Friendship Beyond Words
Three weeks with Sally in the Dominican Republic
I met Sally on my first day in Los Higos. I was sitting on the red porch of Dinora’s house — and my new home, for three weeks at least — in a turquoise lawn chair. The small, two-room house sat among a cluster of other tin-roofed homes on a red clay hill slightly above the village. My arrival had already attracted attention in the little village; new americanos were not especially rare, but always exciting.
Soon after arriving, a niña joined me on the porch, maybe 12 or 13 years old. Sally had frizzy brown hair pulled back in a bun. Her face was wide and bright, but her body was somehow damaged, and she moved with movements wider and slower than the other girls. She spoke with slow intention: “puedes…algo…ropa.” I picked out the individual words but not the desires behind them. For much of the afternoon, we sat in smiles and silence.
The porch, belonging to my “Dominican mama” Dinora, my host, became something of a club over the next three weeks. Children of every age, all related in indecipherable ways, visited any time they weren’t in school, and sometimes when they were supposed to be. One night, I taught a gang of preteen boys to shuffle a deck of cards; another night we all watched Dariel, a toddler who usually only wore a diaper and sunglasses, breakdance in the dust. Here, I listened to the endless merengue that pulsed through the village and practiced Spanish with another neighbor girl, who talked impossibly fast. Here, I sat in amiable silence with the elderly Pepe, an uncle or cousin of Dinora’s, who ate lunch with us and always carried a knife in his back pocket.
Sally visited often, when she could find someone to help her walk the short distance from her family home to Dinora’s. With great patience, we grappled with speech and fought for understanding, with varying degrees of success. Beyond just my shallow Spanish, words often eluded Sally despite her clearly bright mind, or were stretched so long as to be indistinguishable. But sitting on the porch together, we tried. Slowly, despite so little transfer of meaningful words, we became friends.
My last weekend in Los Higos, the local church hosted a goodbye party, a despedida, for me and some fellow travellers. I stopped by Sally’s on my way down the hill, and we began the slow descent. She rarely left the hill at all, as its slippery clay was difficult to manage even with multiple helpers, but she was determined to join in the party, the last big gathering before the americanos returned home.
When the hill became too difficult, Sally climbed on my back and clung her thin arms on my shoulders, piggy back, as we bounced through the village like schoolkids. We made it to the church, each breathless, each happy.
The next day I left. On my way down the hill for the last time, I stopped at Sally’s, where we squeezed hands and said goodbye without a word.
