The following is an e-mail from the year of the hurricane (Georges) which had hit the island pretty hard, at the expense mostly of roofs and standing crops.

The R. D. is the east half of the same island with Haiti, of course.  Although we moved about in it, we were there to aid a church group of Haitians whose main concern is for Haitians in the country. Haitians are darker and speak a different language, a French-based creole, and are discriminated against.

Mostly the group I worked with serves the Haitian cane workers in their little compounds scattered through the sugar lands. Those compounds, reminiscent of the worst of the ones in our country for migrant agricultural workers, are called bateys. The main church in La Romana, a major sugarmill town on the  southeast corner of the island, has some thirty sub-churches, mostly one-room things in various bateys. We travel around in ancient school buses to our tasks and have been helping to construct a hospital in La Romana as well as carry medical care to the bateys.

The island had been hit by a serious hurricane, so we did a lot of rebuilding and cleaning up. All this is just to while away your time, really. I wrote this up to update my friends about what I did for the week, and all I have to do is paste it into this to tell you about it. So it’s nothing special. Here goes:

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If you build a school, the Dominican government sends a teacher, now, so all the newer batey churches have a second room hooked on the back which is a schoolroom. Build it, and they will come.

We filled and poured the floors for a school in a batey (pronounced baht-AY) called Las Cejas. The challenge was to keep the children from getting hurt without just shooing them off in a nasty manner.  The kids in the batey thought we were the most fun thing to come along in some time, and were under foot a lot, wanting to rubberneck and also to help.

Yes, Las Cejas does mean "the eyebrows", but no one knows why. Some bateys, I guess most of them, are numbered. I’ve been in Batey 205 and Karen’s team visited Batey 18 this past week. A good proportion are named, and it seems to me usually frivolously. I’ve been to Alta Gracia, Mujin, Higuey, Lechuga, 30, 28, Como Quiero. Como Quiero signifies "whatever you like" and Lechuga means "lettuce". No sabe.

A small group of us split off from the concrete pouring to construct benches, or pews if you like, for the structure. And a chairor two besides.  The kids and even some moms got involved in the nail straightening team-- waste not, want not-- and also pushed wheelbarrows or shoveled fill when no one was able to stop them.

I was asked to keep the mixer supplied with water and "do what seems to be needed" otherwise, a congenial assignment. I did a lot of inside work,
spreading fill evenly over the interior for example, because the outside work was more popular with our group of teenagers, who wanted a tan out of the deal. I involved a team of six year olds in my water-fetching. That was cool.

The water thing deviated from the normal right away. It seems there was a leak at the wellhead, and the area around the worksite was turning to mud as the water spread out over the landscape.

Four or five of us, including an engineer and an architect,took shovel and hoe to the problem and channeled it away to a hole. It had become considerably, uh, enriched by flowing over the ground.

Little boys and batey dogs peed in it, ducks and chickens poked about in it.  It was brown. But it was only going into a mix for flooring, so we dug the hole deeper in order to be able to dipper it out with a bucket. The little buckets, I had three of them, were those rubber jobbies they use to measure aggregate for a mixer-load of concrete.

I’d fill the five-gallon one with them and then refill them, leaving them to settle out a bit while I carried the five-gallon over to the mixer area.  Coming back empty I could scoop off the chicken feathers and roots floating on the top and pour the thing full carefully enough to avoid the sediment at the bottom of them. Then I’d refill the rubber buckets and go again.

Some little boys, about six, watched me do this awhile. Then they began to fill my five gallon for me whenever I came back. They got to play in the water and also help "el hombre con la pipa" with the water detail. They captured a total of five rubber buckets and involved a seven year old girl in the team at the peak of the thing. I had to set down the five-gallon and stand back quick as they surrounded it and poured it full all at once in seconds. We were all delighted with the system. It was sort of sad when someone fixed the leak and the hole ceased to replenish itself.

One kid stuck to it to the bitter end. I told him, "Mouin chouazi yo patizan-m," which I *think* is Creole for "I have chosen you as my crewman (or partner or even disciple, maybe; I don’t get the Creole really well, but he seemed pleased with me for saying whatever I had said.)

Two days at Las Cejas and two days at the hospital for me, and then Friday I accompanied the medical team.

At the hospital, which is now a working clinic six days a week, by the way, an amazing thing all by itself, the biggest priority is to repair the fence wall around the property, which the hurricane had broken in many places.

All semblance of security was gone, anyone could walk in at any of a dozen places, some places without even stepping over anything. The gate had been ripped down and whatnot. If the fence were not fixed people would begin to set up housekeeping in there. Squatters arrive anyplace convenient all the time and throw together "housing" out of available materials.  They are hard to evict, once established. With so many displaced by Hurricane Georges this danger is only the more acute.

So we had a mixed team of Mainers and local folk digging out the culch and knocking the broken blocks out all around the wall, pursued by a team of masons rebuilding it behind them. Those guys could actually say they had cleaned up hurricane damage directly. They were not able to set the gate back up, but I daresay the team this coming week will get that done.

I was adopted by three chldren from the barrio which surrounds the hospital.  The oldest one, a girl of eleven, took me to her house to meet her mother. I told her her daughter was charming-- "Su hija es encantada, senora"-- and asked her to accept a bible I had in my day pack, a Spanish one I’d acquired three years before and never usedfor much. She graciously did so.

On my breaks I played with the kids with bubbles, if you’re with me, the
little bottles of bubble solution and the dipping wand you blow into to make them.  But I refused gently but firmly to actually give them anything, so that by the second day they had stopped begging me for stuff.

Instead we talked about my own daughter and what it was like in the north where I lived. They discovered I had very strong fingers when they tried to pry the bubble stuff loose from them. "El hombre tiene de la fuerza!" they said. To test that they had me lifting them off the ground by my fingers.

The roof crew at the hospital was concerned, in addition to acquiring a tan, of course, with the forms that had been pumped full the previous spring to create the framework of the upper story. These needed to be disassembled and stored, since the next story won’t be constructed for better than two years, the way it looks now. Most of the ongoing investment is inside the first floor, improving the clinic.

Storing all those forms is a problem. The hospital itself was almost completely undamaged by the hurricane, but the fence wall and also the storage outbuildings were knocked around pretty hard.

The main storage shed had been given a temporary roof already, but all the stuff inside needed to be organized and space made to put the forms. This was my job both days, it being dirty and unglamourous and out of the sun. I was the dude for the back corners of the place where the cockroaches and so on had set up their little homes. We were able to salvage a lot of materials. And organize the place so that they were once again accessible, and sweep the floors up, once we had exposed them again.

Even so, the forms are 24 feet long. The shed can hold only a tenth of them, or maybe an eighth if you get creative. I expect there will have to be another shed made for the rest of them. They’ll probably stack them and build one around the stack. It’s a big task for anyone, just horsing them down off the roof, for that matter. There’ll be plenty to do on subsequent trips.

A team was formed under the master electrician in the group to do wiring in the surgical suite, and another under the plumber, but I was on neither of these and so I don’t know what they all did, exactly. I know the toilet vents mostly vented into the space above the hung ceiling, and there was to have been a hole or three knocked through the roof to extend those, but there’s plenty of plumbing work to do besides that.

All these little subteams, except mine in the shed, masons at the wall and plumbers and electricians, needed to be supplied with materials and whatnot all the time. Logistics and the politics of logistics occupied a lot of the nighttime discussions.

The gumby award for flexibility in management went to Pat Taber this year.  He’s an architect and was everywhere all week. Expeditions were organized to get wire and plumbing fixtures and lumber for the benches, or pews, in Santo Domingo, as well as oil for the forms and all kinds of incidental stuff. A new pump was installed at the main church in town to supply water to the bathrooms, for instance, since the old pump breathed its last this past week. Pat will be there this coming week as well, still gumbying, I bet, but Karen and I only ever go for a week at a time.

Excitement peaked, as it were, when the wall-cleanup team had to evict a family of rats from a pile of dreck they were removing.

All rats are bigger than they have a right to be, don’t you find? I mean, nobody ever says they saw a small rat. It’s always big: A really big rat! That long!!  So the word was, these were ’way big rats, dude. A big momma rat and a clutch of babies, in company with at least a couple of other big big rats.

After quietening the team members, the obvious task of first importance was to allow rodents to escape so that the cleanup could continue, and it would have worked, except that one of the barrio kids injured one of the babies, probably fatally, right in front of the momma rat. The crew boss was forced, then, to kill it, the baby I mean, to put it out of its misery and to allow the momma to turn her attention to clearing out the rest of the little ones.

Another exciting moment or two was provided by some Really! Big! Centipedes!  Life is exciting on wall cleanup, for sure.

Meanwhile the medical team was travelling to a collection of bateys which
they’d never been to before, all of which were without branch churches from Jean-Luc’s church organization. The neatest of these was one where they set up on the porches of three houses, using the terms "porch" and "house" loosely, there being no other structures to set the clinic up in.

At the same place they gave Depo-Provera shots intramuscularly, meaning in the fleshy parts, in the relative privacy of each woman’s home, which allowed them to speak to everyone at length and see where they were all living and so on. That was nice, because it was more personal than the team usually has time to become. A successful improvisation always feels good, anyway.

"Seeing how everyone lived" becomes a bit grimmer if you recast it more accurately as "seeing where they were all forced to live", of course. The bateys are not happy places. At Las Cejas at one point a flotilla of four-wheel ATVs bearing Italian tourists came through. Pat was outraged and sarcastic. "Welcome to Las Cejas!," he shouted at them. "Have a good look at poverty and degradation!" They moved right along without stopping.

There’s plenty more to talk about. Friday I took blood pressures and pulses and took temperatures all day, for instance.  It was the first time I’d done anything medical with the medical teams. I was very polite, almost courtly, sympathetic and kind, to belie the feeling of being processed which could have developed otherwise.

 For some reason, middle-aged women and mothers in their late twenties cottoned to me; I may have been a touch too polite and courtly. No direct offers of marriage, but they smiled and touched my hand and told me their problems, and asked if I were married.

Most adult patients passed from the intake table, where a woman asked them to list their medical problems and made out a card for them to carry, through my station where I entered vital signs on the card and took blood sugars where necessary, to the doctors, and finally to the pharmacy and out.

Additionally, there was a Vermox table, at which was dispensed a swig of anti-parasite medicine to anyone who was seen to have such a problem.  Everyone had a drink at the Vermox bar, and they got a painted fingernail afterward, to avoid double dosing. The kids loved the fingernail polish, and the guys accepted theirs with jokes and good humor.

This was at Como Quiero. People came back around my table afterward to thank me and debrief about what they’d had done inside, which I found flattering.

Thanks for the book, though I hardly got a moment to do any reading.  All I've been describing takes place in a matrix of talk among the team members, as each personality responds to all they’ve seen while they go about their work. This journey of the spirit is more important than any actual tasks we were accomplishing, I believe. The place changes us more than we change the place.

Because shaking down the impact of the third world on the emotions and the mind is absolutely important, I was always willing to listen to anyone. More in demand than the pastors, actually. I am proudest of that, more even than of the six-year-old creole bucket team.