The Hunt's Afoot

When flying over the Dominican mountains, it appears that birds have built nests precariously on the ridges, and are raising their young in the heights, princes and princesses of a verdant wonderland with an ocean view.

When you are human eye-level, however, you see they are not nests. Rather, they are small corrugated steel or cement block houses hanging on for dear life to the mountain side, clutching a serpentining, narrow road. The view of the valley and watercolor shore is free, sans property taxes, but worth a million dollars.

The people who live here are poor. Every time we drive past, I am sobered by the poverty, even as I am overwhelmed by the spectacle of mountain, earth, water and sky. I don’t understand how these families came to be here. Perhaps the houses were originally built by the men who constructed the road? And afterwards, people came and settled in them because they were available? I’m theorizing. 

What is fact, is statistically speaking you are at higher risk of dying from natural disaster if you live here. Much higher. Hurricane Maria in point. What is more, you are a good hour from the private hospital, 2 hours from the regional government hospital that I’m assuming most of these people would be obligated to use. Emergencies aside, day-to-day is a struggle. Although food is available the variety is extremely limited from a Walmart perspective.

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And yet, the earth here is beautiful.

Tierra buena, tierra bella. 

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In some places, like parts of Haiti, the ground cries out with the people, hungry and thirsty. It is barren and ugly and can’t turn a carrot orange. The people are depleted too, of nutrients, of strength, of hope. The earth and the people are unified, and it births pure, simple emotions in your heart: sadness, anger, empathy.

But when hardship is set in the realm of natural glory, where every plant sings “life,” your heart compresses and bursts, compresses and bursts, until you are left in confusion, a melancholic state of wonder. You are stuck in a Shakespearean tragedy: marvelous prose, horrible story (sorry, my man Shakespeare).

I know that when Jesus took the punishment for all the sin of the world, all the horrible stories past, present, and future, giving His chosen ones the right to stand before the judgement seat of God and be declared redeemed, he also felt the pain of the world, of separation from God. He felt the pain of the poverty and hopelessness of those living in the rural mountains of the Dominican (or West Virginia, or Nepal, or wherever) and he gets this. He is not oblivious to their pain, or to my pain that I feel when I see it, live next to it every day. I also know that in this moment God is continuing to store up wrath which will be justly poured out on the causes of all this pain when the Day of the Lord appears. There is not one bacteria or amoeba or unrepentant dictator or demon that will not be duly punished. 

So I can rest. Of course help people whenever it is in my power to do it, but there is no need to be overwhelmed by cruel emotions. One can feel the breeze as the sun sets behind the mountain and enjoy it, trusting that the coexisting darkness is not something you should let get you down.

Easier said than done, no? Sometimes I am still brought to tears, or entirely frustrated, like when I was sitting in the hall outside the ER, waiting for a family member of my husband’s to be admitted to a room, and the electricity kept coughing, taking down along with it the nebulizers attached to crying kids, the desktop computers.

It’s everywhere, every day, inescapable, it seems: the poverty, the pain, dysfunction. All set beneath a cerulean blue sky, tall coconut loaded palms, and an ambient of Latino music.

In the midst of everything, you have to let yourself enjoy the beauty that there is.

When the beauty is not evident, you must search for it. It is an obligation.

So in the midst of my everything—a bunch of boys; cooking; the dirty dishes and laundry that I carried to our new apartment from the old one because I didn’t get around to washing them; sitting in the hospital with a friend or in the shop with a car whose hobby is breaking down; being present in broken lives; etc.—my hunt’s afoot.