Upon visiting the Dominican Republic on my ‘service’
alternative, I was shocked at the varying roles women and men play in contrast
to other cultures around the world. On the second day of the trip, we took a
three-hour bus ride to one of the main agricultural villages in the DR. After
arriving, we were split into groups of three, each with a Spanish speaker in at
least on of the groups and sent to work at an ordinary village family’s house. At
first it all seemed very bizarre that families that live in poverty and suffer
the harsh practises of cultivating land in the tropics made us guests. They
were all really happy to see us, a different culture altogether. The first
thing I noticed was that when the travelling company asked for the families to
take care of us, it was almost every time a female that took care of us and
made the food for us.
On our second day we took a hike through the forests with
our caretakers, who held a huge machete in one hand and guided the way. She
seemed to know where everything was, not only where we were on a map, but were
different kinds of plants grew and were the herds of killer ants hung out. It
was amazing to see such awareness. With her machete she knocked down banana
trees, dug out vegetables from beneath the earths soil and cut down coconuts
for us whenever we were thirsty. When we got back, she made the food for us,
set it out on the table and watched us eat. I kept trying to tell her to sit
down with us, but she kept on refusing. However after we got to know each other
well, at the expense of her mocking my poor Spanish accent, I managed through
translation to ask her questions about her family, her husband and children.
She told me that she had 5 children and a husband. The next day while we were
in the forest she introduced me to her husband who was drenched in sweat,
picking cocoa beans off the towering trees. I noticed that these men stayed out
in the forest all day, and only came back to their homes for lunch and dinner
in which our guides, who all had husbands working in the fields, made food for
them. The Women’s role was sort of similar to that of housewives, but their
conditions were indeed a lot harder.
On our last day, after being in the forest for three days, I
snuck out of my group to spend some time with the men. These men were just
clipping off cacao beans from the trees all day, and it occurred to me that the
women’s job was much more strenuous and she executed all her duties with all
her effort. On the other hand the men would cut a couple cocoa beans off then
rest on the porch cutting them up. The women had a much harder job then the
men, and what struck me was that Wolfs statement that “Women work hard- twice
as hard as men” (22). Compared to the women around the world, it is still the
same situation where “housework totals forty billion hours of France’s labour
power. Women volunteer work in the United States amounts to $18 billion a year…the
economics of industrialised countries would collapse if women didn’t do the
work they do for free…” (23). After some more research I tried to find a
correlation in the responsibilities and lifestyle of the women in the Dominican
Republican compared to other third world countries like “ Kenya [in that] given
unequal agriculture resources, women’s harvests equalled men’s; given equal
resources, they produced bigger harvests more efficiently” (24). This seems to
support many claims that were made in “it is the end of men”, where Rosin
argues that “women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their
offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more- flexible
behaviour, ordaining them to domesticity” (4).
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