Surprising Results from my Interviews

For the last two week, I have been doing interviews. I have now completed approximately 60 interviews with the women and men of the households of Tierra Prieta. These interviews have been a great excuse to meet new families, to learn more about the town, and to better understand what the people of Tierra Prieta want from me and their needs from a healthcare perspective.

The questions that I have been asking consist of questions about what people eat, the power dynamics of the household, the perceptions of responsibilities of women and men, the type of work people do, what is the structure of their house, how many people live in their house, if they gave birth at home, their use of a dentist, of birth control, of alternative medicines, etc., the existence of domestic violence in the community, the situation of water and electricity, the actions of the school, the situation of the trash, and much more.

Some random findings from my interviews have been that the majority of the older women (45 or above) in the community gave birth under 17 years of age, yet very few (I have not yet one yet) of the women under 18 years age in the community now have children yet (an incredible state considering that 23% of women in the DR are pregnant before the age of 18). Something must have changed, in the education or attitudes of the community, because this to me is incredible.

Through the interviews I have found that nearly no one in the community knows what an STI is, nor what the difference between HIV and AIDS is. I was fairly shocked to find that out of my 60 interviews only 3 women in houses knew what an STI was and only 2 knew the difference between HIV and AIDS. Despite the lack of knowledge about these sexually transmitted diseases they still don’t report knowing anyone with an a sexually transmitted disease or HIV, which may be due to confidentiality of the people not willing to share this personal information, but still I find this interesting.

There are also many terms or concepts that the interviewees do not understand (and not just the ones due to my Spanish). Even when other community members ask these questions many community members do not know what “religion” means. They also do not know what is the difference between “natural remedies” and modern medicine. Once put if anyone uses teas when they are sick nearly every household answered “of course”! Some common remedies that people use are teas when people have colds or for other illnesses such as high blood pressure. I am very interested in learning more about these natural remedies and hope to get more information from some local women that have extensive knowledge in the use of plants for medicine. I am also very interested in learning more about the religious traditions of the people in my community, but I am slowly easing into this exploration, so I do not cause drama or cause any gossip that I support one religion and not the other or follow a certain extreme religion that does not support everyone’s morals or lifestyle. I am first aiming to let people get to know me and then I hope soon to be able to see what the yelling and yelping that can be heard all throughout town every Wednesday and Sunday is all about (the local Evangelical church) or discover more what the church that I use for all of my meetings is occupied with near sunrise on Sunday mornings during mass. I also hope to visit a bruja (literal translation witch) soon. I would love to learn more about the beliefs and remedies of the brujas in town (which I know nearly every person has gone to at least one time in their life to fix some ailment or problem or to ward off evil spirits). The same situation applies to the bruja where I do not want to be perceieved and supporting the treatments of the brujas, but I am so fascinated with their workings. One day.

When asking the people of Tierra Prieta what they most want to improve in their community. The people of Tierra Prieta mostly want a road (there are no paved roads in my town) and an acuduct. People in Tierra Prieta can only get water through the sporatically placed wells throughout the community. The town above and believe my town each have acuducts, which makes farming and dialing living so much easier for them, but the government has not found enough funds, yet to bring the acuduct to Tierra Prieta. The people are hopeful though that in the next few years agua will arrive. But for now, often young children and older women must make the long walk lugging galloons of well water to their house every day in the sweltering sun.

Hayden is 14 years old and honestly all she really wants to think about is boys and finishing her homework. Every morning and every afternoon I see Hayden pumping the well outside of my project partner’s house to fill her old olive oil plastic galloon contains with water. She brings along her family’s donkey from her 10 minute walk away. Her mule is used to this walk and as Hayden balances her galloons beneath the spout of the well after about 10 minutes of clearing out the yellow water of the morning well, she begins to fill up at least 15 galloons, caps them and ties them to her donkey. She sweats in the hot sun and from the exhertion of filing up her galloons. She is wearing her black hair net and her tight clothes spotted with a couple of holes, likely snagged by a barbed wire fence somewhere along its life. But Hayden is smiling and joking with the young girls running around the well. When she finishes she sends off the donkey and walks after it to her house up the hill. She returns in the afternoon to fill up water for her 3 other sisters, mother, father and brother for the evening and will be back tomorrow. Hayden is lucky, she has a burro, but many family’s do not have the lushury of a donkey and have to carry galloons full of water to their houses two at a time, rationing their water very carefully. I am lucky because there is a well directly outside of my project partners’ house and so I do not even really have to carry my galloons of water, but from pumping the well water I have already gained some muscle in my arms and back and I often am sore the next day from filling up too many galloons at a time. I will never take running water for granted again.

I am almost down with going to ever house in Tierra Prieta with my interviews and following Tierra Preita, I will then interview the household of Los Portuguesas (the town just above Tierra Prieta on the hill), which is just as if not more impoverished and definitely farther from many resources such as the city and the clinic. I am very excited to start getting to know these people and I can only hope to feel as welcomed and loved in this neighboring town as in Tierra Prieta.

Chica, my project partner consentrating above, insisted that I bring my camera to a day of cooking a huge communal pot of ching-ching (a corn mush dish which is very good). Here she is stirring the large pot as it cooks over a wood fire.