9/4/91 - Waiting to serve

I don't remember exactly what I was doing twenty years ago in early September. I was in the holding period between my mission call (early August) and actually departing for my mission (early October). I'm annoyed that I can't remember what I was doing that period. I assume I was living at home? Was this the brief period when I worked as a bagger at the supermarket?

I do remember I attended the temple rather frequently. Loved the endowment. In the year leading up to my mission call, I attended the temple every Thursday afternoon using a baptisms-only recommend. Since I wasn't endowed, I could only be baptized, not baptize—though I remember being the voice for confirmations once. The baptistry director told me they'd put me to work officiating as soon as I was endowed. But once I'd been endowed, I never went back to the basement; all I did after that were endowments and the occasional session of initiatories and sealings. I feel a little bad about that.

Anyway, I attended the temple pretty frequently in the two months before my mission. What I didn't do during those two months, and wish I had, was learn more about the Dominican Republic. The problem was, my parents were encouraging me to do that, and since the mission was supposed to be my transition to adulthood and independence, I resisted doing what they wanted.

So here are the kinds of facts I wish I'd read up on.

First, a map of the DR—or rather, of the island of Hispaniola. I've made a point of including Haiti, though it usually gets cut off the left-hand side of most maps of the DR, and what little of it you see is often left blank. Out of sight, out of mind. A good number of Dominicans would like it that way. Actually, finding a map online that included both countries was harder than I expected.

Quick history: Inhabited by Tainos before Columbus; they get wiped out pretty quick after 1492. The Spaniards' first New World settlements are here. In the late 1700s, the island passes to French control and after the Haitian Revolution becomes the site of the world's first independent black republic. The Spanish-speaking population declare independence from Haiti in 1844 (a few months before Joseph Smith's death). Subsequently, the Dominican Republic's political history is tumultuous until the efficient but brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, 1930s-1950s. At the time I served my mission, one of Trujillo's cronies, Joaquin Balaguer, was president. The DR was invaded by the US twice, both times to quell political instability perceived as incompatible with US interests. The first time was in 1916, the second was 1965.

The CIA World Factbook (if you can't trust them to know, who will?) tells me that 70% of the Dominican population is urban. This is part of a global trend toward urbanization. Considering that Mormon tradition has a special focus on God as a city planner—as Someone who has definite ideas about the kind of city human beings ought to create—I'd love to see Mormons talking more about urbanization and the gospel. How can we contribute to building up cities that come closer to the pattern of Zion?

The population of the DR is currently just under 10 million. For comparison, that's about half a million more than the population of North Carolina, the last state I lived in, and about two million less than Ohio, where I now live. The DR is five times as populous as Utah. That's a lot of people on a small island. About a third of them live in the capital, Santo Domingo.

Over 40% of Dominicans live below the poverty line. The comparable figure for the U.S. is a little over 10%, but I understand that the measure of poverty isn't the same: I suspect that the DR starts out with a lower standard of poverty than the U.S. It's a poor country, is what I'm saying. However, in Haiti, on the other side of the island, the population living below the poverty line is 80%.

Does this all seem dry? I have mental pictures to go with these statistics. Neighborhoods. Homes. Families. Individuals.

There may be a million Haitians living illegally in the DR. Note that's about a tenth of the figure I gave for the DR's population. They work shit jobs, sometimes (e.g., in the sugar fields) as virtual slaves.

Meanwhile, there are over a million Dominicans and Dominican Americans in the U.S., with New York being the biggest population center.

Internet service is apparently widely available in the DR now. Electricity, I understand, is still irregular (i.e., frequent outages) but improving. UNICEF tells me that 86% of the population has access to safe drinking water, but I don't know if that means you can drink tap water yet or not. You couldn't when I was there—safe water meant bottled water.

There's a subway now in Santo Domingo—I was blown away to learn that. It's been operating since 2009. The pictures I've seen online look so . . . contemporary. Which is strange because of how it clashes with my memories of the run-down taxis and buses we used to ride in.

Enough. I'm having doubts about the utility of this exercise. What do these facts really tell you about the place? Maybe you do just have to get there and see these realities before they become meaningful.

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ADDENDUM: Rising into consciousness this morning as the dog demanded her walk, I had an epiphany: Part of what bothers me about this exercise is that I don't have a good sense of the historical "Why's." Why do 40% of Dominicans live below the poverty line? Why did the public transportation system consist of run-down taxis and buses? Why hadn't the government created drinkable tap water? Why does electricity remain intermittently available? How did all these realities come to be?

The answer would be complex, I presume, and would involve slavery, Spanish feudalism, colonialism, perhaps the terrain and the difficulties it presented for creating a stronger central government, corruption, foreign debt, the power dynamics of international commerce. I have this vague sense that my country, and other First World countries, are largely to blame—we're indifferent, or we're interested in the DR for the wrong, selfish, exploitative reasons. But I don't carry in my head a succinct historical account for the origins of Dominican poverty—or Haitian poverty. I wish I did. I presume economic historians could give me an answer, or multiple competing answers, to that question. Is there somewhere I could find that readily, as close to my fingertips as Wikipedia? There ought to be.