is a great concern of Dominican social movements. Massive amount of resources are allocated for the 14 km long construction project, just before the coming elections. Rightly so, social organisations raise their concerns about various political, social and economic dimensions of the project.

One of the major fears is if the (new) president will continue to show political commitment to finish the project after the election. The corruption due to lack of transparency is another crucial concern. While poverty is widespread and lack of investment in health, education and housing sectors make the life of many poor people further difficult, the speed and amount of resources allocated for the construction of metro raises the suspicions.

Thus, social and community organisations working at various barrios and on different urban concerns such as education, health, housing, community development etc. had a press conference to raise these concerns and call the president to include their views and demands into the current projects in particular, and to follow more participatory and democratic urban planning and development in general.

The press conference, as it would be expected, was attended by only one TV channel, TeleSistema, and later, Michael Miguel, a famous TV presenter joined and had a meeting with community leaders.

Juan Dolio

I spend the last 5 days of 2006 in Juan Dolio, 25 kms long coast that holds numorous all-inclusive resorts, smaller hotels, summer houses etc. It is about an hour ride from Santo Domingo with a RD$50 (US$1.5) guagua. JD has a beautiful, archatypical Caribbean beach with all the palm trees and white sand. Yet, because of the dead coral under the sea, swimming is not as pleasant as in the other parts of the island. There are numorous cheap accomodation, food and entertainment options in JD, which make it an ideal place for extended weekends and backpackers. At the same time, it is much more peaceful than its neighbour and big brother Boca Chica.

At the Rough Guide, I read about a hotel, named “Fior di Loto”, which seemed very interesting with its India-themed rooms, free yoga classes, big gym and resonably priced rooms (US$10 a-nite). When I met with the owner of the hotel, an Italian woman, all the Indian theme, yoga classes, Indian music made sense, as she, under her Indian clothes, heavily involved with India, living half of the year over there working on her charity.

Mainly Italian and French tourist were staying in the hotel, as well as in Juan Dolio. Many of the businesses including hotels, restaurants, bars and supermarkets are owned by the expats. For instance, the only mini-market around where I was staying was onwed by a Japoness family, there were lots of Italian restaurants, an Austrian-owned bar and a Swedish-owned cafe.

I saw and met with many western tourists and expatriats in JD, some of whom I really disliked. Many of them have looked like as if they found their little paradise in the Dominican Republic, in JD, far far away from their cold-expensive western countries, enjoying slow, hot, hedonism-filled lifes, yet reminding other people how close can someone’s paradise be to another’s hell. Something looked wrong, smelled bad, and tasted disgusting, at least for me. Many of those people were male, over middle-age, “ugly” (with all its dimensions), white, lonely characters, bond to each other with one and only common denominator. Almost as if they were different to human-kind, another spicies. The substaintial part of their life in JD was composed of sleeping with different women for RD$500, about 15 US dollars. They were proud of this as their language was mainly around “fuck”.

First day, I met with an in/famous man from USA, around his 60s, with a long white hair and a big beard. He had a huge belly, and a huge comfort in the place. He, “bi-bi or vi-vi” as people called, was living in the hotel, being an old “stamp collector”, now he was enjoying his life in JD as serving to the western male community as a friendly pimp. After exchanging regards, and asking what am i doing in the DR, the first thing he told me was, “now I am fucking my life here, dominican women are beautiful, aren’t they?” I met with another person from the States at the hotel, much younger, ginger head man. Before I heard his story, just by my observations I thought, “oohh, he looks really wierd”. Then I learnt that he was a soldier in Iraq and kicked out of the military after “getting crazy”. I heard about a French tourist, who only came to JD for prostitution, so far he has been with 30 women in 2 weeks. I saw men not even saying hello to the woman whom they slept a night ago. Another Canadian man, a drug dealer doing business through Haiti, told me, whom I don’t even know his name, “I will go to get my German girlfriend, we will have some breakfast and later probably go to my place and fuck. She is, (showing with two fingers) that much taller than me..”

Overall, at the end of my experience, I thought I really do not want to live in a world where there are perverts like the ones I met. The quality of life, the beauty of living, the meaning of human relationship are extremely devalued by such people. And I do not have any sort of religious or moralistic dogmas, yet my intellect and ethics draws the line.

Just for a footnote, I also meet with very nice people, like Michel, who took me to the clinic on the new year eve when I got poisened, where I spend my new year and birthday. Of course, I enjoyed the beautiful beach, relaxed with a Yoga class and was amazed by the sun-set over the Caribbean sea.

From London to Punta Cana

4.12.2006

Mytravel Journey started with 45 minutes delay. Passengers were mainly white British package-holiday tourists. I got a feeling that most of the people were accoustomed to this sort of tours. At the plane, there were very few children. Mytravel, as it states, sells “flight seats”, which explains the range of services included into and excluded from the ticket. On board, apart from a cheap, really bad lunch and a slice-of-greasy-pizza dinner, everything is subject to purchase. For instance, to be able to use multimedia screen I had to buy headphones for ₤2.5. 300cc water was ₤1 and a small can beer was ₤3. Through out the journey, air-stewards constantly promoted consumption by cutting-off the audio-video services and promoting duty-free products and lottery tickets.

As soon as arriving to the Punta Cana Airport, Dominican girls with funny fruit basket hats, whom I thought to be working for Mytravel tours, welcomed tourists. At the arrival door, couples and families posed with the girls to a digital camera, which cheerfully and officially started their “holiday in the egzotic paradise island”. Being the only single passenger, I had to pose alone in the middle of two girls. One of the girls, with a sexy and over-exited tone, whispered to my ear “welcome to the Dominican Republic baby”, which I thought was a reference to the widespread sex tourism.

Tourism is one of the major economic sectors in the Dominican Republic. All-inclusive holiday resorts constitutes the bulk of this activity. Western tourists buy their holidays from their home-countries through a non-dominican tour operator, such as Thomas Cook, Mytravel etc. They take one of these charter flights, stay in one of the segregaded resorts for a week or two, which are mainly owned by transnational holiday companies. Usually without contributing to the local economy directly, they enjoy the beautiful sun-sea-beach trio and go back to their countries. Through out this cycle, they can survive without spending a peso. Thus, real benefit and added-value of tourism for a lower class Dominican (or anyone living in a tourism country) is very low. Construction of holiday resorts have detrimental environmental, social and cultural implications. To built resorts, many people are forced to evict their homes. These resorts consume excess amount of resources such as water and energy, the latter being extremely scarce in the country. They contribute to the de-forestation of native species such as mangroove forests. Service sector jobs, with being over-time and under-paid, have tremendously explotative working conditions. Sex tourism is an integral part of this business, both men and women from West come to the paradise in search of “love”, which I will share my own experiences soon.

My mysteries family...

In Santo Domingo, I am living with Santos, his 2 years old son, and his young sweet girlfriend. Santos is taking good care of me, providing a good room with bathroom, and any support I need. His son Chris is an active, very handsome little man, whose love to play sometimes limits my ability to work and study, but anyway he is a funny mate. And Maria, the girl friend is cooking and cleaning and washing and still manages to share her warm smile with me all the time.

My big man (he is about 2 metres and 120 kgs!!) is 28 years old LAW student. He has a nice house in Invi-Mosa, an eastern periphery of SD inhabited by mostly middle-low income working class families. His car is a white sport Cadillac, a bit old but definitely much more run-down than its age. As most of the men here, Santos also does not do much domestic work like cleaning, cooking, washing, buying food etc. He spend lots of time in his bedroom, watching TV, using computer... I wonder a lot what he actually does, if he works for instance. It was a big mystery for me.. He told me he works with his father, who is the leader of the transportation federation of Santo Domingo. But doing what???

And one night, the night Santos finished all of his coursework for the university, the mystery revealed when I returned to the house. I came to the house and there were boxes everywhere. There were hundreds of DVDs in another corner of the house, mostly Van Damme, Stallone, Arnold movies, porns and some blockbusters. Then I went to the bedroom of Santos, where I saw three teenagers, and three huge computers with lots and lots of DVD writers. One of the boys were in front of the computer changing the DVDs all the time, another one was printing DVD covers with 2 color printing and constantly filling the printers with ink and the third one, a girl was cutting the DVD colors with scissor and finalising the process. They were working as a machine, seemed to be accustomed to what they were doing and taking the work very seriously. Then I learnt that 2 of them were the nephews of Santos. After that night, every following night up until now, they have been coming to the house at night and working until 2 AM. Now the workshop is moved to the living room, where there are more space for more efficient production.

At least now I know one of the works Santos is doing, my future lawyer friend is a copied DVD baron. :) Once again, it is a beautiful combination of an informal and formal, an illegal and legal.. Of course, other than enjoying this sort of colorful household life, I was using the extensive DVD archive since that first night.

Guaguas, motoconchos, chaos and beauty...

Whilst i was going to work from my home with a GUAGUA (mini-bus) this morning, a huge green truck crashed into a white SUV (see the photo above). Hearing the sound of the accident all the people in the guagua turned towards the accident and started discussing about it.. At the same moment, in our guagua, which was initially produced to carry more or less 20 people, there were about 40 people, all packed and extremely vulnerable to any traffic accident. People were shocked about the experience, which was really difficult to understand for me when considering the overall condition of transportation in Santo Domingo (SD).

Transportation of SD is controlled by total chaos. For sure, living a year and half in London has soften and "civilised" my attitudes towards traffic, even though i come from a country that is proud with the level of chaos on its roads. However, something is really special here, in Santo Domingo. Chaos has another meaning, taste and beauty. It is much more raw, in your face, wild.. And much more accepted as part of the "normal" life. Here, when traffic stacks, when cars crash into each other, or even when people almost die, it is not so much important.. There is no regulation, or an authority to shape, to better the transportation. Therefore, the invisible hand arranges itself.

In such a context, the extremes obviously become really really extreme. I mean, the other day i was in a guagua going back home. Another guagua in front of us broke down. And for about 10 minutes, our guagua pushed the other one by hitting to its rear and causing an acceleration. Of course passengers were coming and going at this time, and couple of times, the pushing activity got really out of control.. These 2 guaguas had passed couple of cops on the way and it was completely OK. And finally, we the people realize there is something wrong with the situation and raised our voice.

Guaguas are part of the informal system of transportation in Dominican Republic, so as motoconchos and publicos. Apart from about a 10% of public contribution of municipalities to transportation, the rest of the workload is carried by these small private transporters. Guagua signifies a vehicle (bus, minibus, van) run by a driver and a cobrador (money man), which carries as many people as the space allows from one direction to another with a very loud Bachata music at the background. Publicos or carros are cars, usually rundown Japanese cars, that run along a route and carries about 6 people at any time. And finally, motoconchos are motorbike taxis that would carry you to your final destination. The common denominator of all of these vehicles are that they are usually extremely run-down and they all love Bachata. The beautiful part of this informal system is that it serves for poors at a very low cost and reaches almost all parts of the country. People are talkative, thus can be a space to socialise. For instance, the other night, in one of these guaguas, Mari (a lady at her 40s living around my neighbourhood) gave me her telephone number to drink some beers after talking 1 minute with me. The down sides are that they are highly uncomfortable, dangerous and causing so many traffic problems.

Majority of these transporters are part of a transportation union called Fenatra, the same organisation that is sponsoring me here to work on forced eviction. Father of William, my flatmate, is the president of Fenatra and William also works part-time with his father when has time from his petite-mafia activities, which i will write another time.

Finally, i am broadcasting from Santo Domingo...

I finally find my safe space (and free source of Internet) to keep the record of my new life in Dominican Republic (DR). I am having so many interesting and challenging experiences every single moment, meeting with so many new people that i am afraid i will not remember most of them and won´t be able to share with the loved ones, if any point i meet again..

So, i will be sharing stories, mostly non-fiction, about myself in DR, people i have meet, and general reflections. It will be retrospective and thematic, rather than sequential.

Here i am, sitting in my new office for the next 3 - 4 months, in the Ciudad Alternativa. The Ciudad Alternativa is a Santo Domingo based NGO, mainly working on the issues of urban development, urban poverty, participatory planning etc. It is a technical/professional NGO, working closely with communities and organised civil society. Today, through Marianella, i met with most of the people working here, about 22 people!!! They seems to be very organised and systematic, and resourceful. Mainly doing research on planning and advocacy work.

I had a warm welcome here, everybody trying to call my name and nobody succeeding.. I have been yesher, jesher, jasher, jashe, jashat etc. Nothing near to Yashar, or even Yasar!! There are two ladies in the kitchen, for preparing coffees and cleaning the offices. One work during the morning and the other at the afternoon. One is Senora Blanca (Mrs. White) and the other is Senora Negra (Mrs. Black)..

After work, i suppose to call Ellias, a hairdresser whom i met at my flat last night. After he learnt that i can speak English, he started to talk in English with his Borat-like accent, and ask, "hey my friend, do you want to fuk wuman? I know lots of wuman because i am a hairdresser.." Hehehehe. And i broke into laugh, after having a difficult day at the beach (yes, difficult day at the Caribbean beach, funny but true). Ellias was a bit disappointed with my laughter but i couldn't stop. I really wanted to spend some time alone at the beach after meeting with one million people in 2 weeks, and while lying down under the sun, it started to rain! And on the way back, the car broke down and we waited for 2 hours on the highway, and finally after everything fixed, just before arriving my house, another car crushed into ours.. At least before going to bed, i had some merengue classes from my flatmates!