Making New Friends in the DR

Before coming to the Caribbean, we were in Botswana for two years, where nightmarish insect encounters were a matter of course. I will never forget our first Christmas in Botswana, when we naively attempted to bring a live, potted pine tree, sparse in branch and spitefully sharp in needle, into the house to decorate. A few days after Christmas our tree hatched a brood of tiny praying mantises, and although they were highly efficient ant-eaters, we regretted this insectoid nativity scene all the same.
There’s more. Once or twice a year, after a long dry spell ends with an anti-climactic drizzle that evaporates before it hits the ground, legions of termites take to the air, swarming every light fixture until they fall to the ground and shed their transparent amber wings. The next morning, the city is covered in the delicate detritus of termite wings that defies brooms and vacuum cleaners, swirls out of dustpans on the way to the bin and creeps inside the house from under closed doors.
More than once, a fist-sized dung beetle capsized on our patio, buzzing in alarm, and flapping his wings in an ineffective attempt to right itself. There were incredibly fast house spiders, flat, brown and menacing, who explode into a million pieces when swatted. Under the carpet one might find foot-long millipedes that, hedge-hog-like, curl up in defense when being scooted out the door with the end of a stick. There was also the time I found a giant, orange funnelweb spider (see photo) peering at me from his 5 foot-tall web on our patio, not to mention a million other trespassers of the creepy-crawly variety, 6- and 8-legged pests with warm fuzzy names like “blister beetle” and “shongololo.”

Funnelweb Spider, Gaborone

So when I first arrived in the Dominican Republic a year and a half ago, I was relieved by its relative lack of icky bugs. Yes, there are multitudes of mosquitos, a surprising variety of ants that seem to take turns invading our kitchen cupboards, and the occasional cockroach, but on the whole, I found the island to be pleasantly bug-free.

Until last week.

Last week, I was walking my dog in the Mirador Sur, blissfully unaware of the presence of ginormous bugs in the greater Santo Domingo area, when I walked past what looked like a heap of excrement left behind by a street dog with indigestion. However, after a double-take I discovered that it was, in fact, a tarantula which apparently had a bit of bad luck trying to cross the street. I studied it for only a brief moment to confirm that it was actually a tarantula, and then, with a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, I moved on, praying someone’s pet tarantula had escaped and that I had not just seen an arachnid native to Hispaniola.
As it turns out, there is such a creature as the Hispaniolan Giant Tarantula (locally called “cacata”). According to several websites, including http://www.therealdr.com/ and http://www.wikipedia.org/ the tarantula’s “fangs … are quite formidable at more than 2 centimeters long, and when they pierce the body of its victim, venom is injected which paralyzes and breaks down the body tissue of the prey, allowing the tarantula to suck up the liquefied insides.” The article in question goes on to describe the tarantula’s revolting digestive and mating habits, but I won’t get into too much detail here. Suffice to say, the tarantula is generally a docile animal, although “if threatened …they can bite or … flick off urticating (stinging) hairs that they carry on the back of their abdomen.” The article assured me that even though local legend has it that the tarantula’s bite is deadly, that in fact they rarely bite, and when they do, the venom is highly irritating, but not deadly.

Hispaniolan Giant Tarantula

Even more troubling than the presence of tarantulas in the Mirador Sur was my discovery that the tarantula’s most dangerous predator is the Tarantula Hawk – predictably coined “matacacata” by Dominicans (see photo). This endearing creature is actually “a very large wasp, with an iridescent blue-green body and orange-red wings that grows to about 2 inches or more in length. It stings the spider … to paralyze it, then lay its eggs on the abdomen. The wasp will drag its victim to a safe place to incubate its young. Once the larva hatch they will feed on the live, paralyzed tarantula until it expires.” Another source went on to explain that the larva actually save the spider’s large vital organs for last, in order to keep the tarantula alive longer. (To see several ghastly videos of tarantulas unsuccessfully fighting Tarantula Hawks, visit http://www.youtube.com/ and search for “tarantula hawk”, although you may never set foot outdoors again).

Unlike our new friend the Hispaniolan Giant Tarantula, the Tarantula Hawk delivers what is considered one of the most painful stings in the world, described very scientifically by one researcher as “immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down ones ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream.” Another article compares it to “a running hair drier …dropped into your bubble bath.” In fact, the sting of this wasp is rated at the top of the (ahem) Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

[Note to self: avoid Tarantula Hawks]

OK, so in all reality, I will probably never see another “cacata” and I certainly hope I’ll never meet the business end of a “matacacata.” But boy, do I miss those praying mantises.

Interior Decorating in the Foreign Service

Let’s assume you were one of the lucky ones who moved directly into permanent housing. I imagine your arrival at post went something like this: upon entering your home for the first time, your travel-weary eyes are met with bare, white walls, glaring fluorescent lights, oddly placed air conditioners, 1970’s vertical blinds, and – there it is again, you think to yourself – a rather tatty arrangement of “faux traditional” Drexel Heritage furniture.
This time I’ll actually decorate, you promise yourself. I’ll really turn this place into a home.
A few weeks pass. You’re so preoccupied with getting the kids settled into their new school, learning your way around a new city, figuring out how to order Chinese food in Spanish, and interviewing housekeepers that you haven’t even thought about making your house or apartment livable.
As soon as the HHE arrives, you think, I’ll put the place in order.
After 8 weeks of living out of suitcases and eating off welcome kit dinnerware, your HHE arrives. It takes you another 6 weeks to get everything unpacked and in its proper place, the packing paper and cardboard out of the house, and the musty smell laundered out of your clothes. By then, you’ve become somewhat accustomed to the white walls, and the curtain-less windows. Besides, you reason, we’ll only be here 2 or 3 years – why bother? I’ll decorate next time.
But that sensation of never really feeling at home gnaws at the edges of your awareness for the remainder of your tour.
Sound familiar?
It’s true that decorating your home takes some effort, especially when you’re doing it in an unfamiliar city and in a foreign language. But it’s probably not as difficult as you think. There are some really simple things you can do to make your house or apartment feel like home, even if it’s only for the next year or two. When you live overseas, far from everything that’s familiar, feeling comfortable in your home can make all the difference for you and your family.

Step one: Add a little color
Probably the simplest way to make yourself more at ease in your new home is to paint it. Before you start moaning and groaning about choosing colors and the inevitable chore of moving and covering your furniture and valuables, consider this: hiring someone to paint for you is not only easy, but completely affordable in the Dominican Republic. Building and maintenance can recommend a handyman to do all the painting for you and it will probably cost between RD$2,000 and $5,000 for the labor, including hanging up paintings, photos, and other objects.
However, as in most countries where labor is cheap, goods, such as paint can be expensive. You’ll need about 1 gallon per 20 square meters, and 1 gallon of paint can cost anywhere from RD$375 to upwards of RD$650, depending on whether you choose a ready-made color or have a custom color mixed for you, and whether you choose a matte (flat), satin (shiny) or semi-gloss finish. Darker, more intense custom colors tend to be more expensive. If you’re looking to save a little money I urge you to choose a ready-made color, of which there are about 40, anywhere they sell Pinturas Tropical (check out www.pinturastropical.com.do/faq.htm, under “Color Shop” for a list of vendors in Santo Domingo and an interactive “Guia Virtual de Combinaciones de Colores”).
Another way to save a little cash is not to paint every room in the house. Choose the rooms that are most important to you, where you and your family spend most of your time – maybe the dining and living rooms – and skip the rest.
As for choosing a color scheme, I recommend taking cues from the culture in which you’re living. Since you’re only going to be here a few years, you can afford to take a few chances that you might not take in a home you plan to live in for several years. So why not go tropical? Vibrant pinks and blues, lush greens and sunny yellows abound in the Caribbean. Next time you’re out and about, take note of the colors of the houses and buildings. How would that sea-foam green look in your living room? If you’re worried about it being too bright, bear in mind that the embassy furniture will tone it down considerably. Plus, you can always soften bright colors even further with white, taupe, sand or neutral-colored window treatments or bed linens. Trust me, visiting friends and family will be wowed by your tropical sanctuary!
There are, however, a few things to consider when choosing bright, tropical colors. First of all, if your house or apartment is small and dark, or overly crowded with furniture, bright, rich hues may make it seem even smaller, darker and more crowded (trust me, I made this mistake). Choose sunny colors, like yellow or light green or blue, to keep things light and airy. However, if you’re truly in love with that teal green or turquoise blue, consider painting just one wall of the room that color, and painting the rest a few shades lighter of the same hue. This technique also adds texture to the room.

Step two: Window Treatments
Choosing window treatments for your home may seem like a horrible chore, but luckily, we in the Foreign Service have a few advantages. For one, GSO will reimburse you up to $600 if you choose to buy curtains or have them made. The catch: you will have to leave them behind when you vacate your residence.
Next, since your time at this post is limited, you have the luxury of being a little more adventuresome with your choice of curtains. Who cares if you don’t like your window treatments 5 years from now? By then, you’ll be decorating your home in Djibouti (or your shipping container in Kabul), so be daring! Blinds are another option, but can eat up a large chunk of your budget if you aren’t careful. On the plus side, they really blend with the tropical theme, especially if you choose a mahogany-stained wood or bamboo blind.
For ready-made curtains or blinds, I suggest perusing the JC Penney catalog (copies are available in the CLO) or checking out http://www.jcpenney.com/. The quality, I admit, is not top-notch, but they have a great selection and their customer service in terms of returns and shipping to the APO is fantastic. For higher quality items (albeit with a spotty selection) try http://www.overstock.com/. They also ship most items to APO addresses without any problems, and their shipping is very cheap. Another great source is http://www.target.com/, where you can easily narrow your search by price, color, material type, size, and style.
To have curtains or blinds made here in the Dominican Republic, I recommend Señor Bujosa (809-684-6181). Upon a recommendation from the embassy housing office, Mr. Bujosa came to our house with a selection of fabrics and blinds samples. I chose a fabric, and showed him a photo of the style I wanted. He measured our windows, and within a week, he’d finished and installed our curtains (complete with hardware he’d purchased at the local ferreteria) all for one low price, which easily fell within the $600 allowance given by GSO.

Step three: Furniture placement
Ah, good old Drexel Heritage, the official furniture of the Foreign Service. Love it or hate it, you’re stuck with it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t arrange it to suit your space and your taste.
The keys to creating comfortable living spaces are scale and balance. “Scale” means the size of your pieces relative to the space. For example, you wouldn’t put a tiny area rug in the middle of a huge room, would you? No, you’d put it in a small entryway or bathroom. Similarly, if you have a small dining area, why keep both leaves of the dining room table in and all 8 chairs around it? Instead, store one or both of the leaves in a closet, and keep the table small, with just a few chairs around it. Your extra chairs can be scattered amongst the other rooms in the house. This will leave you with plenty of space for a china cabinet or sideboard for storage.

Wall color aside, this dining table functions as more than just a place to eat.

“Balance” refers to how the objects relate to each other. For example, is the furniture arranged symmetrically or asymmetrically? A symmetrical arrangement, such as 2 sofas facing each other with a table in the middle, creates a restful atmosphere, while asymmetrical arrangements are more fluid, and are better suited for multi-functional and highly-trafficked, transitional spaces.
Think about this when arranging your furniture according to the function of the room. For example, a living room should be a relaxing, restful place, where you and your family can take a load off at the end of a long day, a function best suited to a symmetrical furniture arrangement, particularly when arranged around a focal point like the television, fireplace or large, well-framed piece of art.

This symmetrical arrangement is conducive to relaxing.

But if your family is like mine, the dining area serves many purposes: it’s a play area for the baby, an office and reading nook, an arts and crafts workshop, and – oh yeah! – a place to eat. Therefore, we’ve placed the table off-center, almost in a corner. An occasional chair makes it a comfortable place to read or organize the monthly bills, and the open floor space allows the baby to play while I watch over him from my place at the table.
Open floor plans, such as can be found in many of the large, open apartments in our housing pool, can create a challenge. Too little furniture and you feel like a Lilliputian in Gulliver’s living room; too much furniture and you’re constantly stubbing your toes trying to maneuver around it all! In this situation, it’s best to separate the space into smaller (preferably square shaped) zones according to function: eating, entertaining, relaxing, etc. To do this, don't make the mistake of lining all your furniture up against the walls. Instead, use your larger pieces of furniture to demarcate the boundaries between the zones. For example, a large sofa can delineate the space between the living and dining areas. If you want the space to flow a bit more, use two occasional chairs, side by side with a small table between them to divide the space. But don’t feel like you have to cram the space with furniture, just because you have it. In fact, you need to leave about three feet of space for walkways and foot traffic around these “zones.” If you feel you were given too much furniture for this, contact post’s warehouse: they may be willing to take some of it back. If not, disperse some of it throughout the house (hint: an extra coffee table makes a great desk for a small child).

Step four: Add your own decorative touches and accents
OK, so you’ve got 3 Vietnamese baskets, a 5-foot teak Zambian giraffe, 4 Moldovan oil paintings, a set of brightly decorated Polish ceramic dinnerware, and 15 silk pillows you bought in a New Delhi open air market. What do you do?
Relax, as far as I’m concerned, this is the best part of being in the Foreign Service: you’ve developed an appreciation for the arts and crafts of a myriad of cultures. Who says it all has to match? In fact, the mosaic-like quality of your collected objects is exactly what you should be flaunting. The problem is how to display it all.
Many things can be framed and hung, even plates, baskets, signed baseballs, and small artistic objects (we have a framed comb carved from bone purchased in Johannesburg in our living room). And there’s no better place to frame them than right here in Santo Domingo.
There are a number of frame shops around town, but my favorite is Arte San Ramon, #904 Ave. Abraham Lincoln. They have a bewildering selection of mats and frames, and can frame almost any object. Just bring them your stuff: they’ll figure it out. And it won’t break the bank, either. At around a third (and often less) of what you’d pay in the USA, Arte San Ramon is surprisingly affordable, so if you still haven’t had your college diploma or those safari photos framed, now’s the time!
Wall shelving is another way to display some of your treasures, particularly if you have kids who would otherwise knock them off tabletops and bureaus. A shelf or shelves placed over a bed, for example, makes them a focal point in a guest bedroom. If placed high enough in your living room, you can even mount framed artwork beneath a wall shelf, creating texture and interest. If you need help mounting shelving or framed objects, again, call building and maintenance for a recommendation. Many of the locally hired maintenance personnel are willing to do these odd-jobs in their spare time, for around RD$200, depending on how many objects you need to hang.

Step five: Still need help?
Check out http://www.home-decorating-room-by-room.com/. This site has several useful articles written very much in the “complete idiot’s guide” style. Particularly useful is the article “Choosing a Color Scheme.”
If none of these suggestions sound feasible to you, if simply reading this article is exhausting and you’d rather eat dirt than think about decorating your home yourself, but you still want it decorated, call me! I will happily do the leg work for you, at no charge. That’s right, read it again. If you let me help you choose a color scheme and decorate your home, I'll pick up your paints for you, supervise a painter to paint your home, and arrange your furniture and décor FOR FREE. Just give me a call (my phone number is available in the Quisqueyan) and we’ll get together to discuss your needs and tastes.

Tropical Gardening as War

Horticulturally speaking, living in the Caribbean was initially a disappointment for me. Upon our arrival, I marveled at our neighbors' lush, tropical gardens, with their elegant royal palms, fruit-laden trees, and intricate orchids barnacled atop mossy logs. Inspired, I dragged my husband to half the city's greenhouses and nurseries, stuffing our car with bags of soil and an ambitious variety of shrubs and plants. I soon learned that maintaining a garden in the tropics comes at a price; gardening in Santo Domingo means declaring war on both the climate and the resident pests.

Hunched over a tiny section of earth in my "yard" (which is actually just 2 cement parking spaces with a patch of unkempt grass between them - the grass is hidden by that large bush in the photo above) I encountered the first two very formidable foes of the tropical gardener: heat and humidity. Within 15 minutes I was sprawled on our sofa, the AC cranked up to 19 degrees, gulping down several glasses of water as roughly the same quantity of sweat poured down my face. OK, I thought, maybe I should wait until early in the morning to continue.
By 8:00 am it was already a humid 75 degrees, so I set to work immediately. With my gleaming hand-held hoe and spade, I began to tear out the weeds from the tiny patch of earth under a guava tree to make room for my birds of paradise, sitting patiently next to me on the sidewalk, roots wrapped snugly in black plastic. I waved a lavender garden-gloved hand breezily at a passing neighbor, and then I tore out a particularly difficult clump of weeds. Immediately I noticed that the ground around the gaping hole left beneath it seemed to be moving. Absently, I also noticed that a psychedelic pattern seemed to be swirling crazily across my newly purchased gardening gloves, but it wasn't until a burning sensation spread from my bare wrists up to my elbows that I realized I'd met the Caribbean garden's third foe: red ants.
You can probably imagine my reaction, when, in a moment of Loony-toon like theater, I shrieked, hysterically threw off the gloves and flung the spade, and staggering to the water spigot, trampled my lovely, innocent birds of paradise.
An hour later, after I'd showered and the sensation of tiny, imaginary insects creeping along my skin had more or less passed, I returned to the battlefield. Hundreds of ants erupted from the still-gaping hole, swarming over my crumpled gloves and broken birds of paradise. Sullen and defeated, I turned toward the house. As if to simultaneously warn me against future attempts at gardening and reward the conquering army, a rotten guava fell from the tree and exploded on the ground behind me, suggestively splattering bright red juice on my gloves and gardening tools.

So gardening isn’t my thing, I thought, and surrendered my garden to the elements. The weeds took over; the ant army resumed patrolling the ground around the guava tree, all undisturbed by me. My gardening gloves, a pitiful monument to my defeat, remained undisturbed.

Eventually, however, I even had to abort my apathy for tropical gardening when my untidy cube of concrete, razor-wire and bristly, savage grasses became a warren for both the local mosquito population and a prolific rat family that took up residence in the bushes hanging over our perimeter wall (and I do mean prolific: we had almost “Big Brother”-like access to their love lives from our living room and dining room windows). With both dengue fever and the bubonic plague on my mind (yes, I am a bit of an alarmist, I admit) we hired a gardener to come monthly to raze the sanctuary-lending weeds and hack away the errant vines and shrubs that creep over our wall from the neighbors’ gardens. Next, facilities maintenance kindly placed child-proof rat poison dispensers in strategic locations. By degrees, the mosquitoes retreated, the rats succumbed.

Scene of the crime.

In the end, I vanquished many of my gardening foes (although I still give the ant hill a wide berth). So, for now, I bid thee farewell from my (nearly) ant- and mosquito-free bunker in Santo Domingo.