A different Dominican Republic

For New Year all the Project Trust volunteers headed up north to celebrate at one of the biggest beach parties on the island. Cabarete is a town on the North coast famous for water sports. Its one of the best places in the world for kite and wind surfing, and cool surfer dudes flock from all over to get a taste of the legendary beaches.

I was really looking forward to our holiday, it was a chance to take a break from teaching and the rules of COPA and just relax. However, I was not prepared for the world into which I stepped when we got off the bus. Like many places along the North coast of the Dominican Republic Cabarete is surrounded by plush resorts and huge beach-side villas and hotels. The sandy beaches are deckchair-lined and are the sort of places where a nice Dominican or Haitian man will sell you a coconut that you can drink the milk from with a straw. It was quite a shock for a girl who is used to the chilly windswept beaches of the west of Scotland! We walked to our hostel in a sort of daze along a leafy road, lined with huge houses. It was eerily quiet: no crazy music or roaring motorbikes the only noises were the crunch of 4x4 tires on gravel and the occasional snarl of a guard dog that was obscured by one of the formidable gates that barred the drive to almost every property. It felt almost like walking through suburban Florida. It certainly did not feel like I was in the same crazy, noisy, busy country where we had been living for the past four months.

The other thing that struck me was the lack of Dominicans or Haitians. The beaches were lined with deckchairs, almost each one taken by a white person. When we went to a restaurant it was rare to hear Dominican Spanish and everyone talked to you in English. There were so many white people that Dominican men didn’t even hiss at us in the street, they were so used to Americans! Very strange experience for those of us from Barahona where we have seen perhaps ten other westerners in Barahona over the past four months. For me the lack of Dominicans (those who weren’t selling fruit to tourists on the beach, driving taxis or working in restaurants) highlights the huge void between rich and poor that exists in the country. How can so much wealth and extravagance exist in the same place as such extreme poverty? I don’t understand how people can think of building huge beachside villas minutes away from locals who live in makeshift wooden shacks. Almost every third car on the road was a plush SUV but every second was a Gua Gua (local transport: small privately owned minivans in which rides cost between 25 and 100 pesos) filled to bursting with people, sacks of clothes, fruit, the occasional chicken and the ever-crying babies. If people thought to look around them they would see an amazing country filled with craziness, strange situations and friendly people. One of the Gua Guas we got when we were there had 25 and a half people on it, breaking our previous record of 23, (the half being a huge sack of clothes about the size of a small child). This is a vehicle originally built for 12.

The extreme gap between rich and poor in the Dominican Republic, as with the whole Caribbean, is among the worst in the world. When people come to the country they can stay in plush resorts or beachside apartments where they can be somewhere beautiful but don’t have to venture out into the real world and face reality. You can get private buses to the beach or soak up the sun by the pool. You can spend an afternoon in the hotel gym or order drinks from your balcony with a view of the ocean. If you really want to have a bit of an adventure you could get a ‘village safari’, which takes you around the area to see how local people live. Then you can return to your five star resort where you have power 24/7 and go out for a meal where you can talk to other English speaking people. Whilst this might be an extreme generalisation of tourists in the Dom Rep it does not excuse the huge volume of money, ignorance and excess that exists.

What I found when we were there was that lots of people were just in their own bubble, in ignorant bliss of the world around them. The hostel we were staying in was filled with surfers who had traveled from all over the world to try out Cabarete’s legendary waves. I love meeting different people and that’s the joy of staying in a hostel and traveling; you get to meet loads of new people who you wouldn’t normally cross paths with. We met a couple of Canadian guys who were in the process of kayaking from Brazil to Miami, they were five months in to the seven month journey that covers about 6500km (if you want to know more about it their website is henrykayak.com). Talking to people like that who are traveling and doing crazy adventures made us all feel a bit jealous. Whilst we are all loving what we are doing I think at some points a year can feel like a long time to stay in one place. However that’s the challenge isn’t it? That’s the beauty of what we are doing and what all Project Trust volunteers are doing. We aren’t on holiday, staying in gated houses or beachside resorts. We aren’t traveling from place to place, always moving on to the next destination. This year is a chance for all of us to really connect to a place and a community, to be engulfed by another culture and way of life. We are here because we are ready to be hit in the face with the reality of what the world really is. We are stepping out of the bubble and whilst sometimes that can be really really tough and frustrating I wouldn’t swap it for the world.