Luto

Tonight is my last night in Las Terrenas for 2 1/2 months, and it´s the quietest night yet. No music, no parties, no people drinking, nothing, and it´s a Friday night. The town is in an official state of mourning (luto) because yesterday there was a horrific bus accident in which 15 people died. The express bus from the capital, Santo Domingo, crashed head-on with a lorry and the whole bus crumpled. There are 15 dead and more than 20 seriously injured so far, with some of the injured still unidentified. The bus was packed, with people standing in the aisles.

The preliminary reports are that the 3pm guagua from Santo Domingo to Las Terrenas (the last one of the day) was about halfway to Las Terrenas when the driver went into the opposite lane going around a curve and crashed head on with a lorry. The driver died in the collision, so this account is according to the driver of the lorry, who needed surgery but survived. Almost everyone on the bus was from Las Terrenas or El Limón, the next town over. It happened at 4pm, my housemate saw a big commotion when she was out running at 5pm and heard then, and I went into work at 6pm. The whole evening more news trickled in. Nothing was on official news channels, because it´s not that fast here. Instead, people sent photos and videos from the scene by Whatsapp and Facebook. That was something that shocked me - before any emergency services had moved bodies, there were dozens of people milling around with cameraphones taking videos and photos. The photos are horrific, and shared on everyone´s Facebook wall.

By midnight last night, hundreds of people were waiting in the covered basketball court, where bodies were being brought to be returned to families. This is a small town, of 20,000 people, and many of the people who died were well known. I didn´t know any of them, because I´m a blow-in, but locals know everyone. A 10 year old boy was among the dead.The phone company, Orange, had sent 3 of its staff to a training day in Santo Domingo, and those 3 women died, one of whom was pregnant. It seems a lot of people knew them, I heard so many people talk about them.

Yakaira, one of the women who worked in the Orange shop.

Alba, one of the women who worked in the Orange shop.

By law, funerals have to happen within 24 hours, because there are no facilities here for preserving bodies, no embalming or anything. So today, at 10am, 18 hours after the accident, the funeral processions of Yakaira, Alba and Emilia, three friends, started up the main street. There were three pickup trucks, holding a coffin each, with family sitting inside the cab and around the coffin in the back. Each truck had its own procession, with people all around holding on to the sides and walking beside it and behind it. There were three other trucks too dispersed along the length of the procession that only had speakers on them, all blaring the same song on repeat - Adios mi familia. The whole town walked with them, some people wailing and crying and sobbing. There were some news cameras there, and lots of people filming it with their phones. At one point, a women broke out of a crowd wailing hysterically, and the news cameras all swung to film her. She was walking up the street wailing, with someone holding onto her, and a young guy in front of her, not a metre away from her, with his phone up, filming her. Here they don´t seem to think that is disrespectful. I don´t know if it´s to do with the fact that nobody here was able to make videos or take photos until very recently, or another cultural difference I don´t understand yet. All the photos I show here I took off the internet. I wanted to be able to show people what this kind of mass bereaving looked like, but I did not want to take photos.

I left the procession before the burial, but these photos were shared online.

The police shot dead an innocent young man, sparking a riot earlier this week, and now this awful accident has happened. Las Terrenas needs some good luck, you can feel the sadness everywhere. I am ready to leave, I need a break. This is a wonderful place that I want to come back to, my time here is not finished. But it´s not easy some of the time. Some things that we take for granted just aren´t true for here. Those people who were lucky enough to survive the crash are now in a dirty, understaffed, underequipped hospital. If they make it out of there alive, they won´t have rehabilitation, or prosthetics, or follow-up care, or a disability allowance. I haven´t heard of anyone getting treatments like chemotherapy for cancer, and I´m starting to think that maybe they don´t get it. 

So while this is a glum post, I am fine, and my friends are fine, and the kids in my school and all their parents are fine and that is something to be very grateful for. As I was writing this post, my housemate Mackenzie dropped in a goodbye card to my room that she made. She painted me juggling teaching (Las Terrenas International School 4th grade math) and waitering in Lazy Dog, and it was so darn sweet it cheered me up no end! So I´ll leave you with Mackenzie´s picture, and post again from my new, temporary life in Cape Cod.