"In
the mountains of Hispaniola, on the border between the Dominican
Republic and Haiti, is a tiny village that would have been of tiny
consequence had it not been discovered by someone with big ideas –
someone who was out to save Rio Limpio – its river, its hillsides, its
people – and thereby, to save the world." - Mark Feedman, modern
pioneer on the Dominican Republic frontier.
The Haitian earthquake in January 2010 prompted me to recall the year
that I worked in the Dominican Republic. I was part of an
agricultural project funded by a Dutch charity and run by Mark Feedman
and his wife Chela Lightchild. When my husband and I arrived, we
were flown over Hispaniola in a small plane. We could see
exactly where the Haitian border was because on the Dominican side
there was still forest, but there were no trees, just stumps and
weeds, on Haiti’s side, clearly demonstrating the desperation for fuel
and food.
The people in the D.R. with whom we were working were very, very poor.
They farmed little coffee patches on precipitous slopes and subsisted
on rice, beans, and rum. Children often died from simple
diarrhea, and everyone had infectious diseases, boils and unhealed
wounds. They lived in shacks made of palm-tree slabs with
palm-frond roofs and no indoor plumbing or electricity (as did we).
Once every six months or so, a Catholic priest visited, performed
marriages and baptisms, and sold the villagers little pieces of the
“true cross.” There was no vehicle in the village, but there was a military
post. The citizenry of the D.R. is disarmed but the army was
always there watching out for them. There was a clinic in the
next town but a nurse came up only about once a month. I don't
recall that a doctor ever visited. Our sole medical advice came from the wonderful (and aptly named)
book, Where There Is No Doctor.
Poor as they were, the Dominicans in Rio Limpio had the wherewithal to
“hire” the far, far poorer Haitians who slipped across the border to
work in their coffee fields. After a season helping with the
harvest, these men were given a new machete, a pair of boots, and a
couple bottles of rum. On their way home, they mysteriously lost
the boots and the machete to attackers, who may have been soldiers
“guarding” the border. As to American views of that part of the
world, at the time at least, when I told a well educated and well
meaning friend I was going to be working in the D.R., he asked with
sincere interest, “Do we own that?”
Hispaniola is an island that includes Haiti to the west, the Dominican
Republic to the east. Like most of the Caribbean islands, it was
“discovered” by Columbus, endured the near total decimation of its
native inhabitants who walked into the sea and drowned rather than be
enslaved to the Spanish, and ultimately became a vast plantation using
African slave labor. Its owners famously declared that it was
cheaper to “work niggers to death” and import more than to adequately
feed them.
Haiti was the site of the first and greatest American slave rebellion,
in the late 1700s, in which Toussaint L’ouverture took a band of
rebels into siege on the western side of the island, the least fertile
part but well protected by the mountains. That smaller territory
became Haiti. Those who stayed on the eastern, Dominican, side have
always prided themselves on their lighter skin and European origins.
The dictator Trujillo (whom “we” indeed “owned”) powdered his face to
accentuate his lighter color, and accepted a boatload of Jews who were
set adrift from Europe during World War II, not because of their
religious persecution but because of their white skin.
Mark
Feedman and Chela Lightchild were Peace Corps volunteers in Latin
America in the volatile and invigorating 1970s, serving first in
Honduras and then assigned to Rio Limpio, the back of beyond, a place
no one cared about at all except the very worn down, oppressed
residents.
