A Drive to Batey 50
Ms. French had called Batey 50 “the happiest place on earth,” but I didn’t believe it. I had been to quite a few bateyes when I went last year, but being confined to the med clinic limited my experience; I never interacted with anyone using anything but basic conversational Spanish and wasn’t around anyone long enough to deepen the conversation anyway. Then, I went to Batey 50.
The experience of Batey 50 starts with the drive. Beginning in the main city area of La Romana, you can tell that the water drainage system isn’t great. It hadn’t rained any more than it would in Connecticut, but the water sitting still on the streets made me feel like there was a massive monsoon the night before. The drive to Batey 50 is a little over an hour, meaning you will see at least 25 lottery shops while still in the main city. As you drive closer to the batey, you begin to see the sugarcane. It stretches as far as the eye can see. While driving through these massive fields, the only thing I could think about was how many people it must take to farm one acre of sugarcane, and how much sugar one acre of sugarcane even makes. The water drainage system becomes nonexistent once you leave the main roads, which coincidentally is more than half of the drive to Batey 50. The windy roads to Batey 50 are incredibly scenic, to the point where you almost forget about how the land has been manufactured for farming by indentured servants. Before you arrive at Batey 50, there are a bunch of other bateyes off the road. Even though we never interacted with them, the people in those bateyes were so welcoming. You couldn’t help but smile and wave to everyone waving to you.
Then, we get to Batey 50. It has a very unique “feel” to it compared with other bateyes I’ve been to. Maybe it is because it is so far removed from the nearest city, but it just feels so contained and unified. Thousands of miles from Connecticut, I truly felt like I was home. I quickly made friends with a 12-year-old girl on Batey 50 named Elizabeth and a 16-year-old girl named Yolanda. Both girls were very willing to help me navigate the batey and communicate with everyone. Yolanda would regularly take my wheelbarrow of cement or help me shovel dirt when she thought I needed it.
Elizabeth was my right hand(or I was hers, I’m not sure). She was clearly a voice of authority among the younger children on Batey 50, and despite the fact that most of the time I understood very little of what she was trying to explain to them, I would not have been able to safely navigate the batey without her. When she wasn’t making sure that everyone knew what was expected of them, we had a lot of fun. Whether it was finding a trough of water and splashing me, skipping and dancing down the streets singing Shakira songs, practicing our model struts, or jumping up behind each other and then pretending it wasn’t us, the language barrier never came in the way of pure joy.
Then it came time to leave. We hugged and cried, and then the bus pulled out of Batey 50. It didn’t matter if we told our newfound friends that we were coming back next year, whether we meant it or not; it was one of the most heartbreaking moments. But I can only imagine what it was like for Elizabeth and Yolanda. Because I had something to look forward to when I returned to my real home in Connecticut. I got to see my parents, dogs, and brother, and enjoy a hot shower and the luxury of my bed. Elizabeth and Yolanda only said goodbye. There was no assurance that we would return, and they don’t have the means to visit us; they might never have experiences outside of Batey 50 and the surrounding bateyes. They are “stuck” in the land of false hope given by horrid lottery companies, poor drainage systems with festering bacteria, and sugarcane fields so vast they become inescapable.
