Day 5

The internet saga continues, and I feel bad that we have to pack up the kids each morning and have them traipse along beside us and sit in a room somewhere in this small town while we follow another dead end. Today we headed back to the all-inclusive resort, where the IT guy was available. He looked at my computer and went away and came back with a printout of what he called “LAN / IP settings.” We attempted to enter them into the laptop, all the while making me fearful that I’d lose some other, vital setting. I was recording any set of numbers I came across in my network listings. I am always wary of a PC person touching my Mac settings, and a PC person who speaks a language I don’t comprehend is only scarier.

After trying many configurations, we still couldn’t access the internet, although my fan was the strongest I had seen it since we had been in JFK the other night. Then the IT guy and I took turns just staring at the computer. As we stared, with one or the other clicking on something to open another box, I noticed hotel employees gathering around us. The IT guy turns to one of them and says “Macintosh.” Amy and I have shared how we feel that no one in this region has any clue of what a Mac is, much less whether they are compatible with the local networks. I get the feeling that every network, every internet café is manned by someone who learned the specific tricks needed for their little café, without getting any training in computer skills at large. As 6-7 resort employees gather around, I hear the IT guy, who had spoken very little, much less very little English, point at the laptop and say “camera.” To assist with his presentation, I turned on Photobooth and took pictures of all the employees. Heck, if I ever get the damn connection figured out, I’ll need to be on their good side to hang out in their lobby every day, checking my e-mail. Maybe I can take pictures of all their guests and sell bad prints with stock Caribbean backgrounds back to them.

After this I sit in the lobby and play with the settings some more, trying his in different locations, and trying to make sure my original settings remain intact. Amy tries calling the IT guy at the Boston EPA, who says our lack of connection is from the resort’s not entering our IP address into their server. Since I doubt they do this for all their guests, I think this is probably not the case. I call my IT expert and gay lover- if I was gay and he was gay and we were attracted to each other and we were lovers- Robert, who so kindly takes my call and helps me understand that I probably had taken the right steps. He also recommends calling the guys at Apple, who know more than God about technology. (That’s because God was hired by Microsoft.)

After leaving the resort and forcing the kids on another ¾ mile death march through palm tree-lined beaches, we tried the Verizon store I had mentioned earlier. This store was a marked contrast to the internet café – it had no sign announcing its contents, it was manned by a teenaged-looking Dominican guy who seemed to know how the equipment worked, and it was up and running. We asked if I could try plugging my laptop into their system, and he said okay. We got no connection, so Amy and Lane used their computers to check their e-mail, while Benjamin fell asleep on my shoulder. They do have towers which have CD slots, however, so they might be something in an emergency, which this is inching towards, if I need to send an image via CD.

Later in the day we tried the gambling bunker again. It turns out this is a legitimate, government-run operation. It also turns out it is a single windowed cement bunker with two rooms and no furnishings, except for a young woman and man taking turns behind a bank teller’s window, where they take in locals bets on the national lottery. It also turns out this marvelous signal of theirs that my computer picks up is an intranet, with no connection to the internet. We found this out after waiting over ½ hour for the manager in the afternoon, and after Amy ran back there tonight when, while we were trying to avoid blowing ourselves up with the bottle of gasoline that the mercado sold us as charcoal lighter fluid, the young man from the bunker showed up on his motorbike and announced that the manager we have been looking for for two days was in the bunker and we could see him. Amy said he was nice, and that he would like to help us except that it is an intranet, although they may expand it sometime soon. We have been here enough to know that soon translates into sometime in the next 5 years. He also mentioned something that has been said a couple times, and may be my next trouble – even if they did allow us access to their network, they would be afraid of us using too much bandwidth, as the networks in the Samana Peninsula are almost all satellite-based, which means the bandwidth isn’t too much to begin with.

I hope and wish that I’m able to remember and write the NON-technology events of our days soon. I worry that Lane and Benjamin will remember the DR as the place that we couldn’t get the internet.

I also worry that folks like me are ruining the world – we expect the comforts of home in every corner of the world we visit, and the need to create these comforts ruins the local cultures.

We asked someone about the gunshots we thought we heard last night. They said yes, those were gunshots. The local (regional?) baseball team had won the national championship in Santo Domingo, sending them to the Caribbean World Series.

TODAY’S BIG THOUGHT: have dogs outnumbered their usefulness to the planet?

Day 4

I am sitting here with 2-3 bars on my airport signal blackened, but no internet connection. This has been the theme for today. When we arrived I knew there would be some work involved in finding an internet connection, but I was a typical (?) westerner – of COURSE there would be a connection. Isn’t the world wired? It turns out that that is one of the reasons people come here – to escape the wired world and have a beer on the beach. While in favor of both those notions, I’m having some existential problems. Being online is creeping up the life needs list, closing in on breathing. I will be needing to get online in order to work and, in my preparations, I thought it wouldn’t be so difficult here – while remote and in the far reaches of a sometimes third world country, we were to be living in a resort destination, filled with hotels and restaurants. Surely these industries, in order to attract the savvy and modern world traveler, would have to have state of the art communications systems. Hell, most of them even advertised it.

They lied. I have visited several hotel / restaurants that advertised internet connections on their (hah!) websites to discover that either they don’t have said connections, the connection consists of a rotary phone and a 20 year-old computer, or they only allow hotel guests to possess the several layers of passwords necessary to access the rotary phone, etc. Don’t these people know of the good ol’ wired USA, where the streets are paved with wi-fi?

So today’s search: I awoke determined to solve the connection problem – I was not going to return home until I had exhausted all the probabilities. There just HAD to be a wireless network here or, at least, a good broadband. We started at the all-inclusive resort down the beach, where we use the facilities without any interference from the staff. Today we were in the pool, surrounded by French people wearing yellow wrist bracelets, and no one asked us if we were staying there. This all-inclusive has a wireless signal, which I’ve picked up. My fan goes black, and I’m excited. No web pages. No mail. Today Amy tried – she speaks Spanish and can negotiate these things better than I. She asked someone there what the password was (you did need a password, even if the computer didn’t recognize it) and they asked her what her room number was. She ‘fessed up, and the resort employee was cool – he told her to come back tomorrow when their IT guy was around. Then I was off to my next destination – the person, Daniel, we are renting a house from told me of an Italian couple in town who “knew all that computer stuff.” When we returned from the all-inclusive, I headed right out in search of Cyril and Diane, two names on the proverbial scrap of paper. Since I just knew of the street they lived down, I was wandering through a group of relatively new bungalows, past an algaed-green swimming pool, and around a couple snarling dogs behind fences until I saw a woman walking towards me, who I asked if she knew Diane or Cyril. She said she was Diane, I exclaimed “bless you,” and she showed me to her house, where Cyril came out. He was very nice, a 30-something Italian man, who did have a network, and even told me I could use it occasionally, but that he needed the broadband and could I please not use it to send or receive files, which is what I happen to want it for. I asked him what he knew of networks in the area, and he said there wasn’t much. I told him a network kept popping up on my airport list, and he said “Oh yeah, Juan Burgos.” How did he know of the network that I assumed was within 150 feet of my house because it was the network that appears on my network list? “That’s a signal from a cellphone tower in town that a local gambling ring uses.” (Note to self: always check with criminals and pornographers first.) Cyril told me that he knew nothing else of these people. From there it was on to the local internet café. A note on the internet café – when I first entered it 2 days ago and asked the man behind the desk what their rates were, he just pointed at a sign on the wall without looking up or acknowledging me. When I explained to him that I would be a frequent user and did he have any bulk rates, he just pointed at the sign again, head down. Amy, under the guise of trying to help, explained to him that I was a cartoonist, and that I needed this for my work, and he started helping someone else. When I got his attention 30 seconds later, I asked him if I could connect my computer to his network. He said he had to install software in my computer to monitor the time I used. I asked him if his software was compatible with my Mac. He said no, and started helping someone else. Since then I have made several stops by the internet café and turned around when I saw him (I think his name is Merko) at the desk.

I went to the internet café after meeting with Cyril. I was thinking I had to bite my pride and spend some time in there, as it might be my only outlet. I was pleasantly surprised to see someone else behind the desk. I had been told by one of our several hundred new sources that this was Fabrizio, and he was much more friendly and knowledgeable. I said hello, and he explained to me that their satellite was down and that the internet couldn’t be accessed for awhile, a time he couldn’t guess. I asked him if it would be okay to connect my laptop when the satellite WAS working, and he said he didn’t see why not. I came home, and went back to ask him if it was okay that I had a Mac – he said he didn’t know Macs, we could find out. We chatted, and he apologized for his bad English, and I apologized for my bad Italian, and I left feeling I had found a compatriot, or at least someone who would help.

I went to the next name on my list - a name Amy had gotten from a local pattiserie, who’s proprietor said “Karin and Ronald know everything.” La Ranchetta, their B&B / restaurant, was longer than the typical walk around this town – at least 3 miles up a road outside of town. On the way I passed a large snake that had been run over, but looked to have a lot of teeth. When I finally found La Ranchetta, I had to maneuver my way around several horses tied up on the entry path. I froze next to one that seemed nervous every time I tried to walk by – it picked up its head from its feed bucket and snorted as I neared. There were people walking about up ahead and they seemed to see me, but not respond. Finally I asked if Karin and Ronald were there, and they both said yes. Karin finally told me to come in and pull a chair out of the outdoor bar / restaurant, and she continued to tend to her guests while a neighbor, Pauline, introduced herself and showed me around.

When Karin joined us, she added her experience to the internet search – she had gone to Santo Domingo, 4 hours away, to get a card in her cellphone that allows you to connect to the internet. She said it was expensive, that it required a year’s contract and expenditure, and that they couldn’t do it at the cellphone store in Samana, a half hour away. She then proceeded to name every internet possibility that I had so far explored, and how it had gone wrong for her – people misrepresenting their services, weak signals, power outages, etc. I left feeling that I had just quit my career.

(I discovered an unnamed Verizon computer store. Will investigate this further.)

I walked home along the beach, saw Amy and the kids playing, then tried the internet café one more time. Fabrizio was there again, the satellite was working. I asked if I could plug in. the friendly person who apologized for his English earlier had been replaced by another head down, point at the wall guy. He said they couldn’t allow me to plug in my machine – they needed their cables for their machines, and they were too busy to allow other machines to be used. I said okay, I’ll use one of your 200 year-old PCs. I went on, tried to log in to my web-based e-mail and, while trying to remember the right combination of user name and password, the computer went offline. Sorry, Fabrizio said, they had lost the connection. No charge.

Later tonight Amy went to investigate the gamblers’ tower / signal. I had tried to check them out earlier, but my lack of Spanish left the people there just staring at me in incomprehension. Amy talked to a couple people in this building, a bank, and found they knew of this network and that sure, their boss would probably let us use it (via password) but he was gone for the day and could we come back tomorrow?

On her visit to the gambling / bank folks, on of them thought Amy was asking about hamburgers, and took her by motorbike to a local hamburger shack, where she asked an 18 year-old kid with a gold chain around his neck about network connections. He feigned translation problems.

Amy’s cell phone was returned by the gua-gua driver.

Tonight as we were trying to go to sleep, we heard what sounded like gunshots. We thought “what do we do? If there is a crime committed around here do we have any ability to report or prevent it? We feel powerless.

Day 3

This morning we were greeted by a stranger on our front room / porch. He had on a tank top, a knit cap, and a basket of fish. His name is Tito, and he brings the catch of the day door to door each day. He usually has dorado, calamari, or pain de coco - coconut bread, an unleavened bread sold everywhere here.

We took a gua-gua, the local public transportation, into Samana, the nearest city, where we though we could find a larger grocery store and stock up on foodstuffs. The gua-gua driver assured Amy that it was a big store. We have different definitions of big store – it was no bigger than anything we have in Las Galeras, nor did it have more stock. While checking out, we noticed a bowl of bite-sized, golden foil packets with silhouettes of chickens on them. We thought we’d buy 4, giving us all a first taste of an authentic Dominican candy treat. We left the store, and Amy and I opened ours first, popping them into our mouths and realizing they were bullion cubes.

On the return gua-gua ride, Amy made use of her Spanish to connect with several people on the ride, while I sat across from an older woman and a young boy who had a plastic toy gun that he pointed and pretended to shoot at many of the passengers, much to the delight of the older woman, who laughed as he pointed it and especially howled when he put it in his mouth and pretended to shoot.

The gua-gua stops wherever people need to get off. Riders just holler, and the truck / van pulls over. At one stop a particularly frail elderly woman, who was under 5 feet tall, got off, and motioned back to something in the van. One of the men on board got out a new television monitor – a big one – and put it on her shoulders. She then turned to head down an incredibly steep bank – it was easily steeper than 45 degrees, and I couldn’t see the house from the road, so I had no idea how far she had to go. Oh, did I mention she had high heeled shoes?

Amy lost her cell phone on the gua-gua, which we didn’t notice until we got home. She went back and talked to the group of men who operate the gua-gua’s from a small stand near the ocean, at the end of the main road in town. They said the gua-gua we rode in was gone, but they knew who it was and would get it back the next day.

TODAY’S BIG THOUGHT: how does one explain the concept of intellectual property rights to third world countries?

current reading – "Sugarball," by Alan Klein, "Emergency Sex and other Measures," by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thompson

Day 2

We started getting moved in. we rested a bit, unpacked a bit, walked around the Las Galeras we remembered a bit. We looked around for a wireless internet connection, with no success yet. At night – rather, dusk – a guard showed up at our house. He was an older-looking man in a tank top, a Chicago Cubs hat, and a machete on his belt. He is hired by Daniel / JuanYLolo to watch the properties at night. He has a face like a character from an older Warner Bros. cartoon – a very prominent overbite, and heavy eyebrows. He is gruff – a bit friendly, but not more than necessary. He – I think, as my Spanish skills weren’t anywhere sufficient enough to keep up with his non-tourist speaking speed - he was trying to impress upon us how necessary it is to not leave valuables lying around and to lock up. Amy told me this was correct. This required closing several bolt locks on two doors – the main, French door-type front door, and a side kitchen door. As it was our first night in a strange house, and we had been traveling for a couple days, so the kids were a little edgy – they were trying to figure out whether to sleep in separate rooms or in the same room (they chose to be in the same) and, then, which room. After we got it settled, we met the particular power issues of the region – there are regular outages, as the local remote power network has to change to another system for the night. This means 15 minute power outages at 6 and 9 o’clock. (I witnessed an unlucky person trying to write an e-mail in one of the local internet cafes at 6, and lose it as the power went out.) Benjamin was particularly jumpy – just as he was going to bed the 9 o’clock power outage occurred, and he started screaming as everything went dark. We calmed him down, only to have him start screaming again when the power went back on and the music from the local disco blared on again. We calmed him down again, and started getting ready for bed – we took the room downstairs, next to them until they get comfortable. As we got into bed, suddenly the front doors started banging violently – we thought someone was trying to break in. Benjamin started screaming again, which the rest of us probably felt like doing. It turned out the night guard was checking to make sure we had properly locked up. We assured him we had, but he was starting to scare us. As he walked around the house, he would look in windows, so we learned to close the shutters. We later complained to Daniel, via his girlfriend who stops by, about the weird night guard. He stopped being so vigilant, but he also became less friendly. We think we hurt his feelings.

Arrival

Our trip out couldn’t have gone smoother. Okay, it could have gone a LITTLE smoother, but it could have gone much much worse. Our dear neighbor Rena, - one of the 10 most reliable people in the world and, unfortunately for her, one of the most spread out – gave us a ride to Logan airport, where she dropped us off. We arrived at the JetBlue counter early and, upon checking in our 9 bags, they told us the maximum weight for bags to the Dominican Republic was 50 pounds per bag, and 4 of ours were over, barely (53, 55). We were fortunate to be at the airport early, as we opened up our bags and repacked them right at the check-in counter, so that we had 5 bags at exactly 50 pounds. The check-in person also told us that we had been bumped up to an earlier flight to New York, where we would catch the plane to Santiago, in the DR.

Having to catch an earlier plane meant we had to eat dinner faster. Amy’s sister, Linda, had met us at the airport and brought dinner. We hustled into one of the eating areas, wolfed down our food, and headed to the security gates. We each had a carry-on bag, and we had a stroller for Benjamin, and a car seat for the flight and car rides there. We made it through the gate relatively quickly, although I took up several trays with my pocket contents, my laptop, my coat and my sneakers. But they did pull one bag aside – a turquoise backpack that is usually mine, but that Lane had used for this trip. They were looking at the backpack and trying to open one of the front pockets, one on which the zipper has been broken for a couple of years now. I told the woman guard that she was welcome to rip it open if necessary. She finally got it open, and inside was a Swiss army knife. I looked at Lane, and she said she thought it would be useful to have in the Dominican Republic. Lane was very upset, and on the verge of tears. She didn’t realize that it was wrong, and she was embarrassed. We explained it to her, and then asked the guard if we could call Linda, since she was still in the airport, and ask her if she could stop by this gate to pick it up. He said they would hold it for 10 minutes, and after that he couldn’t guarantee it. We tried to reach Linda, but couldn’t contact her cell phone – she must’ve been in a part of the airport where signals were being blocked, most likely a parking garage. We told the man guarding the contraband this and went to our gate. Amy kept trying to reach Linda, and finally got ahold of her. When she did, Linda was driving out of the airport, but said she would come back. Amy went to tell the guard, who said the knife was already gone, but he knew where and would get it for Linda. He also told Amy that normally it would be a lost cause, but he had seen our family and since we are a bi-racial family he felt we were doing God’s work (his phrase) and would help us out. I guess doing God’s work means being armed with Swiss army knives.

The flights were uneventful. We are pretty used to the short flight to NY, the layover in Kennedy Airport, where we enjoyed a wonderful wireless network, and the midnight flight to Santiago. The flight wasn’t crowded, and we had an entire row to ourselves in the back of the plane. For once, the kids didn’t try to watch the individual TVs on the back of each seat on a JetBlue plane and slept instead. When landing, the crew wished Lane a happy birthday over the intercom. We got all our gear and found a taxi quickly for the 4 hour ride to Las Galeras. The taxi driver was very good, and he knew a shortcut we had always wondered about but never taken – either by ourselves or with another taxi – when looking at the maps. We mostly slept on the ride out, or everybody slept except me, who finds it hard to sleep in a car, especially a car driving through a strange country where I want to see so much and especially in a car driving through third world roads with potholes and drivers coming at you and motorcycles spread along the road like some sort of video game.

We got here. No one knew where the house was except me, who had checked it out last spring, and I told the driver where to go. We turned off the only main street in Las Galeras, and pulled up in front of JuanYLolo’s the people who manage the rental properties here. It was early, and I worried about our first personal interaction with them, after months of internet connection, being literally a rude awakening. Fortunately Lolo was up, and she said she was waiting for us, and took us to the house. The house was much bigger than I remembered – 2 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms downstairs, a big loft bedroom with a bathroom upstairs, and a large outdoor living room / porch downstairs, with an indoor kitchen and an outdoor cooking area on the first floor.

It turns out that this house was the former home of Daniel, the man we are renting it from. We have learned that Daniel is a former French and Dominican musician, and that he used to have a disco in this house. There is a beautiful wire sculpture on the front wall of the upstairs loft, with a series of instruments - drums, a bass, a trumpet – and musical notes and flowers all drawn with the wire, all multi-colored. The house, with its many bathrooms and roomy bedrooms and extra mattresses piled up on the back porch, gives the feeling of a ski lodge –a ski lodge on a tropical island.

Lolo asked if it was just us staying here, and she seemed surprised when we said yes.

Why we're here.

Many friends, family, and interested onlookers have asked us why? Why leave home for 5 months? Why the Dominican Republic? What about the kids' school? What about all the new YouTube postings you'll miss?

My wife has travelled throughout Central America and parts of South America. I've travelled throughout Upstate New York and parts of Boston, MA. When our children were born, we talked of spending time in a non-English -probably Spanish- speaking culture. One night a couple years ago Amy was online and found cheap airline tickets to the Dominican. We thought for about 5 minutes before saying "why not?" We spent 10 days in Las Terrenas, another town on the Samana Peninsula, which is the northeast corner of Hispaniola, the island on which the Dominican Republic and Haiti are located. The Samana Peninsula has historically been separated from the DR - initially because it was literally separated by a canal, and in later decades a more de facto separation, as the Dominican government has paid little attention to this region - unless a high-ranking government official was from here - until recently.

Two years ago we returned to the peninsula, again for 10 days, this time to the community of Las Galeras, on the far northeastern tip, where the road literally stops at the Atlantic Ocean. We enjoyed both these visits so much that we brought up our original idea of living in this country for a longer period of time. Five months worked for us - it was the period Amy could take as sabbatical from her job in Boston, and it allowed us to avoid a Northeastern U.S. winter. People asked us about the kids' schooling - what would we do? We planned on enrolling them in the local school for the time, and supplementing that with home schooling in subjects that they needed to keep up with - mainly math. We also felt that learning a new language and spending 5 months on a Caribbean island would qualify for a decent field trip.

Note: We are actually halfway through our stay at this point but, for reasons you will read about, the technology has not allowed me to post this blog until now. So I plan on posting it a couple days at a time, until I'm up to date.