Increíble.

Walking home from work today, I heard a woman yelling and looked in the direction of the noise. Squinting my eyes against the afternoon sun, I could make out a man’s overturned juice cart which he rides on flattened wheels to and from his home in the impoverished part of the city. Just behind it and pulled off of the side of the road was a black Mercedes Benz that had clearly run into the cart. His 20z plastic soda bottles, filled with the juice that he had made that morning, were spilled all over the road. Pieces of bread had broken out of the plastic package and were splayed across the road along with instruments, cups, and containers. This man’s livelihood was splattered across the ground.

The woman and vendor were surrounded by six men, a mix of security guards and nearby workers, as the woman screamed in Spanish, “I am not going to pay!” The rest of her speech was incomprehensible to me, but since she was the only one screaming, I deducted that she was making it very clear that she thought it was the vendor’s fault and she was definitely not paying for the damages to his cart.

This is one of the difficulties with the Dominican hierarchical system. Sometimes it seems as though one has been transplanted back, back, back into the early 1900’s when masters and slaves still existed. When people did not have a voice merely because of the color of their skin or their social status. If this accident was to be taken to the police, I can guarantee that they would side with the woman. After all, doesn’t it make sense that since she is intelligent enough to build and/or maintain wealth, she is somehow worth more than this vendor who just had his entire business destroyed by her car? Sadly, many here would respond, “Claro que sí.”