The Story of a Rose
Rosa Joseph (1991) Batey Cojobal, Sabana Grande de Boyá, Monte Plata. She went to school until the 8th grade under the old system (currently 2nd year of high school under the new educational system). She married at 16 and has four children. She has a national identity and electoral card. She is not employed and has no income.
In Cojobal de Sabana Grande de Boyá, between sugarcane and rocky roads (without electricity and a lack of potable water), I was born, raised and still live there: a very painful life between poverty and sometimes, joy.
I was three years old when my mother separated from my father, leaving me and my brother, Luis, with my dad. He raised us alone, without the help of a mother or a stepmother. We went with him to work, since he was a sugarcane cutter. He left us with the women who cooked in the sugarcane fields. We had to get up early every day at four in the morning to go to work with him. The only days we didn’t have to get up early were Sundays. That day was when we slept the most because we were tired, physically exhausted from those carts with worn tires. There were so many nights that my brother and I went to bed without bathing and without dinner!
On Sundays he would take us to the river to wash clothes and bathe, wash my hair, trim my little brother’s hair (if he had a lot of hair, if not, he wouldn’t). On Sunday afternoons, he would look for a young woman to comb my hair and if he couldn’t find anyone, he would do some turutuyos1 in my hair himself. There were very few times that I played with my dolls because there was no time to play. Other times, he would leave us with some of the older ladies from the community, sometimes they would get a little annoyed at having to take us in. On several occasions I heard them say that we had a mother, why did he not leave us with her?
When I turned five years old, my dad enrolled me at Josefa Perdomo School, where I completed my primary education. I would go to school without combing my hair, dirty, and apart from that, I also had to take care of my brother in school. On one occasion, the principal asked me about my mother, why I came to school in that condition. I told her that I had no mother, always with tears in my eyes, ashamed, and with a lump in my throat.
I remember that one day a lady selling bread and hot chocolate in the sugarcane fields gave me a piece of bread. She divided it into two pieces: she gave me half and the other half to my little brother Luis. I told her that I didn’t want it because my dad told us not to eat from the hands of strangers, and my Godmother replied: “Don’t say that my child, she is your mother, take it.” And I didn’t even eat it: I left it there for my dad to see. When he arrived, he asked me who gave that to us, and I told him that it was a Black woman who came by selling hot chocolate and bread. Then, my Godmother told my dad that [the lady] was my mom. And he told me that we could eat it, but she left without giving us an explanation of whether she was [our mother] or not.
One afternoon my dad called her to talk to her about us, to wash our uniforms and comb my hair. She told him to look for a woman to wash and comb us because she had no reason to do it. Then my dad said, “What kind of mother are you?” She replied that she was, “like a guinea hen, my job was to lay the eggs, not to raise children.” But, despite this, I didn’t see her as my mom. When I was seven years old was when, in fact, I started accepting her as my mother. I also discovered that I had two older brothers and an older sister.
When she wasn’t home, I would go to her house to play with my siblings. As soon as she would come back home, I would leave her house. When I was a child I did not have a good relationship with my mother, until at the age of 16, I had my first child and she came to help me. It was very hard for me to know that the lady who lived across from us was my mother… all this time I thought I didn’t have a mother.
While my brother and I waited in the sugarcane fields, my dad would make us a little house of four sticks with a roof made of dried sugarcane leaves and guava tree branches. We would spend the day there, sleeping and eating. Sometimes he took advantage of a moment to check on us and see if the sun was hitting us to change our position and made us sugarcane and grapefruit juice. It was almost always like that. Then we would go home and he would make us hot chocolate with crackers for dinner. Sometimes this dinner would be breakfast, since we would fall asleep.
At the age of eight I started learning how to cook by watching how the neighbor did it. My dad also taught me how to fry eggs, boil green bananas and make hot chocolate. I raised my younger brothers and four nephews, who are my older sister’s children from my father’s side. The neighbors would tell me that I looked like a little grandmother because I had a lot of knowledge and patience to deal with so many kids.
At the age of nine I suffered a terrible episode that left a mark on me for the rest of my life. A relative of my mother, whom I met at my mother’s house, molested me several times. He came into our house after my dad left at the crack of dawn. My dad locked the door from the outside so that, when we woke up, we could call a neighbor to open the door for us. So, he would take advantage of this to enter and abuse me.
I used to think that what he was doing to me was a good thing, until one day, after several months, he confessed that he was not my mother’s relative, because if he had been, he would not have done what he did to me. But it was not [until] I was twelve that I realized what he had done to me. A great hatred toward him developed in me, I even tried to kill him. On two occasions I tried to stab him with a pair of scissors, but I couldn’t. Something held me back.
I blamed my mother for what happened to me, because if she had at least paid attention, maybe that wouldn’t have happened to me. One day my dad asked me if anyone had crossed the line with me, and I said no, because I was afraid of his temper, but he always suspected that something had happened to me. He even asked my brother if anyone came into the house after he left. He told him he didn’t know. Even to this today I haven’t dared to tell my dad what happened to me.
As a result of that experience I suffered from a terrible depression. I went to school, but I couldn’t pay attention in class. I was always alone, hidden, crying. I wanted to die, since my life had no meaning. Nothing made me smile. I sought refuge in a married man with children. This relationship lasted about a year. My dad was against that relationship, but I fell in love with him. He also used me. One day he asked me: “Who made you a woman?” I felt like I had been stabbed with that question. I didn’t know what to tell him, until I broke up with him.
Then, in 2006, I married2 a 33-year-old man, who took me to Samaná to live far away from my family. There I was humiliated, verbally assaulted. He increased my pain and my depression. He made me feel worthless since he was wealthy. I got pregnant with my first daughter, and when he found out, he took me to live at his mother’s house. I only lasted about two months there, I could not stand the old woman’s insults and she reproached me for the food she gave me. In addition, she let me know that I was not a woman for her son, that her son was looking for women from high society and I was not good enough for her son.
I left that place taking only my clothes. I went back to my father’s house, pregnant and without my ex’s help. I had a difficult pregnancy and I suffered a great deal of hunger, the baby barely moved in my belly because I was always sad, crying. On one occasion, my gynecologist told me that the baby girl was not moving because of my mood, that if I was sad, she was too. So I decided to improve my mood a bit.
Months later, Rosanny was born, weighing five pounds. Her father never came around for her because he wanted a boy; and not only that, but when I was pregnant, he denied he was the father. He said that the baby was not his, so I had my girl alone. He came to meet her when she was eight years old.
Three years later I had a boyfriend, with whom I got pregnant with my second child. He asked me to get an abortion, but I did not want to have an abortion. Well, I found myself pregnant and without the help and support of the father, once again. In those days, he sent me to a man to give me a tea that would cause a miscarriage. This man told me that he could not do that because if my father found out he might even kill him. He advised me to have my son, and that “men do not give birth, women do.” When he [the father] saw that I had no intention of getting an abortion, he sent someone — who three years later would become my mother-in-law—to tell me that he was not the father of that belly, that I should look for the real father of that child.
For me this was a very difficult situation because I suffered a lot of hunger and need. Even when my child was born, I didn’t have any clothes for him to wear. I had to dress him in the clothes left by Rosanny, my oldest daughter. When Adrian was born, he was a very ill child. My situation kept getting worse, so I had to leave my five-month-old boy and my girl with my mother, and went to the city to work in a family home.3 At that job I could only go back to my house every two weeks. When I left, my child weighed 22 pounds and when I returned my child was so thin I no longer recognized him. I did not recognize my son because he got sick from an intestinal infection. There was carelessness in handling the child’s feeding and this caused him to get sick.
Despite all the painful experiences that I have had to live, I do not want my story to be repeated in the lives of my children. So I try to make sure they study… so that they will have, in the future, a better life.