Alternative Spring Break Dominican Republic 2013 (By Melanie Marks) Fourteen students and one faculty member set out for the adventure of a lifetime during spring break. Partnering with New Community Project s Sustainable Living Center in Roanoke, Longwood University traveled to areas not frequented by tourists. Instead of heading for the beautiful Caribbean beaches, the group s goal was to have the real Dominican Republic experience where they would live as many citizens do in relative poverty. The Dominican Republic is an island in the Caribbean and shares a border with Haiti. While the country is far better off economically than its neighbor, the country s GDP per capita is well below the world average. We set out for the small community of La Guama, in the mountains near the border of Haiti, by way of a guagua (bus). There is no concept of personal space on a guagua. Boards are put across the aisles to make room for more travelers and it can be very crowded. However, it was a great opportunity to speak to the locals and enjoy some good Latin music. In La Guama, travelers were assigned to host families who welcomed them in the traditional Dominican manner, with hugs and kisses and great warmth. While La Guama is not the poorest of the communities the students would live in, most houses did not have indoor plumbing and electricity was only available some of the time, as service rotated to different parts of the community. Students would use outhouses, wash their clothes in basins, and take baths using a washcloth and a tub of water. Practically no one in La Guama spoke English, so students had to rely on those in the group who spoke Spanish. When words failed, there was always the common language of baseball, music, and dancing. Baseball, the most popular sport in the Dominican Republic, required creativity. Balls were made from rags and bats were carved from branches. But that did not detract from the fun. The impromptu baseball game pictured here was one of our first experiences with the locals. We hiked to an even more rural part of the community where we found houses along a dirt road. In the first house, a woman named Santa
invited us in for coffee. Her house was in need of repairs and on a rainy day it would take many dozens of buckets to collect the rain that would come through her roof. But, she had a million dollar view of the mountains and the scene was breathtaking. Santa explained to some of us that her crop yields were way down, likely a result of climate change and the lack of rain that the country has been experiencing (compounded by the severe deforestation taking place). In traditional Dominican fashion, she served us small cups of coffee dark, sweet, and delicious. Some of the neighbors taught the students to play dominoes. The children peeked around the corner to look at us. After some coaxing, they came over and we made our way to the dirt road for a ballgame. While in La Guama, students explored two local markets, one just over the border of Haiti in a free travel zone and a second one on our side of the border in a town named Elias Piña. The contrast was startling and the difference in prosperity was evident just from this experience. In the market on the Dominican side, venders were selling clothing, alcohol, fruit, vegetables, and meals of yucca, plantains, and chicken stews. Students purchased things to bring back to their host families, and some souvenirs for themselves. On the way back, we picked up pineapples for our next service activity working with the local women s group, Mujeres en Desarrollo (nicknamed MUD ), which translates as Women in Development. MUD is a cooperative that is best-known for the production of a high calorie food bar used to feed malnourished children. One bar contains 500 calories, and local studies showed that children gained significant weight after being served these bars for only a month. The group uses grant funds and donations to support its operation and to supply the bars to needy children. Our job was to help them make peanut butter and pineapple/orange preserves that they would sell at an upcoming exhibition. Students in the pictures are helping to prepare the oranges and remove the red skins from peanuts. We were joined by a couple of church volunteers from New York who were there to visit their friend Joanna, who heads up many local projects and helped to arrange our stay in La Guama. Some of the students went by truck to deliver large barrels of water to the elder home. This is a community project similar to our daycare programs for the elderly, where they can be active for the day. But, there is no access to water unless it is driven there from quite a distance.
Our next service project required us to drive into the mountains outside of El Cercado where a community garden was being established. Unlike the traditional model where different individuals have a share, the families will cycle through the different growing seasons. Our job was to help prepare the land by hauling rocks, laying out water lines, and preparing the rows for planting. While we were working, the local children watched with great curiosity. We paid them to find us some guayabana and guavas, two of my favorite fruits that are not available here. The opportunity to earn some pocket changed was very exciting to them, and we ended up purchasing something like 20 pounds of fruit (which we brought back to the families in La Guama). The local women cooked a great lunch of rice and beans and pasta, all cooked over an open fire. After many hours of labor, we treated ourselves to a swim in the river. Unfortunately, this was our last night in the village of La Guama. In celebration, the community threw a dance in the church building. Young and old attended and my female students were definitely an attraction. Dominican men are flirty but harmless, and it was really fun to dance with them. After lots of hugs and kisses from our host families, we boarded the guagua for our ride back to the capital. There we switched to a private bus and headed to the sugar plantations where we would be based at Centro De Atencion Jesus Peregrino, an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of the stateless Dominicans that work in the sugar fields. Surprisingly, the Center was very modern, and it was nice to see indoor plumbing with toilets and showers. Our first stop was the sugar cane fields where we stacked sugar cane for a short period. Then we were taken on a tour of the facility to learn how sugar cane is harvested, weighed, and how workers are compensated. Sugar cane workers are primarily Haitian and they are enticed by the promise of good wages. But, they are paid very little not even enough to put food on the table for a family. And there are many ways that workers are cheated. For example, if they are Haitian they might not be able to read the receipt that they are provided once their harvest is weighed. So, the individual handing out the payments might take advantage of that. As such, the workers in the area we toured have organized themselves as a way of providing some protection.
Unfortunately, many workers live in company-owned housing areas called bateys. The housing is substandard and often consists of run-down barracks. There could be an entire family living in something the size of a small college dorm room. Corrugated metal roofs were rusted through. Generally, facilities are not kept up and in some communities there is no access to water. In one community we saw a USDA water project (pictured below). But we were told it was not operational. The pump deteriorated long ago and the USDA has not returned to make repairs. As such, the community members must walk an hour each way to the river to collect jugs of water. As bad as some of these housing areas were, we definitely saw worse. In one area we passed a housing facility where newly recruited immigrants live. They are locked in the buildings at night and guarded to prevent escape. A large fence with barbed wire surrounded the complex. After dinner at the Center, we heard from a lawyer about the discrimination against the Haitian population. Recently, the government passed a new law stating that, starting in 2010, if you were born to Haitian parents you would be considered Haitian and not Dominican. This means that you would be unable to get identification which prevents you from getting a job and higher education. Interestingly, the government is violating its own laws because it is retroactively applying this to individual born before 2010. We met Isidro (pictured to the right), an incredibly intelligent and articulate 24 year-old. Until recently, he had full rights as a citizen. His parents are Haitian, and even though he was born in the Dominican Republic and his parents have collectively lived in the country for 90 years, he has had his citizenship rescinded. He had to drop out of the university and cannot get a job other than small tasks that are offered under the table. There are thousands of people in the
same situation. Haitians (even ones born in the Dominican Republic) cannot participate in the national healthcare system and they are not eligible for social security. Worse yet, without identification, they are at risk of deportation. Isidro and his sister have organized a student protest group and we are hoping to mimic some of their activities on the Longwood campus in support of their efforts. After breakfast in the Center, we headed towards the batey where we would stay overnight. Along the way we went through some other bateys. In one community, children were attending school. But others were waiting outside. We learned that because there are not enough resources, some children go to school in the morning and the others in the afternoon. Essentially, each child gets half a day of schooling. Our impromptu visit to the school was a wonderful experience. The students were happy to see us and they sang the national anthem. We reciprocated by singing ours. There was also a little dancing! Around 2:00 we arrived in batey Naranja. We sponsored a community lunch and it was possibly the only food that many of the residents would eat that day. We joined them for this meal of rice, chicken, yucca, and plantains. I am told that we fed around 125 people. Batey Naranja is very poor and it is unfortunately very far from the nearest school. As a result, many of the children are not attending. There is a local school building in the batey but it is only one small room. There are no teachers in the area so the school does not operate. The children were very happy to see us. The girls were most interested in braiding hair. The boys were easy to entice into playing soccer and baseball you can see the boys playing in a field behind the pigs in the picture below! While the students played with the kids, I was invited for coffee. My Spanish is not that good but I was able to have a long conversation with three of the adults in the community. As you can imagine, their stories are horrible. One gentleman had saved enough money for some cows. But, he lost all of his wealth when they were stolen. A second gentleman developed a lung disease from the burning process used in sugar cane harvesting. He had a diagnosis from a physician but was not able to afford the course of treatment expected to
cost around 500 pesos, less than $15. (On behalf of the group, I left the money for him to get the medicine that he needed.) These people literally had nothing, and they will not get retiree benefits from the government since they are Haitian. They are also ineligible for healthcare benefits. Tom, our leader from New Community Project, and I met with the local medical consultant. She had participated in a training program and knew the very basics of medical care, despite the fact that she had no formal education. However, the community had no medicines at all. Along the way to her house, we passed a small, neatly painted wooden house that could have been a kid s playhouse in any of our backyards here in the USA. The resident who escorted us to the clinic said that he dreams of owning a house like that one day. Before dinner the children led us to the river, which was only a few minutes away (a big benefit for this batey). It was pure joy to play in the water with the kids, and because there is no running water in the batey, this constituted our bath for the day. So, we were even happier to be there for that reason. Our dinner was an amazing homemade peanut butter with cayenne pepper and bread baked by Jerome, a resident of the batey (amazingly delicious). After dinner we joined the community for a bonfire with singing and dancing. We offered the children packs of Oreos and school supplies. They were very grateful and it is a shame that we could not do more. But, it is important for us to build relationships with the community members and not be welcomed simply because of what we bring with us. It is hard to keep that in perspective when each family is so needy. Our home for the night was a small church and we had to put our blankets on the cement floors or wooden benches. Jerome stayed outside until very late in the night to keep an eye on us. It was not the best night s sleep, and I personally was awake most of the night. But, by asking to stay in their community, we sent the residents of this batey a signal that living with them was not beneath us. In the morning, we collected all of the items that we wanted to leave behind for the residents shirts, shoes, blankets, toiletries, etc. We ended up with a substantial pile of things. The community members asked me to give them out to the different households. I declined, trying to explain that I could not possibly know which families were the neediest. I figured the task would be better conducted by someone in a position of authority in the community. What I did not realize is that there was no such person there was not going to be a way to allocate the items fairly. What resulted was chaos and definitely not an equitable distribution as we had hoped. Next year, we will likely focus on some community assets, such as a stocked medical cabinet (something that everyone might benefit from).
As we left the batey, we reflected on our time there and acknowledged that it was both a very sad and happy experience. Even though the residents lived in absolute squalor, there was still beauty and joy. We were glad that we got to know them and felt privileged to be part of their community, even if it is was for a short time. We brought Isidro (who had accompanied us to the batey) back to his community, and we left him with money to take English classes, something that will open up additional opportunities for him. We wished him the best and told him how much we would miss him. The last night of our Alternative Spring Break was spent enjoying what most people come to the Dominican Republic to see the beautiful beaches. We relaxed and reflected on our time in the Dominican Republic. We played volleyball with locals, ate great meals, and enjoyed massages on the beach. However, we know that is not the real Dominican Republic.