Road Work

El Batey is moving up in the world. It's kind of a funny experience for me because it reminds me of when they were paving Snowden in front of my house a few years back. Apparently some guy who is running for Senate owns some sort of development organization and in a bid to win votes in our area he is doing various development projects i.e. paving our road. The road from San Juan is notoriously bad. The first part is kind of paved, as in, it was paved nicely at one point but has not been maintained so there's a ton of potholes and parts where the pavement has worn away entirely. The last half is gravel, well, dirt would probably be a more accurate description. Which isn't too bad when it's dry, but when it's raining it's a mess. Needless to say, everyone in my campo is ecstatic. The thing I must say that I love about my community is their enthusiasm. And another thing I love is the collectivism that Dominicans have. They're all in this together. How this relates to the road is that the organization needed people from the community to help clear the sides of the road so that they can widen it in order to paved it. So most weekdays for the last several weeks a crew of about 20 or so men from my community have been out chopping and clearing away brush and trees. Someone volunteers to cook a late breakfast/early lunch for everybody and they work until 1 or 2 in the afternoon. They're almost done with the clearing part and the dump trucks have started hauling gravel through town to lay on the road to bring the bed up and level it out. Bringing lots of noise and lots of dust along with them. Here's some pictures of the people working on clearing out the brush and cutting trees.