Week 9- Project Esperanza

With one of the classes

Post Cornrows 

Roof Top View of Munoz 

We left early in the morning for our six-hour trip to Puerto Plata, which is in the northern part of the island. We got there after lunchtime and went directly to the Project Esperanza headquarters, which also houses current volunteers and a fair trade art shop. Kaitlyn, the co-founder of Project Esperanza (and a fellow Hokie!) gave us a briefing about the census surveys we would be giving the next three days. We met Allusena, an 18 month old who was abandoned by her mother with her nine year old sister, Sandra. Both she and Sandra were found extremely malnourished, Allusena near death with pneumonia. She was recently released from a two month hospital stay, but is still a very sick, fragile, and bony little girl- she looks like a new born. When you hold her you can feel how hard she is rasping, her little body has to work so hard to breath. She also has a cleft foot and they do not know if she will walk since her muscle development has been so stunted by illness and malnutrition. I am not a huge fan of babies, but I was totally enamored by her. After dinner, we headed to Batey Munoz for the first time. Before Punta Cana became developed, Puerto Plata was the hotspot tourist destination. There are still many resorts in the area, and Munoz is tucked away in their midst. It is a non-working batey, meaning that the sugar company that owned it left, also leaving 568 households worth of unemployed, undocumented Haitians. One of the most disturbing things I saw during our time there was the go kart and horse back riding excursions through Munoz. Tourists basically pay to go look at the batey and are given candy to throw at the children. At least one group comes through a day, and without fail, the children flood the streets, begging for money and fighting over the thrown candy. The tourists wave and take pictures and the guides take videos that you can buy at the end of the tour. It was like watching an animal safari. I asked Noni, one of my favorite Abuela’s what she thought of it. She said “I do not throw food on the ground for a dog. These children are treated lower than dogs.” When we arrived the first night, many of the children begged us for money and sweets because that is the only image of white people they have. Despite the begging, we received a warm welcome from the community members full of music, dancing, and socializing. I spent most of the night talking to Junior, Roger, and Enelbi, three of the older guys from the Boys Home. They, along with most of the other boys, crossed the border as children and have grown up on the streets. When they were accepted into the Boys Home, they signed a contract saying that he would go to night school. However, many of these guys have been living on the streets for too long that they cannot follow through or adapt to that level of commitment and end up skipping classes and dropping out. Junior has embraced the opportunity and wants to become fluent in Spanish and English so that he can return to Haiti one day and better his home country- Haitians have so much national pride. He also loves Basketball and was so hyped about the concept of March Madness.
Monday and Tuesday were survey days. We arrived in Munoz early each morning and got started right away, as each group of three needed to survey roughly forty houses per day. Project Esperanza needs to know what the critical issues are in the community before the make any development plans so we were there to highlight them by asking literally every question imaginable. How many people live in your house (which are mostly crumbling one room shacks)? How many of those people sleep on the floor? Do you have clean water? What is your weekly income (when there is work)? Do you have a stove, toilet, power, garden, refrigerator, documentation- the list went on and on. We only have two fluent Spanish speakers out of the nine of us and somehow I was deemed the third most fluent. So I got to lead my group’s surveys. At first I was really nervous, but I got the hang of it eventually. It was good for me to be forced into really communicating with these families, analyzing their living conditions and taking in their way of life. Jimmy, my Creole translator for the non-Spanish speaking families was very helpful and patient with me and cleared up any mistakes I made- and there were plenty of them! Munoz is basically a shantytown of huts stacked on top of each other- the surveys are supposed to be private but there is no privacy and we drew attention wherever we went, followed by an entourage of little kids waiting to play with us. I would be in a woman’s house asking “How many meals do you and your family eat a day” and a neighbor would poke her head in and holler “Look how fat she is! How many meals you think she’s eating?” By the end of my questions there would be a whole flock of ladies jokingly answering for each other. Luckily I had a faithful companion with me. I met Ebo, a two year old boy who was abandoned by his mother, a teenage sex worker. Apparently she only fed him powdered fruit juice instead of formula or milk so he was found extremely malnourished. His teeth are only just now coming in because of this, and like Allusena, he is very small for his age. He took a liking to me and I carried him around everywhere. He was the lowest maintenance toddler. He never cried- my arms would get so tired from carrying him so I would occasionally set him down. But then his eyes would start watering as he'd look up at me, holding back tears. How could you say no to that? So my arms got a work out and Ebo became my personal assistant (attached at the hip), holding my packet of Census questions for me during the interviews. Noni made us fried cookies, fresh bread, homemade peanut butter, and squeezed orange juice for us for lunches. The best. I also got my hair braided by Adena, one of the teenage girls. She did a wonderful job and I now can check getting cornrows off my bucket list. Jimmy said I looked like a white Alicia Keys, I thought I looked ridiculous. My group finished surveys early Tuesday afternoon so Tricia, Cat and I got to go teach in the schools! It was different because Kaitlyn had to translate everything we said in Creole, but we managed to discuss Dental Hygiene and the kids enjoyed their coloring activity and receiving Disney Princess and Cars toothbrushes and toothpaste. They could not have been more excited- passing out the little prizes was chaos. I know one word in Creole very well from that experience- “SHEETA!” (SIT DOWN!) Sadly, the schools are on the edge of being closed due to lack of funding.
I’m 3 for 3- it would not have been a proper field trip if I didn’t get sick! Wednesday morning everyone left for Los Haitises National Park for the 27 waterfall hike. I had been looking forward to this all semester long- you hike up a mountain and then climb back down by jumping off a series of 27 waterfalls! But food poisoning swindled me again! Oh well, I felt good enough to go back to Munoz with the group when they returned that afternoon and give a different class a lesson on dental hygiene. Before dinner, we toured CEPROSH, a non-profit HIV/AIDS clinic and discussed how to respond to the extremely high AIDS and sex tourism rates in the DR as well as the social stigmas associated with the disease. It was a very sad but eye opening tour and they are doing some great work. That night, the Boys Home hosted a rap concert for us. They have a group called Hip Hop family- rap in Creole sounds awesome and they were all incredible dancers!
Thursday we presented our findings to the community. We decided that clean water is the greatest need for the community, as clean water would solve many other issues. They have no sewage system so it drains through the streets, making people sick and contaminating food and water. It was very hard to say goodbye since each of us had grown attached to certain kids during our short five days there. We left for Santo Domingo, where we toured the Batey Relief Alliance headquarters. They are an NGO of beautiful people providing free medical care, nutrition campaign, HIV/AIDS awareness, and so much more to Bateys around the country. We then toured a public hospital, which was much nicer and emptier than anything I expected. However, it was recently renovated and they made it clear that this kind of facility was state of the art in the country. I am so surprised at how into this health care stuff I’ve gotten- I never thought I’d be interested in this field but this class has shown me I am, big time. Who knows where that will take me? This week was probably the best, most transformational one yet- I learned, saw, and loved so much and felt God's presence more than ever in the community. The inspiring, beautiful people I met in Munoz reignited my feeling that God put us on this earth to serve- we are blessed to be a blessing to one another. I will take this weekend to reflect and digest the happiness and sadness of this experience at the Fundacion before we leave on our weeklong Arts and Culture field trip on Sunday morning. It’s the last class of the semester. Where did time go?? 


Find out more or donate to Project Esperanza here: http://esperanzameanshope.org/