Dominoes & Dancing

Adjusting to life in the campo has been an interesting experience. Most of my adjustment process has been sleeping more, and earlier than usual. There is only so much to do in a day here. Since our research projects are coming to a close, all we have to do is work on our papers, work on our presentations, go to Spanish class twice a week, and that’s about it. I would find myself just pacing up and down our one street community just to say I did something.

Every day at five-o-clock a small group of us go for a walk around the community, venturing to the next campo and back again. We always see interesting things and creatures along the way. We usually encounter men with machetes walking down the street, children running around naked and lots of animals.  We pass rolling hills of countless grazing cattle, and a ranch with horses. We also are greeted by pecking peacocks, mostly females showing their babies how to be proper birds of beauty. The scene of infinite palm trees that are seen from the tops of the hills are united by a border of the red-brown dirt roads that were shaped by the people traveling to work, to their houses, to visit their friends, going nowhere. The tranquility of this simple life is complemented by the beauty of the natural environment that cradles it.

There are an infinite amount of flora in the country, the variety of plants just in the yard of my host family’s house is incredible, mostly because they plants just grow, without the intervention, for the most part, of man. I took an afternoon after lunch to explore the yard and count all the different plants that were there. I got to seventeen and decided that photos would be better. The plants here are so exotic and colorful, there is a cattail on the side of the house that is bright red and a flower that blooms both yellow and pink. There are even hibiscus flowers here, the universal symbol for tropical climates.

Once it becomes too dark for walks or admiring the nature, the whole town heads to the Esquina to play endless games of dominoes. Almost every day there is at least one game going from about 7pm until they get good and ready to go home.  Since the Americanas showed up, we have added to the numbers and contribute a table or two of dominoes to the already established games. Dominoes is a very intense game over here, kind of like old American men and horseshoes…it’s not a joke. You can see Dominicans of all ages, men and women, gathered around tables of four playing in tournaments or just casual games to keep from getting rusty. Keeping score takes a lot of mental math, because you can win points in the middle of a game, at the end or a round, whether you won that round or not…there are so many ways to win points that you have to be paying attention the whole time. My mental math skills have definitely been challenged here. Since you can only play four at a time and there are only so many tables, and because music is always, always, ALWAYS playing in this country, there is no dominoes without dancing. Between rounds it is very common for a guy, usually old, to get up and start dancing merengue for a song with some unexpecting, slightly creeped out young lady. These baila breaks, obviously, prolong all of the games and they last forever.

Regardless of whether there are dominoes or not, if the Americans are there, there shall be music! Everywhere we go, if someone has a stereo, they immediately play music for us. One night for one of the girl’s birthdays the family ran the car just to play music from the stereo. I’m pretty sure it’s battery died on us. In our honor, they especially like to play American Top 40 songs or timbau songs, like Palante or Muevete Heavy…the Dominican equivalents of the unedited versions of “Yeah” or “Drop It Like It’s Hot.”  This literally happens wherever we go.  One night we wanted to play Mafia, and we had to keep telling these guys to turn the music down because we couldn’t hear each other eliminate our murder suspects.

But the music isn’t all bad. There is this one disco in the campo called 20/20, a chill place where you can [in my cheesy announcer voice] play a pickup game of billiards, drink a Presidente and, of course, dance. It’s funny because on the sign it says “Lo mejor de aquí…” but is should say “Lo único de aquí” because being the only one that exists for a good thirty of forty minutes, naturally, it is the best. In general, it’s not bad, just a little awkward because the same ten guys are always there, and they always ask us to dance and its really weird when you see them around the campo, and you know their life’s story just because this town has like ten people in it.