Rain Rain Go Away

January 11, 2012

Rain, rain, rain. That’s about all we’ve seen here for the past week. Which means that we have plenty of time to blog but very little in the way of updates to blog about. So instead of telling you all the boring details of our week, I chose to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about the daily routine of our family.

As we may have already explained, our host family is composed of 6 people, not including us. First, there’s the mother and father, Doña Ena and Don Patricio. Then there are the two daughters and one son – Paula, Yubrelis, and Carlito. They also have a grandson living with them named Manuel, and occasionally their older son Bienvenido (literally meaning “welcome”) stays the night with the family.

Like most of the women in our community, our doña is the “ama de la casa,” or a housewife. Here that basically means she works harder than anyone else around here and doesn’t get much appreciation for it. Doña Ena is usually the first or second person to wake up for the day. Sometimes Patricio gets up first to go to the fields to work with the crops. The first thing our host mother does is make coffee, usually in time for the men to drink a bit before heading off to the fields. After that, she sweeps the whole yard with a broom to move the trash away from the living areas (imagine someone sweeping dirt around the yard and you’ve got the picture). That might sound strange but people here do not use trash cans, and therefore just throw their trash on the ground when they’re done with it. After that Doña Ena starts to make breakfast for the day – usually hot chocolate with bread. After that she starts on the real chores of the day, which can range from sweeping and mopping the house, doing the laundry by hand (this takes most of the day), or going to the fields to harvest guandules (a type of bean that has to be shelled after harvesting – it kind of looks like peas). She starts to make lunch at about 12 o’clock and usually finishes by 2 pm. Then, if she doesn’t have any major chores left to do, she usually has a little bit of time to rest. Some of the other chores that she works on daily include: feeding the pigs, shelling the guandules, working in the garden, collecting and chopping firewood, and taking food to the fields for the men. At night she usually makes something small for dinner and lights the fire. We all end up sitting around a campfire for an hour or two before turning in to bed.

While Doña Ena is working at the house, Don Patricio spends his morning working in the fields. He does all of the regular things you would imagine a farmer doing – planting, weeding, and harvesting. The usual crops he works with are yucca, rice, auyama, batata, and sugar cane. He grows other starchy vegetable crops as well. As Don Patricio is a little bit on in years, he has to hire help (usually from one of the Haitian families that live here and don’t own land) to work with him in the fields. While Patricio sometimes spends all day working in the fields, he usually comes home at about 12 or 1 o’clock in the afternoon and is then free to hang around for most of the rest of the day. Sometimes he does other chores in the afternoon like drying and pounding the rice and fixing tools. Around evening time, Patricio usually leaves the house and visits the nearby colmados to hang out with his friends and relax. He then comes back at night and spends some time with the family around the fire before going to bed.

Like their parents, our host sisters also work very hard. When they are not in school, they usually spend most of the day helping Doña Ena with the chores. This includes sweeping and mopping the house, cooking the meals, washing the clothes, and doing any of the other numerous things that need doing. Even when they do go to school, they usually leave at about 7 in the morning and come home at about 12 in the afternoon, so they spend the rest of their day helping with chores. They often leave around evening time like their father to spend some time with other teenagers in the campo and come home a bit later.

As for Carlito, our host brother, he is actually quite lucky in that he is one of the few people in the campo to have a full-time job. From 9 to 4 Monday to Friday he works for a government organization called Brigada Verde that works on reforestation projects in campos like ours. Therefore he spends all of his morning and afternoon planting pine trees in various locations in our campo. He often comes home to eat lunch with us but besides that we don’t get to see him that often.

And what does Manuel do then? Well, he spends his day terrorizing the chickens and generally being a nuisance to everyone around him. He’s really not that bad, he just has a bad case of ADD. He does actually help a bit too. He runs to the colmado occasionally to buy food or sometimes he even works with Patricio in the fields.

While this is a typical day in the life of our host family, rest assured that none of this has been going on for the past week. Unfortunately we’ve all been cooped up in our rooms hoping that the rain ends soon and the sun comes out.