In La Zurza - Blog

On any Sunday or Saturday that Nancy has off from her cleaning job at the Hotel Embajador, I am going to visit her for a “strong and Dominican” coffee at her apartment in La Zurza. The urbanization is close to the Ovando con Máximo Gómez and the Los Tainos station of the Santo Domingo metro. Coming out of the clean and quiet underground world of the subway on the escalator, I emerge outside in a totally different place. Immediately, the smells and noise hit me.

In the street I breathe the ugly smoke from the diesel engines of the buses walking with their collectors always shouting the same things, “Villa Mella, Punta” or “Yamasá” “Monte Plata”. On the block on the way to the complex, I pass the hundreds of Haitian street vendors with their piles of mangoes and oranges, or various other things such as clothing, glasses, hats, cell phone accessories, and plastic toys. But what is most noticeable is the noise — the horns, the music everywhere, the screams of people in the street.

The first time I came to La Zurza in April 1990, there was no subway, nor was it thought that there would be a subway at that time. A meter was something from the other world, from my country. I remember exactly the month I came here because I was seven months pregnant with my first child. When I first climbed the stairs of the building where my then-husband's cousin lives, it was with a bit of difficulty since he lives on the fifth floor. Everything seemed completely alien to my normal life, only my life in my country, but also my life in Santo Domingo. I thought it was the kind of neighborhood people warned me against. I thought I must have been afraid, but I didn't, and here in La Zurza, I have never felt it. It must have been because of Nancy, who felt, from her first visit, so at home in this place.

Arriving at the complex is like entering a separate city, or better to say, a separate world. On the first floor of each building it seems that each apartment, on its side facing the street, is a business. There are grocery stores, beauty salons, gambling benches, and the Assembly of God church, which is operating with its plant outside. There are many engines hidden in the floors, but few cars, and those that exist seem to be public cars because of their poor condition. On the balcony railings, people hang their clothes, especially their jean pants. The walls of the complex are painted in the colors of the political parties in the murals dating from the last elections.

On the first floor of the building, in the concrete courtyard, three dogs sleep, one after the other as if they were spoons stacked together. At first glance, it appears that they may be dead; all three are malnourished, with little fat, little muscle, their legs like sticks. But when you look at them more closely, you can see the motion of the air moving in and out of your lungs.

The floor they sleep on is concrete, but with many holes filled with dirty water and the patio itself is dotted with Styrofoam cups and loose papers. Smell of rotting fruit and a little urine. When I go up to the next floor on the almost broken staircase, where you can see the metal skeleton supporting the concrete, I see a game of dominoes in progress on the platform between the apartments. You can hear the slap of dominoes on a makeshift table. On the third floor, a boy is creating a chichigua with a plastic garbage bag and some sticks, and on the fifth, a group of young people are betting on a fish fight, each one shouting to cheer on his own. Although the power was long gone, loud music can still be heard emanating from some apartments, whose owners want everyone to know that they have investors. Here you do not pay for electricity or water, only the telephone, if you have one. Nobody pays the house either, because they were houses given away by the government in the Balaguer years to people whose huts were left on the road to a highway that was being built at that time.

I saw and still see everything with the eyes of a foreigner, because I am not from here. I am not from this urbanization, nor from the city, nor even from the country ... and you can see it. My skin is fair, yes, but it is really my facial features inherited from my Danish ancestors that mark me as a foreigner, as white, as a gringa and my speech, when I speak. But I come here often, and they don't look at me as much as they used to.

I had never seen a place like this when I first came here, but Nancy, my husband's cousin's wife, had a 10-month-old baby and we started playing with him and her four-year-old boy. Hence a friendship that has lasted for nineteen years was born.

We don't really have much in common. We talked about the children, life and challenges, the conditions in the country, some of my husband's relatives and life in general. We don't talk about books, and very little about politics or ideas beyond everyday life, family and home. She has given me a clear vision of the rich and the way they are, which can only be achieved by serving them. Many times she laughs at how pushy they are. Above all, Nancy is a real woman. In this world, people live in a very different way than in my life abroad or even here with my middle class peers. We sometimes talk about her being able to visit me in my country, or that she can take one of her children with me, but we both know that she will never happen.

There is a sense of neglect here in the urbanization, as if this place has been forgotten by the authorities, like a field that has allowed itself to go to the seeds, left to find its own way to survive. Different types have developed here, and Nancy and I talked about everyone, the drunk — there are many of this type — who hangs out with his jumo every day, who only stops drinking when there is no more alcoholic drink, and only for the time. It takes him to raise the money to buy another bottle of rum. There are mothers with many children like the lady in the room who had eleven boys in search of the female, and special types like a lady in the fifth who is called "the American" because she speaks at every opportunity of her time in the United States. like it's a big deal.

Few people work outside the complex, but there are some who go to their jobs as maids, or chauffeurs, and the children go to public school in their khaki uniforms and blue shirts. Nancy works at the hotel as part of the cleaning team, and her husband is the driver of the woman who was my sister-in-law and is now a senior official in the party in power. Nancy tells me about the habits of tourists and what they leave in her rooms.

A whole society has grown up here with its own rules and way of life that does not include books or the written word, things that form the basis of my life. It's a world very foreign to mine, and I really don't understand why I feel so comfortable here. I think my friendship with Nancy opens a space for me to be a simple woman in relation to another, talking about our children, jobs, dreams, and problems. I don't have to be anything other than who I am, I don't have to achieve great things in my life, or publish a book or win an award for her to accept me. I don't even have to speak her language perfectly from her, although I feel better talking to her than anyone else. And when we talk as we usually do, until night falls in a place where the light almost does not appear, we can erase the distances in race, origin, education, and way of being until we are simply two women, two human beings, with your challenges, your wishes and your dreams. We are fine with each other as we are, and that, here in the middle of the darning, gives me a kind of peace.

------

Meg Petersen is a writer and writing professor at the University of Plymouth in the state of New Hampshire in the United States. She currently resides in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, as a Fulbright Scholar. Her poems have won awards from the Association of Teachers of English, and the New Hampshire Writers Association. She was a featured poet for the New Hampshire Council on the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in Concrete Wolf, Entelechy International: A Journal of Contemporary Ideas, Garden Lane, English Journal, The Leaflet, The International Journal for Teaching Writing, and other publications. She is director of the National Writing Project in New Hampshire and founding editor of the Plymouth Writers Group, publishers of the Teachers' Anthologies of Writing.

Blog Source