La Isabela

This weekend our trip was a co-pay trip to La Isabela, the first established European colony in the New World. I have previously expressed my feelings on history, but this was actually so cool! So I want to share a little bit. I’m going to do a sweeping accreditation right now of my facts to the spoken word of my program director Lynne Guitar, a researcher of history and anthropology. First off, some people will say that it’s not worth going to because so many of the ruins are gone. Part of this is because Trujillo ordered one of his men to clean up the mess, whose solution was to dump it all in the sea. What’s left of the ruins is dwindling because the locals will take the rubble from what’s left to build their own homes. It’s hard for them to respect the history when they’re just trying to survive their own place in history right now. Columbus first arrived with his men around Christmas time. They celebrated Christmas Eve more heartily than Christmas day itself, and they did so but drinking it away. There was a shipwreck because all of the men were drunk and a 12-year-old was left in charge of the ship. So when they decided to return, 39 of them had to stay. But Columbus promised that he would be back within a year. And he was-he came back around Christmas time the next year…to find the rotting corpses of all 39 of them. What had happened was that the Spaniards had integrated well with the Tainos and the Tainos killed them because “they didn’t know how to live in a civilized society”. They had begun raping the Taino women. This was mostly due to them not understanding the Taino culture very clearly. The Tainos encouraged sexual experimentation from a very young age before marriage. Any baby born was seen as a gift. And they were very hospitable so when the Spaniards came as guests they would lend them women to be their bedmates. Since the Spaniards saw everyone sleeping with everyone else, they thought it was okay to take any woman they pleased, but it was not. So the Tainos decided they had to kill them off. But they couldn’t have imagined the terremoto that came back with Columbus, but neither were the Spaniards prepared for such disaster. Columbus brought 1,200 men with him. Each Spaniard ate about 8 times what each Taino would eat. And they were all hidalgos-important people-so they weren’t going to lift a finger to help cultivate the land. Everyone was going hungry after awhile. Furthermore, the Spaniards encountered new diseases they had no immunity to. Within the first 3 months 400 Spaniards died of dehydration from dysentery. We saw a complete skeleton of one of the Spaniards (the Tainos put boards on the foreheads of their children so they all has purposefully slanted foreheads so with his flat forehead this is known to be a Spaniard) and that was really a strange feeling. It wasn’t even like in a glass box in a museum. It was just out in the open with a hut over it to shelter it from the elements.
Okay, end of history lesson for the day. After this we went to the beach in La Isabela, where there is a large coral reef. The water was so calm and so shallow and so warm! And I got to walk on the reef! (Thank you Chacos! :) ) I found some shells and some other cool things and just had fun exploring. Later we were finding cool crabs and stuff when some Dominicans sauntered by with a LIVE sea urchin in their hands!!! They let me hold it =] It felt so weird because I could feel it moving. In our other searches I made a hermit crab friend and we found some baby sea urchins. At one point I was holding both my friend and a baby sea urchin and I think that the sea urchin was about to eat the crab because it suctioned him to himself so I had to separate them (although I have to admit, that would have been fascinating to watch, but I was a little leery of a sea urchin stunning his prey on my hand…) We ate lunch from an amazing woman who cooks on the beach for a living and it was soooo good. Some people ate fish (I don’t particularly enjoy seafood so I wasn’t that daring) and others ate chicken. We had to let her know in advance that we were coming because they catch the fish the morning of, and she had to know how many to catch. The meat plus the tostones plus the rice and beans plus the salad plus the coke was about $5. Incredible.

After that beach we went to a different beach that was much wavier. There was a string of rocks the went out into the ocean (sort of like what lines the Grand Haven pier but without the pier) and I made it all the way out! But barely. I lost a flip flop a couple of times and I was scared of losing my camera. But I made it and it was beautiful. After I got back from that, a friend and I decided we were going to try and cross off another Reto from our list by obtaining, opening, and drinking a coconut from a tree. We intended to climb the tree but that was ruled out after a few feeble attempts. So I got a coconut from the ground and threw it at the cluster. I had several really good hits! But I think that they were not at all ripe and they hardly budged. So my friend began to shimmy up with another friend’s help with spotting. She made it so far up but he wasn’t tall enough to get her up further and she was still a little out of reach. All the Dominicans on the beach had formed a little motorcycle cluster and thought we were so amusing. Sadly, we had to go so we had to give up. I was a little heartbroken. We will find a way somehow before we leave! I slept contentedly for much of the way home and arrived peacefully. Then, I began my homework for the next day. Just another day in the life :)