this photo has nothing to do with street art except that i took it during the ‘05 wooster street art walking tour. i think that was the year they let me help them tell people about street art history. they’re pretty great.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
last week my laptop was stolen. at gunpoint.
i’m not sure how appropriate it is to dig right into all the details. here are some.
my boyfriend and i had rented a house in the dominican republic and after three days there two men came into the house and robbed us of our laptops, my ring, my camera, cell phone, and a few other things. we ran out of the house as the gunman was fumbling with the clip in his gun and they fired at us as we ran. barefoot, we ran out of the yard to the neighbor’s, scaled a fence and ran through a briar field to get away. they shot 8 times as we ran, some in our direction and some when were already out of the yard.
i believe the gunman were haitian, though i don’t know for sure. [note: the following paragraph was added to help explain why i believe the attackers were haitian. it is the result of countless conversations and interviews with both poor and rich locals, police, expats etc. i only know one haitian man here but he is wealthier than the migrant workers of this town] i believe this because the situation has been explained to me as the following: haitians, the most oppressed and impoverished rung of society here, are hired by higher-up dominican crime bosses who pay off the police, if they’re not hired by the police themselves. night guardsman are paid very poorly ($500/month is the higher end) and often tip off the thieves to the victims’ whereabouts. entry-level police are paid very very poorly here, worse than armed guards in fact, and make about $120/month. With so little to survive on, is it any wonder that they are corrupt? furthermore, the haitian border has been opened up fairly recently, and an influx of oppressed and starved people has left migrants seeking work and ways to survive, beyond the horrendous conditions of the sugar cane fields where they work for less than $1/day and are paid in (overpriced) company food store coupons. A movie called the price of sugar came out about this recently. further, a good deal of crimes have been committed in this wealthy tourist town over the years by haitian assialiants, likely being used as henchman for a much wealthier crime ring. lastly, they had very dark skin (unlike the mixed race appearance of many but certainly not all dominicans). in any case, they were driven to this by some kind of need.
it’s tough to not feel hopeless in the face of people risking their lives and trying to take yours for some stuff. most of the haitian people you see here are digging ditches for $2/day, which is not enough to live on even by local DR standards. on that salary it would take ten years to make the amount of money equal to the value of the stuff they stole from us, probably longer. the other day I saw a couple of the haitian boys who walk around trying to shine your shoes for cheap on the beach. they were looking in a storm drain pipe for change or anything of value that could have washed out of the sewer. i can’t for a moment pretend to forgive the robbers for shooting at us and for doing what they did, but clearly the circumstances that created the reasons to do such a thing are pretty brutal. the going price for our laptops on the street is like $600 or less. who knows what they were getting paid, but it reflects the value of their lives and ours in this situation, which really isn’t much.
what to do? wringing my hands and feeling sad at the moment, but i’ll learn more about the situation as time passes and try to understand how people can help. for now i’m just trying to eat, sleep through the night, work and proceed with caution.
this experience was nowhere near as bad as I could imagine it being, and I’m grateful for that.
we’re very safe now, despite being shaken.
what they say