Bola of the Century

I spent several days this past week helping out in other sites. There are two volunteers relatively close to me who invited American high-school groups to come help with the construction of aqueducts, and I was asked to come and help translate and also to provide a night of entertainment in the form of live folk music. I was amazed at the amount of trench those kids were able to dig in order to put in piping in order for water from the mountains to reach individual houses, and when we left the celebratory pig roast on Friday night, spirits were high. That is, until us visiting volunteers remembered that we had to cross 2 frigid rivers on foot in the dark in order to reach the house where we would be sleeping.

The community where we had been helping out was far back in the mountains, across several rivers, and even more difficult to reach lately as it had been raining cats and dogs. The last thing we expected, therefore, was to see a car inside the community at the festivities, and a revamped Range Rover with leopard print interior and a sound system to blow your socks off. After eyeing this vehicle, the volunteer I was visiting had the brilliant idea of asking for a “bola”, or a free ride, to his house on this person’s way out to the main road. Obliging and friendly, the driver loaded the 5 of us into the back, and off we set to traverse flowing rivers and flojo (weak) land bridges. The imagery I experienced from the inside of this unlikely SUV was uncanny.

As we sat on the leopard print seats and tried in vain to protect our inner ears, the car filled with a red glow from the tail lights, and I looked out the back to see three young boys running along behind us, their smiles illuminated by the necklace glow sticks that the American volunteers had handed out to amuse them. (As an aside, I noted that given toys and gadgets, such as the costume jewelry and flashlights the Americans brought, Dominican children suddenly seem far less different than those in the U.S.) They ran behind us the whole way home, deterred only slightly by the rivers, catching up each time with smiles never faltering.

I’ve had a lot of free rides in this country, but this one I will never forget. Having just spent all day in the trenches and the evening eating fresh roasted pig and dancing to Dominican songs, it was the perfectly strange ending to a more than vivid 3 days.