Mary C.'s Perspective on Severt, DR

It’s my third day in the DR without a cell phone. Time is weird here. There’s actually no real sense of time because clocks are not seen in hotel rooms nor in the lobby. People are not stressed about meeting up on time because anytime is good time, it seems.

Even though people do not stress so much about time, we still have to get work done on schedule. This morning, we had a long discussion about how to run our photo voice project in the community. It took longer than I thought and there were definitely a lot of details to think through. It was the first time that community members are in possession of cameras, so we had to share with them how to become responsible photographers. The question we came up with was “when would you not like people taking photos of you?” Another concern was that people might use cameras to take photos of their relatives. We spent time telling them that every photo they took had to mean something to them or to the community.

The most exciting part of today was holding the meeting at Severet, one of the communities that HH work with. The twelve Tufts volunteers were divided into two groups, one in Pancho Mateo and another in Severet, which is further away from the hotel. The truck ride was bumpy on the muddy road.  There were many puddles on the way and at one point we thought we had to push the truck. Luckily, we didn’t! Even though it was a long ride, I enjoyed the sceneries along the road. There were cows, sugarcane fields, and mountains. One kid chased our truck and got on the car with us for a few minutes before he decided to jump off the truck. 

When we finally arrived at the community, our volunteers were waiting at the church. All of them were women. I was paired with a grandmother. It was very nice getting to know her. She is not literate, so I read the photo voice consent form to her to make the information as transparent as possible for her. She was a little quiet but when I asked her about her family, her eyes would brighten up. Before we went home, she introduced me to two of her baby grandchildren. She is a great grandmother too! What I love most about today was being able to connect with people through their spoken language. I can’t wait to hear more about their stories from her photos tomorrow!