Twenty years ago today, I was being transferred from my first proselyting area, in La Romana, to a barrio on the north edge of Santo Domingo called variously Guaricano or Los Guaricanos. It was located beyond what I understood to be a city dump, though in retrospect I don't know if the dump might have been more spontaneous than planned, out where cane fields begin. For the most part, it was a squatters' town, although the government was just starting to build "multis" in the north part of town--apartment buildings for poor people displaced by an ecological disaster in another squatters' community elsewhere in the capital. When I was there, only one road had been paved. Neighborhood juntas were still in the process of naming streets and numbering houses. There were no phones. Running water was very limited; those who could afford to (like us missionaries) had cisterns in their homes which were filled by trucks from the capital; people who had cisterns typically sold water to their neighbors (but we missionaries didn't do that). Officially, there was no electricity, but neighborhood juntas would pool money together to buy transformers--this was my understanding of what was happening, at least--and then people would plug themselves in for what became free (because unbilled) but extremely unreliable power (frequent blackouts).
Guaricano was my favorite proselyting area. It was a newly opened area; I was part of the first missionary companionship to live and work there. The living conditions were the most primitive I experienced until a few years after my LDS mission, when I returned to the Dominican Republic with a Catholic organization to do education work out in the countryside. I loved it. When I lived there, it felt like a community just beginning to get organized, full of possibility.
At the end of my mission, I drove out to Guaricano with my parents. It looked more drab than I had remembered. When I returned to the Dominican Republic four years later with the Catholic program, I made a couple of return visits to Guaricano. I was shocked: in just a few years, it had turned from a rural-feeling community into an urban slum. I discovered it had a bad reputation for crime. The missionaries who worked in Guaricano no longer lived there--they commuted in and out each day--because their house had gotten broken into one night, and the mission president decided the area was too unsafe for them to live there.
During my first return visit of 1997, I went looking for the house where I had lived. It had been a one-floor cement house adjacent to an empty plot where bean trees grew (their branches reaching into our window). Our neighbors' houses were wood or block. The street was unpaved, and in the rainy season it turned into a clay so thick you couldn't even push your bicycle through it because the clay would clog up the brakes so badly the wheels wouldn't turn. In 1997, the place was so transformed, I just stood in the middle of the street and laughed in shock. Our one-story house was now two; it was surrounded by one- or two-story cement houses; the empty plot was gone, along with all the vegetation, with no sign it had ever been there; and the street had been paved in such a way that the front door of the house was now several steps below street level.
I know I don't really have a right to be nostalgic about "the old Guaricano" since I don't have to live there. I have no right to any "say" in what life in Guaricano should be like--that's for its inhabitants to decide. But seeing Guaricano get transformed so dramatically, so quickly, left me feeling like I was watching this monstrous, uncontrollable force called "development" at work. The results have not been all good, and I'm not sure I would say (if I had a say) that the results have even been good on balance.
I should scan some photos for next month to show what Guaricano looked like twenty years ago.
Here's a map of Santo Domingo, showing Guaricano in relation to the other places in the capital where I worked.
1. Gazcue and the colonial zone. This is where the mission home and office were located. I mapped this part of the city in an earlier post. The dot indicates the LDS temple, which was built after my mission.
2. Guaricano.
3. La Milagrosa, a.k.a. Los Minas.
4. Espaillat.
5. Alma Rosa.
I'll write about areas 3-5 later in the series.
Here's a satellite image of Guaricano.
The highlighted trail shows the route followed by the video below. This is the same route we missionaries used to get in and out of Guaricano (by bus or motorcycle taxi) when we needed to go into the capital for meetings or P-day.
1. The house where we missionaries lived.
2. The office of FEDOPO. This was the first place where we held church meetings and where I taught English for weekly community service. I'm not sure how to describe FEDOPO, exactly. I should talk about in a later post. It stands for Dominican Federation of Popular Organizations. It was an organization dedicated to grassroots community development, basically; their ideology was leftist, but they were happy to cultivate a working relationship with American Mormons.
3. The house we rented for church when we had grown enough to justify moving out of the borrowed space at FEDOPO.
4. When I returned to Guaricano in 1997, church had been moved to a house here, at the entrance to town, basically. I attended fast and testimony there once. None of the people I'd baptized--that is, none of the pioneers of the congregation--were still active, or even remembered. That's five years later, mind you.
5. A Pentecostal church whose pastor helped us get settled in Guaricano in exchange for supplies for a school the church operated.
6. A clinic operated by nuns, who moved into Guaricano, along with a permanently assigned priest, around the same time we did. The house they rented for their clinic was one we had considered for church. I got to know the priest, who had his office in the same house. More on that in a future post.
And now, to finish today's post, a YouTube video that shows Guaricano as it looks today. The creator of the video seems to be a Dominican evangelical. He's taking a taxi into Guaricano from the capital. (In my day, there were no car taxis that served Guaricano, only shuttle buses, school buses, or motorcycles.) I can recognize the route he's taking, but the town has been transformed--many more houses and tall buildings than there used to be, more traffic, and more paved roads.
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