Dispatches from Republica Dominicana Part 2: All in the Family

12 Bikinis

Our housemate, Melissa, is from Italy.  She goes to university on the east coast near Bologna, studying tourism.  So naturally, she speaks 5 languages effortlessly.  She is bright, friendly, beautiful, and overall adorable.  We liked her immediately. 

Melissa’s schedule was pretty routine.  She’d wake for breakfast, around 8:20, go to class from 9-12:30 then to the beach for the afternoon.  In the evenings, she’d return from the beach, get changed, go out to dinner, return, change again and then go to Caberete at 11 – just before the clubs there really get going.  Cabarete is next town down the beach dominated by windsurfing during the day and dance clubs by night. She’d return from the clubs, between 3 and 4 am.  She never woke us up when she came home, never once during our 6 weeks of living with her.  She was rarely hung over the next morning and she’d get power naps while lying in the sun in the afternoon.  We are quite certain she was actually solar-powered. 

Over the first week of sharing our apartment, we noticed no apparent end to the variety of bikinis either on her body or hanging up in the bathroom.  Surely she must have exhausted all her bikini options in 1 week?  Nope, there were more.  These are no ordinary department store bikinis; like any good Italiana worth her Prada shoes, these were bangled, sequined, charmed and broached bands of material which barely covered her Sicilian-tanned body.  Seriously, she made Shari’s post Hawaiian tan look like a Minnesotan after a long winter. 

One day, Shari asked, “Melissa, just how many bikinis do you have?”  She replied that she had around 30, but “eet was so hard to decide, I could only pack 12, you know, in my suitcase.” 
 

Thirty bikinis, one for every day of June….wow.  “They are from Victoria’s Secret, you must know it….yes?”  This reminds me of how in college I had close to a month’s supply of underwear, so I only had to do laundry once a lunar cycle.  I think perhaps our motivations were somewhat different; mine arose from lazy frugality, while hers comes from the innate desire so essential to her Mediterranean culture to express oneself in the articles which adorn her body.

She also brought 7 different pairs of sandals, all strappy and sequined.  Despite all the bangles, the sequins, the shimmery flowing tops, how can you not fall in love with a young Italian woman who refers to you as “Mami y Papi”?  

Burrito Salad?

At the school there were about a dozen single or double rooms with small fridges.  Our apartment had the only real kitchen at the school that was available to the students.  Most folks went out for dinner each night to a variety of Dominican or ex-pat European restaurants.   We mostly cooked for ourselves and had found ways to creatively remain vegetarians in a culinary culture dominated by pork, fish, and chicken. 

One night, as the younger students were preparing to go out, they stopped by to invite us to come along with them to dinner – as they did each night.  We found this to be very endearing, though our budget didn’t allow for many nights out.  We had just tucked in to a delicious taco salad complete with Doritos made in the DR.  Denise, another adoptee from Germany, found our fare incredibly interesting and wondered if we could make it together some night.  Day after day she asked us, “When we make burrito salad?

Somehow the idea got around in everyone’s head to start cooking dinners in our apartment – after all we were the only space at the school with a fully stocked kitchen.  Dino, kicked it off with amazing vegetarian lasagna.  Despite his earlier protests that he couldn’t cook, we discovered that he certainly knew his way around the kitchen.  After that first meal, the conversation in the afternoon turned from, “where should we go for dinner?” to “what shall we cook for dinner?”  And people started to bring their traditional meals from home, which included calls to the mainland for grandma’s recipe .  We ate Rocqulette over potatoes and bread made by Bruno from Switzerland.  We had speztel from Denise, Tara, and Martin from Germany.  In between these elaborate meals, we had pasta, risotto, beans and rice, and even a pizza clinic for the whole group, which used all the available pans in the school as well as both of the ovens. 

Eventually, we got around to making the burrito salad for Denise, which of course is easy and delicious and all the better when you can find avocados falling like rain from the tree outside your bedroom window.

Dr. Dino’s Medicine Cabinet.

We were lucky that neither one of us contracted a tropical malaise during our visit in the DR.  However, Shari came down with some sort of headachy, sinusy thing that made her leave early from a particularly frustrating lesson on the various forms of past tense verbs.   Struggling with language is one thing, trying to do it with a raging headache is quite another.  She politely excused herself, and went to take a nap.

Dino, who always sat next to her in class, returned to our little apartment very concerned about Mami, and asked me how she was with a very serious look on his face.  Unsatisfied with my answer, he immediately went into his room and produced a small pharmacy in a large shopping bag.  Apparently, on Dino’s last trip to the tropics he suffered multiple bouts of different ailments.  This time, he was prepared.  As Shari got up from her nap, still a little foggy and hurting, Dino shoved a thermometer in her mouth.

Dino is also Italian, from the Amalfi coast on the opposite side of the boot from Melissa.  While he grew up on farmland that is now a Unesco World Heritage site, he is a chauffeur at a five star hotel and takes wealthy tourists anywhere they want to go.  Though he is still involved in the harvesting of his family’s vineyard, working in the garden and slaughtering the occasional pig, he is much more suited to working with the public.  When not in tourist season, he is able to travel in order to learn and practice new languages.  A government plan encourages this by returning much of his extensive income taxes to him in the form of a stipend for such travel.  It improves his ability to work with the many different nationalities that come to the coast.  The Amalfi remains what it is because of tourism; there is little else there which does not directly feed that engine.  So far he has learned English in the U.K., Spanish in Spain, and now in the D.R.  

He is also one of the most purely auditory learners we’ve ever met.  He hardly writes anything down, or reads the workbooks, but he will stare at your mouth as you pronounce a new English word for him with the intensity of a brain surgeon.  Fearless when meeting and talking to new people, he sees everyone in town (and in the country) as someone who can teach him more Spanish.  He quickly befriended everyone in the school, and half of the town knew him on a first name basis.  We also liked him immediately, it was simply impossible not to.  His gregarious nature inspired me to become a little more outgoing and to risk sounding like a fool when trying to speak.  Nearly everyone was patient and encouraging, and excited that I was willing to try. 

Back to the thermometer in Shari’s mouth… after a few minutes it beeps to tell us that there is no fever, Dino pronounces it with a Spanish e – as in favor.  I say, “no, no, it’s feever, with a long e.”  He watches my mouth as I say it again, and he repeats – he’s got it.  

As he begins to sort through his bag of meds and show us each one in turn, Dino’s English skills hit a snag, but with his usual pluck and creativity he gets the point across. 

“Dees one?  Dees one is for when you,” putting head in hands and making small circles, “Ohh, Ohhh, Ohh!”

“Dees one?  Dees one is for when you ‘ave too much,” pinching his upper nose, “sniff, sniff, Aatchoo!”

“Dees one? Dees one is for when you ‘ave,” looking at me with a wink, “feeeeever!”

“Dees one? Dees is one is for when you,” putting fist up to his mouth, “cough, cough!”

“Dees one? Dees is one is for when you ‘ave,” placing hands on stomach, “ohh, ohh, bleahyacht!”

“Dees one? Oh, dees one is for when you ‘ave too much,” waving his hand below and way from his rear end, “ppppbthyyyptht!”

We settled on a little bit of “ohh, ohh” and “sniff, sniff” but after laughing at Dr. Dino, Shari was actually feeling much better than she had since breakfast.

When our first roommate, Melissa left for a short time, Dino moved in with us, so we maintained the Anglo-Italino balance of the household.  Melissa returned after her exams and moved back in with us, sharing a room with Dino.  The school offered him the chance to move to another room so that he and Melissa could have more space in their room.  To this Dino said, “If I move, there must be space as well for Mami & Papi, because now we are like family, and I cannot break up my family.”

We left the school early on a Saturday morning, but our family got up early to have breakfast and walk us to the gate.  We lingered, not wanting the current hug to remain the last.  We may be in different countries, we may be in different generations, but our experiences there created a bond that surpassed a mere summer camp crush.  These kids of ours were like the ones we mentored back in North Carolina, only we weren’t hired to fill that role, it just fell into place.  We miss them.