Volunteer Life Stories

Finding Ryan by Edward Crawford

On Friday, May 25, 2007, I received a cell-phone call from Liliana Castillo, a wonderful person and an administrative assistant in the Peace Corps Office in Santo Domingo. We were in the process of running the EAP Drill (Emergency Action Plan Drill), a relatively controlled panic that PCDR implements each spring a bit before the onset of hurricane season.

This is done in order to verify our ability to contact every volunteer in the DR in the event of a hurricane or some other emergency situation during which PC might need to issue warnings or instructions for volunteers to move to a prearranged consolidation point. We are given 48 hours to contact all 160 +/- PCV´s in country either during the drill or an actual emergency. At the time, I was Emergency Coordinator for my region (there are 6 regions in PCDR) and as it turned out, one of my 18 Volunteers who lived in a remote area near Haiti had not responded either by cell phone or Internet to messages from PCDR concerning the drill which had begun on the 23rd. This was no surprise. However, we were running out of time. I would have to make a trip to visit him in person.

It was 11:00 AM when Liliana called. The generator at my AVE (a small computer lab) was running full tilt, the muchachos were having a hullabaloo inside, outside the kids at the school were noisily enjoying their perpetual recess, and the motor-cycles in the street were making enough noise to wake the dead. Even during quiet times when speaking English, I am not fond of telephones (my ear sweats); and to try to hear and speak Spanish in the cacophony of the Dominican vortex is a challenge, indeed. However, Liliana and I have worked out a deal: she will hang on speaking Spanish and listening to my brand of it until it becomes absolutely clear that talking to Edward in Spanish is a lost cause. Then we move to English. In this instance, we handled virtually everything in Spanish which made me feel somewhat competent. Here is an edited version of how it went (due to PC security regulations any reference to the exact location of a volunteer is impermissible: therefore, the somewhat vague citations of place):

L: Hola, Edward. ¿Cómo está usted? [Hello, Edward. How are you?]

E: Muy bien, gracias. ¿Y usted? [Fine, thanks. And you?]

L: Muy bien, gracias. ¡Edward, Ryan no me ha llamado! [Fine, thanks. Edward, Ryan hasn´t called me!]

E: Tampoco a mi. [Me neither.]

L: Edward, ¡ve a encontrar a Ryan! ¿OK? [Edward, go find Ryan! OK?]

E: OK. ¿Dónde vive exactamente? Mis informaciones dicen que vive cerca de Las Matas de Farfán pero yo pienso que viva en alguna parte a sur de Las Matas. [OK. Where exactly does he live? My information says that he lives near to Las Matas de Farfán, but I think that he lives somewhere south of Las Matas.]

L: Edward, vive en un lugar diferente en la provincia de Elías Piña. [Edward, he lives in a different place in the province of Elías Piña.]

E: OK, Liliana, me voy para el sitio de Ryan, dondequiera que estuviera. Nos vemos Dios mediante. [OK, Liliana, I´m on my way to Ryan´s site, wherever it may be. See you later, God willing.]

So off I went at about 1:00 PM carrying my motorcycle helmet and day-pack (containing a toothbrush, a Nalgene water bottle, my camera, a change of clothes and a book), but with virtually no idea of where I was going after arriving in Elías Piña or whether I would return to my site that day or spend the night on Ryan´s floor, if he had one. This was beginning to feel kind of like Peace Corps.

At about 1:15, I boarded the guagua; two hours and 80 pesos later I got off in the center of Elías Piña, a town of 20-30,000 inhabitants a few kilometers east of the Haitian border. At that point I had no choice but to begin asking various motoconchistas (motorcycle drivers) if they knew of a tall, skinny, blonde, young PCV named Ryan living in a place somewhere in the province of Elías Piña. These conversations can be hard to endure and nearly impossible to relate faithfully, but, believing that I had found a guy who knew Ryan, I pulled on my helmet and mounted the back of his Suzuki 100. It was going to cost a whopping (and I´m serious) 200 pesos one-way to Ryan´s site.

One block later, the driver pulled over and began asking other people whether they knew the place to which I wanted to go and whether there was an American living in the vicinity. “Not a good sign,” I thought. It was about 3:15 PM by this time and I was beginning to wonder whether there was enough day-light left by which to accomplish my “mission”. Then, over came Jóni on his trail-bike. It became apparent that he knew both where I wanted to go and the guy I wanted to meet. Whew! Then a second debate over cost began. Driver #1, who by this time didn´t have a snowball´s chance of winning the contract, now wanted 400 pesos one-way. I reminded him of his prior offer and when Jóni said “OK” to 200 pesos, I mounted his bike. Driver #1 then wondered aloud where his finder´s fee was coming from. I growled something like “I´ll give you 10 Pesos.” He said, “20!” and ended up with 15, but I was on my way.

The level of trust that PCV´s have to have in Dominicans is immense and it is comforting to know that only a very small % of people will try to take serious advantage of us especially when a number of people can bear witness to the fact that someone particular volunteered to provide a particular service to a particular foreigner. In this case, I had to have faith in a number of things (Was Jóni telling the truth? comes to mind for starters), not to mention his driving skill. Recently, I was talking to an American who has lived in my site for many years: I mentioned this adventure and wondered aloud why the roads aren´t littered with the dead and dying victims of traffic accidents. “You´d be surprised,” he said. I gulped. “I haven´t seen the statistics from 2006 yet, but in 2005 there were about 4500 highway fatalities in the DR and 53% of them were by motoconcho. In North Carolina, also with a population of about 9 million, there were 4 motorcycle fatalities during the same period.” He and I agreed that walking pleases us hugely and, failing that, the motorcycle helmet comes in handy. (Did you hear that, Romeo?)

Anyway, off went Jóni and Edward at speed. I have never liked motorcycles and my time here is unlikely to alter that perspective. Too much power, too little protection: ¡ya! These people drive with a certain reckless abandon trusting that the horn will clear the way. However, in order to reach most out of the way places PCV´s frequently have no alternative but to use motos and it doesn´t do a rat´s ass worth of good to attempt to counsel the driver concerning safety issues. We traversed the main highway for about five miles before we turned off toward the south. Jóni pointed to what appeared to be a series of very steep switch-backs in a mountain range and said, “Nos vamos por allá.” (We are going over there.) “Si Dios quiere,” I muttered. We rose between 1800 and 2000 feet. The switch-backs turned out to be about half way to our destination and the road (“unimproved” doesn´t do it justice) was steep enough that I had to get off the bike a couple of times so Jóni could re-establish forward progress. The isometric exercise involved in staying on the bike tired the legs and arms significantly: two days later I felt sensation returning to my right arm, the one I used to brace myself against an untimely back-flip. If I had fallen off, at least I would have had my pack, helmet, and the ground to help break the fall. This was really beginning to feel like Peace Corps. Yahoo!

We ultimately found Ryan at about 4:15 PM working with a female volunteer from Chile in a one-room school house at the road´s highest point. I lurched toward the open doorway stumbling along as though I had just gotten off an Alaskan fishing vessel. At the entry, I gathered my senses and said with a certain alacrity, “Buenas tardes.” In unison everyone responded, “Buenas tardes,” fell totally silent, and stared at me. “Back atcha, Edward,” I thought. So I said, in a very confident tone, “¿Cómo están ustedes?” I was on a roll. “Muy bien, gracias,” they responded, again in perfect unison followed by more pin-drop silence. I surveyed the room quickly, looking for someone in a tuxedo holding a baton. No one! I had to make my move: “Yo busco un Americano un voluntario del Cuerpo de Paz. Se llama Ryan. ¿Ustedes lo conocen?” “Sí,” rang out: again in perfect unison. The building shook.

“Ed, is that you? What are you doing here?” Ryan had been sitting about 10 feet to the right of the doorway so deeply embroiled in his work with a student that he hadn´t noticed my entrance; and boy did he look scared: “If PC is sending the old guy out after me, I must have really stepped in it this time,” he seemed to be thinking. It took a few minutes, but he finally settled down and believed my assurances that he was not in trouble. We did our brief business; I discovered that 200 pesos is the going rate one- way from Elias Piña to Ryan´s site; there was no need to spend the night; so Jóni and I took off. It was after 4:30 PM and it looked like rain. The trip back was quiet, if not peaceful, owing in large measure to Jóni´s employment of Mexican Overdrive on the long down-hill stretches. This may have saved him some gas, but it probably cost me a couple of years. Nevertheless, I paid Jóni a crisp 400 pesos at the bus stop and should I have to visit Ryan or anyone else living in the province Jóni will get the first opportunity to provide transport. From Elías Piña I phoned my report to Liliana, caught the guagua to return to my site at about 5:30 PM and was back home by 7:30 PM.

In retrospect, an agreeable day: 180 KM of scenic travel @ 575 pesos (18 to 19 dollars American); the experience: priceless.