The Orange Dust of Santo Domingo

    Standing on rooftops and looking out over the skyline of Santo Domingo, the buildings appear in a state of continual decay—like pieces of overripe fruit slowly disintegrating and returning to the earth. On the ground there are the smells of fried empanadas, Bachata blaring from car stereos, and the sight of the ocean so blue you’d swear it was surreal.
During my time in the Dominican Republic I’d spent most of my days on those beaches, drinking cold Presidentes and killing time until the bars opened in the Zona Colonial where I could dance Merengue next to the oldest European ruins in the New World—the churches and forts Columbus and his men had built centuries ago.
     Today was different though.
     Today I was in the back yard of an orphanage for Haitian refugees, standing in front of a lopsided hoop, teaching a group of children—victims of human trafficking—the game of basketball. I didn’t speak Creole and they didn’t speak Spanish but we made it work. There was a lot of pointing and laughing and running around. We broke about every rule there is for basketball. It didn’t matter. These kids—who didn’t even have shoes to play in—weren’t concerned about the rules. They just wanted to play the game in bare feet and they were all smiles, all the time.
     It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Standing out there in a concrete yard, surrounded by high walls with barbed wire and the dense tropical trees hovering above us—I thought about the resort I’d been on just days earlier. The contrast was staggering. I shook my head and looked beyond the court where my girlfriend sat on a bench with the children who were too small to play. She was an International Aid worker. She was the reason why I was at the orphanage in the first place. She looked back at me and smiled and I had no idea that in a few months—on a different trip, in a different part of the country—she was going to break my heart.