Fighting Cocks in the Campo

As I mentioned in a previous post, my Dominican family trains fighting cocks.  My first weekend with them, I mustered up my courage and went to see a fight.  When focusing on peace, violence cannot be avoided.  I want to understand how this culture experiences, understands, and interacts with the concepts of peace and violence, transformation and destruction.

Three of us climbed onto a scrap metal scooter and rode down the rocky dirt path to the fighting ring.  When we arrived, a crowd of men were already bustling around outside the ring.  Both humans and roosters contributed to the rising din in the Sunday afternoon heat.

Gladys and I entered the fighting ring, a circle of concrete benches surrounding a green pit; we were the only women present for this spectacle.  Gladys’s boyfriend Aldonis was fighting one of his roosters that day, but he stayed just outside peering in.

Hands gathered two roosters from the holding area and brought them out in rough fabric bags.  They plunged the roosters into the light and spritzed them with water to shake their senses.  Handlers roused the roosters into a fighting mood by jabbing at them and thrusting them toward their would-be opponent.  

The roosters have 15 minutes to fight to the death.  Or 15 minutes for them both to just barely survive.  

The fight was on.  The roosters circled and flew into each other and fought with their beaks and their talons.  An aggressive dance for survival.  The cock fight seemed to embody some key element of Dominican culture, some need for male violence. 

The enthralled men circled the fight, shouting bets to one another.  

Both roosters were tinted red with blood.  One fell and pelted out a heart-wrenching cry.  The other dove in and pecked the last of its life away.  Life is experienced as a fight until death, for roosters and humans alike here.    

After a valiant fight, our rooster died that day.  I looked to Aldonis, searching for any hint of sadness, but I could neither find it then nor in the evening when he ate his fallen rooster for dinner.

Although from my count the family has another four fighting roosters, it’ll be a few more weeks before they'll fight one again. Will this female gringa vegetarian peer into this male Dominican ritual again?  Likely not.  But it certainly wasn't an experience I regret having either.  I feel like I experienced Dominican culture on a whole new level.  

Patience and Perseverance

Last week took off with positive momentum from the week before.  (I was going to post this blog last Friday, but my internet connection wasn’t fast enough to load something as advanced as a blog much less make a post.)  I also wanted to take this opportunity to announce to those of you who might not already know that I was officially accepted into Korea University for this upcoming school year to complete my dual degree in international peace and conflict resolution/international development and cooperation!  Very excited.  I move to Seoul in mid-August.  Also, my blog name, Laurasia, might make a bit more sense now.   

On Friday, I was persuaded (read: coerced) into riding with the ten or so girls who were named queens of the festival of the town's patron saint.  Laura, the foreign queen, la reina extranjera.  We all got a good laugh out of that one, including the queens, who periodically showered me with confetti during the parade.

I’ve been working on the first draft of the peace curriculum, and through raw determination, it’s been moving forward.  At this point, I’m writing out flexible lessons with an introduction, key focus areas, learning objectives, and suggested activities, amounting to about one or two pages per lesson.  From what the teachers communicated, they would put best to use open and flexible plans, and this works perfectly with my vision as well.  The idea is that the lesson plan should be used as a guide, and the class dynamics should carry the class to create shared meanings.  If the end goal is to empower youth to be peacebuilders in their homes, their communities, their country, and the world, the learning process must take the shape of participative, active learning.

Children from a nearby community, my friend Nelson from Santo Domingo, and me.  Behind us are featured the homes where these children live.  Together with a group of visiting volunteers, we forged a river and hiked up many a hill to reach the community to administer eye exams and distribute glasses and food items. 

I’ve also been able to connect more with some of the teachers who have particular interest in peace education, and they’ve been really enthusiastic about the draft materials I’ve shown them.  Even though they are just beginning their month break for vacation, some of them are even giving me their home addresses and phone numbers and telling me to drop by whenever I want for feedback or help translating.  What a shift from my first week here!  (The first week when no one even bothered to tell me where I could work and so I worked in a field under the shade of a tree; it was actually surprisingly pleasant.  Now I work in a room where occasionally herds of goats run by the window.  Also quite pleasant.)

Although I’ve doubted my approach here at times, I’ve been committed to growing relationships and my work here organically, which is to say that I’ve battled against the urge to plow ahead and create this thing on my own.  This past week has been a great reminder that loving patience and persistence separates those who reap the harvest from those who abandon the crop before it ripens.  (My internet connection, coincidentally, also reinforces the lesson of patience every single day.)

Welcome to my community.

Also, my project has taken another unexpected turn.  During my time in Santo Domingo, I developed an interactive community charla, or chat, about conflict transformation.  Charlas are a pretty popular way of transmitting information here, and they take the shape of informal town hall meetings with participants from the community.  However, I sort of abandoned the charla as I shifted gears into the peace curriculum…that is, until this past week. 

One day, the kids around the house were fighting as kids do, and the matriarch of the family was yelling at them to stop to no avail.  So, I told them that if they didn’t stop, they would have to attend my peace charla as a sort of punishment. 

They paused.  Then they erupted into elated cheers.  “A charla!  A charla!  Yayyyy!”  They told their friends about it, and on Saturday, 10 kids showed up for the charla, ages 4-24.  Wilneidys, age 9, was so enthusiastic that she even prepared her own component of the charla by looking up information about “what is peace” in an encyclopedia and writing it out on papers.  The others drew “peace pictures,” and just about everyone participated.

A depiction of the charla, the tortoise of tranquility, and the peace rooster.  They tried to draw a peace dove, but it came out as a rooster, so we just went with it.  The irony is that the family raises fighting roosters.

Their reaction to the charla?  “When’s the next one?”  Pretty amazing where things can go if you let go of an agenda and let things develop where they may.   

During the peace charla.  Here you can see evidence that they were at least partly paying attention.