The main water supply line from the street to the house is accessible from the sidewalk. You lift a little metal door in the sidewalk and quickly find a leaking coupling that joins the city part of the water line with the homeowners part of the water line.
This plumber has removed the old connection, a rigid piece of PVC, and is replacing it with a flexible, expandable, temporary PVC coupling.
This plumber has an audience with the lady of the house watching him through her wrought iron front door, and a neighbor and me making sure he knows what he is doing.
Water continues to bubble out of the break as he works.
When he closes the little door, the leak fixed, he might be the only one in this entire city to solve a problem today.
What I’m wondering is when is someone taking out the flexible coupling and installing the meter that measures the water usage of this household?
Water, last time I looked at my bills, wasn’t free.
I’m guessing, as I leave, that, before long, a long bill will be sent and paid.
In the end, we always have to pay, and, leaks that aren’t fixed ,cost us dearly.
Paying high prices for food, that no one but tourists can afford, is not our idea of travel. Our idea at Scotttreks is to find healthy, well prepared food,served in good surroundings, where locals eat, for local prices.
This neighborhood cafe is a six minute walk from the La Puerta Roja Guest House.
At the intersection of Calle Santome and Jose Gabriel Garcia, this neighborhood eatery has no flashing lights, not even a sign on the outside of the building to identify it. I didn’t know it was alive until I looked inside open doors and saw people eating, spotted the sign above the cash register, saw that Google maps said I had arrived by flashing me an arrow.
Next trip back I’ll try some of the potato dishes, cole slaw, beef, plantain, and other Dominican Republic specialties. This trip I’m sticking with rice, chicken and okra cooked like my Dad liked it.
To my south is George Washington Avenue that runs south of the Zona Colonia and is one of the toughest streets to cross in the world because there are no stop lights and I don’t trust people to stop for me in the walkways.
The Caribbean water sparkles in this afternoon sun and the palm trees remind me of Los Angeles, Padre Island and Belize.
I have my favorite places.
Most of them are warm, by an ocean, and in the Caribbean.
Games of choice on the neighborhood streets seem to be dominoes and chess but I have also seen checkers and card games with money on the table.
This street corner game, in progress,even has an official scorekeeper who shouts out the score at the end of each game and visits his cell phone often. Some of us pedestrians stop to watch. This is likely an ongoing game between friends who have money and/or bragging rights involved.
The men don’t talk much. They slap their dominoes on the board when they make a play. When they shuffle the dominoes to start each new game in the series, it sounds like feet hitting the floor in a salsa dance.
It is quitting time, with darkness starting to move in, and the most conspicuous thing missing is rum.
When this tournament is over, the players and onlookers will go into the nearby colmado and take care of drinking business.
It doesn’t cost much to sit on this corner. When one tournament is over, different players take seats at the table and start another. There is luck involved as well as skill. You can have good dominoes but it you don’t play them right they aren’t worth a damn
No one says anything about my picture taking, and, I wouldn’t expect them too.
These guys wives, and girlfriends, know where they are.
Homelessness is no stranger in urban environments.
Disparity, economic and otherwise, is visible in older rougher parts of cities, worldwide,where no one with money wants to live. Urban flight has created downtown areas where people, who have nothing. sleep on sidewalks and warm themselves, on cold nights, over fires burning in empty fifty five gallon oil drums.
We have homeless in Albuquerque who construct cardboard houses by the freeways. They push their shopping carts down sidewalks and congregate at bus stops. They stand at major street intersections with hand scribbled signs full of bad spellings asking for money. As most of us, who have volunteered to help, or have been homeless, know, this homeless army is Veterans, college graduates, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, people who have run out of luck,people that no one is looking for. Most have dropped out, many are drug addicted or mentally ill. They are lost, covered with anonymity in the midst of plenty.
Even wealthy societies haven’t come up with solutions.
This soul,in the passageway on my way to Colonial Square, is tossing food to pigeons. They come waddling closer as she throws a handful of popcorn out. They are not timid, not afraid.
There is something Biblical about this scene.
When I see someone with nothing, give what they have,Jesus becomes more than just a possibility.
When I remark that I have a cold, Yuri asks if I want some ” Mama Juana? ”
” I don’t want marijuana, ” I answer.
” No, ” she laughs, ” Mama Juana. It is a local drink, good for colds. ”
Berluis shows me a jug which looks like it is filled with bark off a tree, which, it turns out, is. Research says this alcoholic drink was concocted by local Taino Indians who put rum, red wine,honey, herbs, and bark in a jug to make a happy time drink.The drink is good for colds, flu, digestion, circulation, and cleaning the blood.
” It won’t hurt me? ”
Yuri shakes her head ” no” and Berluis pours us all a little into plastic cups, not unlike my golfing crew’s ” birdie juice ” cups.
We drink to the Dominican Republic, and, happily, no ill effects have been noticed.
The alcohol content is subdued and the drink is sweet, not unlike Jamaica Tea.
” You can’t say, ” Yuri explains, ” You have been to the Dominican Republic without trying Mama Juana. ”
People don’t need to have a health reason to drink but having a real cold makes this sampling real good for me.
Learning about local traditions is always a plus, especially when they taste so good.
The boy walking the sidewalk in front of me is tossing a banana into the air and catching it as he walks. It could be a baseball, a football. a soccer ball, a stone or a pencil. Boys toss things into the air, catch them, and feel good with the world as it is.
Along the way, he stops at a slightly leaking hose that has been repaired before with wire that has become rusted and no longer solves the problem. He kneels down and inspects the water problem, holds the banana alongside the hose as if it would make a splint. Boys like to fix things.
I pass and continue down the sidewalk on my way to the Colonial Zone.
A leaky hose is a problem we can solve in a world leaking problems.
For now, throwing and catching is mostly what is on this boy’s mind
Girls will change his equations, in a few years, and his chalkboard will look like Einstein had a hallucination.
Throwing and catching brings back some of my happiest times.
The last police band i saw was in Cuenca, at a celebration for ex-pats and foreign business development in that Ecuadorian city.
This Santo Domingo events aim is to support women and fight domestic violence in Latin America.This police band provides some of the entertainment. There are uniformed officers patrolling all the tourist destinations in this ” old City.”. and, except for getting hustled to buy things you don’t want or solicited to take a guided tour from one of the many guides in the area, the Zone is very safe.
The police band’s music is contagious, in a good way.
It is good for the police to show their gentle side since most of their job deals with locking up family, friends, and strangers who choose not to follow rules.
Police are still humans, we sometimes forget, who wear guns, handcuffs, badges, drive official vehicles. play in the police band, and put people in jail.
They can never lose their humanity no matter how much bad they have to clean up.
When public servants and institutions lose their humanity, we all lose.
For those who have trouble putting up a shelf on the wall, someone had to build the house you live in, the car you drive. Someone had to educate your kids, grow the food you eat. Someone in the background has to mow your lawn, do your tax forms, listen to your heart, fix the pothole in the street.
In every place Scotttreks goes, people are at work doing unglamorous,tedious, dirty jobs that keep civilization going.
Luckily, people are gifted to do different things.
A world of actors would be all talk and no substance.
In a world without financial men and women, nothing would get paid for.
On a planet without ministers, we would all get big heads and believe the world rotated around us alone..
Without dreamers, there would be nothing new around every corner.
There is always work happening wherever Scotttreks goes.
Working men, and women, are worth celebrating.
Visibility is restricted on airplanes.
Looking out through a small porthole, flyers can see parts of their plane, but mostly see clouds. Sometimes the clouds are white as your grandfather’s hair while other times they are puffed up like a boxer’s bruised right eye.
The terra firma of the Dominican Republic fills my porthole as we fly over the island and begin our descent. Instructions for landing are given over a sound system in Spanish and English. We are thanked for our compliance, urged to take all our belongings with us, go through Customs, enjoy our trip and fly United again.
This island is large, with plenty of water, and grows everything, and the surrounding sea has plenty of fish. This island is the size of Georgia and is one of the largest of the Caribbean islands, behind Cuba and Jamaica.
Setting down with a bump, on a wet runway, this ninth Scotttreks trek, has begun.
I’ll be stepping back into history this trip, jumping into the Unesco certified Colonial Zone in Santo Domingo where Spain established its beachhead in the New World.
Landing, my travel notebook is empty, waiting to be filled.
Some of what fills Scotttreks is by choice; but the rest is up to fate and the travel God’s.
Where my attention goes is what I write about and photograph, and what draws my attention usually doesn’t have lots of bells and whistles.
We listen to a lot of talking heads but this guy actually makes sense.
As an employer, you don’t have to pay his wages, retirement, medical benefits or deal with his personal issues that cost you money. Fred stays where you put him and does as he is programmed. He won’t steal from you, misrepresent what your business does, and always dresses appropriately.
As a traveler, Fred gives me information I can use, and, he is easy to walk away from.
As a watcher of trends, Fred seems, to me, to be a harbinger of our coming dystopian future.
When we listen to ” fake people ” we have already been positioned where someone else wants us.
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