Tormenta Tropical Noel, y La Gallera

(okay, the video failed. i waited forever. can´t upload it. check for pictures on the links)

We have rung in our Peace Corps service with our first tropical storm – Tropical Storm Noel. It started raining about 9 pm Sunday and rained hard and constant for about 30 hours until about 10 am on Tuesday, and then it’s been off and on since then. When I woke up Monday morning my house had about 2 inches of standing water. Luckily, my bedroom sits a bit higher than the rest of the house so the water only entered under the door about a food into my room, and nothing important got wet… on the floor anyways. However, the roof is zinc and nailed onto the house so there are holes, and when it really rains, it rains through the roof, so the end of my bed has been damp for a couple of days. It’s great. It brings out all the wonderful stale, musty smells from the mattress. Mmmm. On a sad note, there have been something like 15 document deaths and several people unaccounted for in the DR because of this storm. It’s worse in Haiti, although last we heard there weren’t any reports yet because they don’t have the infrastructure to handle this kind of a storm or to report how bad it is. For us, it was mostly a ton of rain, a few downed banana trees, a small mudslide on the road near my house, and of course, a small flood IN my house. However, to be honest the water in the house here is not as catastrophic as it would be in the US. The floors are all cement and nothing important touches the floor… probably because of situations such as this. Although now it’s 630 Tuesday night and I’ve learned that the electricity, which normally comes and goes throughout the day but often enough to keep the inversor charged (and thus the lights on), has been damaged by the storm, so the inversor isn’t almost out of charge. I just took my first bath-by-headlamp and am now sitting on my bed under the mosquito net typing with my headlamp on. Peace Corps Moment, right? :)

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Cockfighting. A truly cultural experience.

Saturday afternoon the volunteers in my neighborhood went to the Gallera. One of the Dons in our barrio fights his chickens there, so we went as his guests to check it out.

Five Americans. Four of them women. The only women, in fact, in the place at all. Talk about being in a fishbowl! A few of the men around us were more entertained by our reactions than by the fights themselves.

My thoughts?
Two male chickens (or roosters or whatever they are) in a ring, fighting to the death. Well, pecking each others eyes out and stabbing each other with little spears taped on the backs of their feet, more specifically. These gallos go into the fight with their red rooster thingys on their heads, and they leave without them. Thankfully we weren’t close enough to see too much detail, but it was clear what was happening, and pretty disturbing as well. It wasn’t the fighting part that bothered me so much as the “to the death” part. Quite a lot of time passes between when you can tell who won the fight and when the loser actually dies (and then they STILL flail around for a while when they’re dead), and that’s the hardest part to watch. But it’s like a train wreck – you can’t look away. One round was really sad, and definitely the most disturbing. Not long into the match one of the chickens decided he just didn’t want to fight and tried like hell to surrender. He was running away from the other guy just as fast as he could, making himself small and running circles (because he couldn’t go anywhere else) to get away. It was so cruel that they didn’t just declare him the loser and let him off the hook and out of the ring. Even if his owner decided he wasn’t worthy anymore after that, the slaughter probably would have been a lot faster. It made me a little sick to my stomach.

I guess the moral of the story is that I’m not necessarily opposed to it categorically, but when one of them gives up, they shouldn’t just let them be attacked to death. I’m glad I went because cockfighting is a major cultural activity here, but I don’t think I’ll go again unless I have visitors who want to check it out. My curiosity is satisfied.