A premonition of middle age came upon me a few weeks ago, in the slow days between the visits of good friends from home. This was mostly sparked by the passing of my one-year-in-the-peace-corps anniversary, and the concurrent cataloging of all the things I have not accomplished – all the work left to be done. I had this realization as I walked a ridgeline above the valley under the noonday sun, pausing occasionally to scan the hedges for ripe pineapples. A hot day – moving out of the too-brief-too-wet winter – and in the half haze you could see all the way to the Atlantic. A good day to get out the kinks of cabin fever and make some bold leaps toward productivity.
*
My work has changed around a bit. Several side projects are still running, but the wreckage of the rainy season and the polite but firm aid-agency proposal rejections have finished my work toward a road in Vuelta Larga. The costs are simply too high and the existing channels too uninterested. I suppose this is a branding of reality and I should be consciously savoring some disillusionment, but I have no shortage of windmills at which to tilt.
By virtue of my ability to operate a global-positioning-satellite receiver (GPS) and make a map, my local Dominican coworkers reached the somewhat rash conclusion that I am capable of building an aqueduct in the town of Los Guayuyos, located just upriver from Vuelta Larga. Even in my wildest resume fabrications I never though to put down “Civil Engineer,” but this particular job has proven remarkably feasible. After a crash course in hydrodynamics in Santo Domingo, I set about the planning of a gravity-fed system capable of providing 300 people with potable water. The designs are nearly done, the funding mostly secured, and the shovels sharpened. Theory and reality are soon to collide spectacularly.
*
But on that new spring day I was still working out the basics. Wandering Los Guayuyos, I was using a Peace Corps GPS to mark coordinates and elevations of potential faucet sites. Perhaps you can appreciate the impact of a sunburned gringo stumbling about a village, stopping occasionally to press some buttons and elicit some beeps from a black plastic object the size of a paperweight. Whereas in the US I would have been either 1.) arrested, 2.) shot or 3.) both, the locals in this case frequently emerged from their houses and shady front yards to ask me if I was having any luck finding reception on my new cell phone. Many offered me water as well, doubtlessly saving my life. As I chatted, trying to explain the significance of georeferencing their aqueduct design, it was not lost on me that the water I was drinking had been carried by hand in buckets from streams up to a mile away. I suspect it was not lost on them, either, but Dominican generosity knows no limits. I turned down six offers of coffee on that day alone.
But as I reached the last house on the ridge, I met a woman cooking lunch who proceeded to ask me the casually probing, painfully personal questions I so often get as a corollary of that generosity. When she finished with my love life and got around to asking me how long I’d been living in the valley, I was surprised to find that I didn’t know the answer in exact months, weeks, days and hours, as I had when I first arrived back in days of antiquity. She marveled nonetheless that nearly a year had rolled by for an American in the jungle. “But time moves pretty quickly around here,” she added.
Through the days of rain stuck inside, the headaches of communication and the interminable traveling required of every activity, I never would have thought to call this life “quick” until she mentioned it. Yet so it has been, and so it will most likely continue. I thanked the woman for the unexpected wisdom, and continued down the path until I was back under the trees, breathing deeply and trying to slow down a bit.
*
My work has changed around a bit. Several side projects are still running, but the wreckage of the rainy season and the polite but firm aid-agency proposal rejections have finished my work toward a road in Vuelta Larga. The costs are simply too high and the existing channels too uninterested. I suppose this is a branding of reality and I should be consciously savoring some disillusionment, but I have no shortage of windmills at which to tilt.
By virtue of my ability to operate a global-positioning-satellite receiver (GPS) and make a map, my local Dominican coworkers reached the somewhat rash conclusion that I am capable of building an aqueduct in the town of Los Guayuyos, located just upriver from Vuelta Larga. Even in my wildest resume fabrications I never though to put down “Civil Engineer,” but this particular job has proven remarkably feasible. After a crash course in hydrodynamics in Santo Domingo, I set about the planning of a gravity-fed system capable of providing 300 people with potable water. The designs are nearly done, the funding mostly secured, and the shovels sharpened. Theory and reality are soon to collide spectacularly.
*
But on that new spring day I was still working out the basics. Wandering Los Guayuyos, I was using a Peace Corps GPS to mark coordinates and elevations of potential faucet sites. Perhaps you can appreciate the impact of a sunburned gringo stumbling about a village, stopping occasionally to press some buttons and elicit some beeps from a black plastic object the size of a paperweight. Whereas in the US I would have been either 1.) arrested, 2.) shot or 3.) both, the locals in this case frequently emerged from their houses and shady front yards to ask me if I was having any luck finding reception on my new cell phone. Many offered me water as well, doubtlessly saving my life. As I chatted, trying to explain the significance of georeferencing their aqueduct design, it was not lost on me that the water I was drinking had been carried by hand in buckets from streams up to a mile away. I suspect it was not lost on them, either, but Dominican generosity knows no limits. I turned down six offers of coffee on that day alone.
But as I reached the last house on the ridge, I met a woman cooking lunch who proceeded to ask me the casually probing, painfully personal questions I so often get as a corollary of that generosity. When she finished with my love life and got around to asking me how long I’d been living in the valley, I was surprised to find that I didn’t know the answer in exact months, weeks, days and hours, as I had when I first arrived back in days of antiquity. She marveled nonetheless that nearly a year had rolled by for an American in the jungle. “But time moves pretty quickly around here,” she added.
Through the days of rain stuck inside, the headaches of communication and the interminable traveling required of every activity, I never would have thought to call this life “quick” until she mentioned it. Yet so it has been, and so it will most likely continue. I thanked the woman for the unexpected wisdom, and continued down the path until I was back under the trees, breathing deeply and trying to slow down a bit.
