Fear

A blog post by Adam. For Christmas, our Santo Domingo host family invited us to their home for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner. It was quite a production. We arrived at their house on the afternoon of the 24th, attended mass from 7:00-8:30, and then made our way to our host brother's home for the actual meal. More than twenty family members were present, ranging in age from two-years-old to over 70. We hung out for a few hours, and at 10:30 pm joined around an elegantly decorated table for a feast of bread, turkey, sweet potato casserole, some sort of pork dish, and an amazing grape salad. We then hung out for a couple more hours, until 1:30 am, when a four year old threw up after eating a couple pounds of candy while running around endlessly with his cousins (bedtime is pretty flexible in the DR for adults and kids alike).

The following morning we had a relaxing breakfast with our host family before heading back to La Romana in the early afternoon. In the end, it was our morning together that was the most enlightening part of the trip. As we sat in their living room our host mother recounted stories of robberies and attempted robberies, of her daughter being held up, and of murders for money. It was frightening, but not a new experience.  Over and over we had heard of people who had been robbed, often for cell phones. A coworker who lived in our same apartment building was afraid to walk the streets at night, and various other Dominicans we met regularly walked the streets in fear.  Fear was such a normal part of every day life.

Such had also been the case in Israel, but there it was a different kind of fear. Among Jewish Israelis there was a fear of Palestinians and particularly of the neighboring Arab nations. Most of the Israelis we met had no trust in their Arab neighbors. Likewise, the few Palestinians we talked to only had mistrust for Israelis. Similar to the DR, people seemed to go about their day to day lives under a cloud of fear.

More recently, in Ecuador, we were repeatedly warned of theft and of how we should be particularly careful when getting into taxis and buses. Robberies in taxis had become so common that many taxis now have security cameras and panic buttons for passengers' safety. Given all of the warnings we felt ourselves constantly looking over our shoulder, constantly wary of the people around us. And in fact my host sister was robbed during our stay - she and a friend were in restaurant near the university where they study when a man entered with a weapon and demanded their cell phones. Carolina lost nearly a thousand pictures, and also lost some confidence in venturing beyond her home.

Three very different countries all gripped by fear. Even in the US, most of which generally seems safe, Michael Moore posited that we live in a culture of fear in the movie "Bowling for Columbine". Fear is undoubtedly a normal human emotion, but I wonder if ever in human history have so many people lived with constant fear of others so much of the time. During our short time in Israel, the Dominican Republic, and Ecuador we spent valuable energy looking out for ourselves, attempting to temper our fear. I can only imagine how it must be to live in fear for a lifetime; for a healthy dose of fear to be a daily feeling. It seems that if we could convert all the energy spent being fearful of one another into energy spent on addressing the root causes of crime and conflict, we might be better off. Instead, sadly, it seems that our fear only immobilizes us.