Dominican Generosity

Rewarding High School Immersion Service in the Dominican Republic

by Will Arndt

We had been listening to the droning engine and the tires kicking up gravel for three hours, while lying cramped in the bed of a pick-up truck with all our gear. As we wended our way down a long, steep hill, the coarse grating of gravel was replaced by a deep, dull splash. We knew we were getting close. This water around the tires was the reason for our trip. We were coming to build a bridge across the Rio de Chorro, in cooperation with the villagers of Chorro Bonito, who lived on the other side.

Upon arrival, we found the entire town gathered to greet us. Several Dominican men ran into a house to offer us their finest chairs. There is nothing so humbling as Dominican generosity. The men motioned for us to sit down, then came around one by one to introduce themselves. As they shook our hands, they all started laughing, saying "muy suave" (very smooth). They were farmers, and their hands were covered in thick, cracked plates of calluses from laboring in the fields. Rough hands being a mark of virility, our soft, white, scholarly hands were amusing.

Slowly, the local kids overcame their initial shyness. As we fumbled our way through our first real conversations in Spanish, the twilight air turned a vibrant crimson and the dull, red earth seemed to glow with warmth. We had come to Chorro Bonito, "the village of the beautiful waterfall."

We were Somos Amigos, an annual group that my high school, Georgetown Preparatory in North Bethesda, MD, sends to the Dominican Republic to serve in a complete immersion experience in a developing country. This was the 16th project, and the most ambitious yet.

The application process had started before Christmas the previous year. Students interested in the program had to submit an essay and sit for an interview. In the end, eight applicants were selected. To raise funds for the trip, we conducted phone-athons to alumni and worked as valet parkers at the Prep Gala. We conducted a pizza kit sale and delivered pizzas at 7 a.m. on the Saturday after the prom. For a month, we took Spanish lessons after school, and to get to know each other better we went on two weekend retreats. Then on June 28, 2004, we boarded a plane to leave the U.S. for five weeks.

In the campo (village), we split up into pairs and moved in with separate families that agreed to put us up for the duration. Initial introductions having been made, I soon found myself plodding along a dirt path, following my host to his home. His name was Jose, and he was always smiling. Dominicans are a hardy people, and Jose was lean and wiry. His wife was very quiet but always patient with my bunkmate, John, and me. My family had five children: Toni, Rosa, Josania, Javelli, and Rosita.

Their house was little more than a lean-to. The roof was corrugated aluminum, and the walls were rough-hewn, unpainted planks. The whole house was slowly shifting to one side, as though it were yawning and stretching. I didn't realize it the first night, but the bed that they offered us belonged to the parents. They slept together with three of their children in a single bed, so that we could have some privacy.

It must be a misconception common to all city-slickers, but I was under the impression that country life is peaceful and serene. Not so. In the wee hours before our first dawn, John and I awoke to the percussive trumpeting of an exuberant rooster. He had taken up his post just outside of our room, and he blared his revelry to arouse the other animals in a cacophonous symphony of grunting pigs, snorting horses, mooing cows, and persnickety chickens. The rising sun found us wide awake, awaiting the day with boots already laced up.

The Dominicans were already there when we staggered down the hill in our new designer boots and spotless khakis. The engineer of the project, Nenemesa, marched purposefully into the brush and returned with two sharpened sticks. He stuck them in the bank on either side of the river and ran a string between. "Aqui," he said, "here." Then he told us to go get stones. We of course began a competition to see who could find and carry the largest rock, and after about 10 minutes we were all sucking wind and draining our canteens. Since there were still four hours and 20 minutes left in the morning shift, it goes without saying that we slowed down a bit after that.

We were building the bridge because the river floods during the rainy winter season, leaving the villagers stranded until the waters subside. Our bridge had to be sturdy enough to withstand the flooding and also to carry the flatbed trucks hired by the farmers to haul their crops to market. The bridge had to be built from concrete.

We first dug four trenches for pylons, and then we bent and twisted iron bars together to give the bridge structural integrity. As we gathered stones and gravel, the Dominicans built molds around the skeleton-like grids. Then a truck delivered a load of cement and sand, and we would mix concrete on the banks and form a bucket brigade to fill the forms. It sounds simple, and it was. We did it all by hand, using nothing but shovels, wheelbarrows, picks, and buckets.

We didn't just come to Chorro Bonito to be construction workers, though. We were investing our time and energy for something more. Some of us thought that we were there to experience a lack of material goods. Others thought that we were there to work really hard. Some us just wanted a taste of adventure. In the end, we each got a little bit of what we had come for.

During noon siestas, we would learn children's games or play dominoes with the adults. Our meals were plain and hardy, but they were feasts for our hosts. We had rice, and usually beans, and cabbage. There was almost always chicken on the plate, although I lost my appetite for chicken after I was invited to slaughter and butcher one for lunch.

One day the men decided we needed a break, so the children led us deep into the jungle to a waterfall. The water was a murky jade color and it poured down the walls of a deep crevice, wide enough to form a perfect diving pool. The cliffs were about 20 feet tall—just high enough for second thoughts and for the first 10 years of your life to flash before your eyes as the water rushes toward your head.

Our hands slowly formed calluses, and we finally managed to break in our boots. Sunburns turned to tans, and excess flab vanished. Our mosquito bites never went away, but gradually we stopped our feverish scratching. We were still Americans, still sometimes longing for our materialistic lifestyle back home—but we were no longer foreigners.

It took a Herculean effort to finish the bridge. The concrete for the entire road bed had to be poured at the same time so that the bridge would have structural integrity. Forty men came from Chorro Bonito and the nearby village of Hippolyta. Their wives and daughters built fires downstream to start preparing a feast for lunch. Children managed to find mischief everywhere. We didn't have enough buckets to go around, so twenty men mixed a batch of cement for a bucket line on the near side of the river. On the far side, another batch was mixed for a circuit of wheelbarrows. The chaotic fraternity was beautiful. Wheelbarrow drivers yelped battle cries as they charged their load of cement up a rickety ramp onto the bridge. Frantic chants of Cuvo! Cuvo! Cuvo! ("Bucket! Bucket! Bucket!") filled the air. As we neared the completion of the project, a cloud of butterflies descended on the worksite like a blizzard of neon lime and orange. Claps of thunder could be heard in the distance. It was as if nature was honoring us all with a closing ceremony.

Saying good-bye was harder than any of us imagined. My family quietly told John and me that we were their sons and brothers forever, and they wanted us to come and visit again as soon as possible. The same tough men who had worked barefoot on sharp rocks for the past four weeks now wept openly at our departure. No one complained about discomfort as we wedged ourselves in the back of the pick-up truck one last time. Though we all sat silently as the truck pulled away, lost in our own reflections, the group took comfort in the knowledge that a part of us would never leave our homes in Chorro Bonito. Our bridge was built with more than stones.

Will Arndt is a Senior at Georgetown Preparatory in Boyds, MD.