Voyage to the East Side of the Island

The first thing you notice flying over the east side of the island is the trees. I knew this already, I had looked at Hispanola on Google maps, I had seen the legendary line of foliage that divides east from west. But I wasn't entirely prepared for what the surviving jungle represented: the Dominican Republic has a more-or-less functioning state, a mildly healthy economy, a middle class. There are not women on every street corner selling produce in baskets, because many of them are inside, working at their jobs. Streets are paved, businesses have signs that light up at night. There are sushi restaurants for gods sake! Sushi! There were plenty of Haitians there, riding around on bicycles selling coconut juice or hawking paintings of cheerful tropical scenes on tourist strips. Haitians come to the DR for work, either cutting cane in the fields or working the informal economy. Haiti invaded the DR twice in the past two hundred years, at one point controlling the area for over twenty years. This has created a fair amount of resentment, and the supposed 'fathers of the Dominican Republic' on their bills are the men who liberated the country from evil Haitian rule. I got talked into buying a painting of a boat by a Haitian who claimed he lost eight family members in the earthquake. I feel like I am probably the only person to buy a trashy Haitian painting in the DR only to bring it back to Haiti. I felt bad for the guy. There is so much anti-Haitian racism in the DR, he said, I hate it here.

Santo Domingo's claim to fame is having the first everything in the New World. First colony, first church, first hospital, first fortress, first university etc. We're talking like 1490's, early 1500's. I got accidentally got picked up by a stray tour guide one morning who took me around the Zona Colonial and we peeked our faces into windows, looking at original this and original that. But when Santo Domingo is not trying to be original, it's trying to be New York. They recently installed a small subway system, New York style yellow cabs have begun to appear, and every other restaurant or laundry mat is named after the big apple. And of course, the Yankee's hats.

The ostensible reason for the trip, beyond learning to dance merengue and eating fresh seafood on the beach, was to go for Yom Kippur. There are only two synagogues on the island, both of which are in the Dominican Republic. Apparently in the Santo Domingo synagogue, the local rabbi had left some months ago, so a American ex-pat had been asked to lead the services. He is a modern orthodox Jew and he said he would lead under the condition that a divider would be put up to divide the men and the women of the congregation. The local Jewish community (also mostly ex-pats of various stripes but some Dominicans too) was not to happy about this but they figured they had to compromise when they had no one else to lead the service. In addition to that, the Yom Kippur service was led by a visiting Chabad Jew from Israel. So I found myself atoning for my sins and the sins of others at an orthodox Israeli service on a tropical island in the Caribbean. Dear Jewish God: May I never cease to be amazed by the confluences of cultural forces in the world. I gave fasting a try on Saturday, since I had never done it before, and let me tell you, walking around all day in wet heat not eating or drinking water leaves you feeling very very sorry for the things you've done. So sorry that I said screw it, I'm not even jewish, and drank a bottle of water. But even with this confrontation with my physical limits, my forays into the DR and into Judaism led me to a very interesting weekend.