Day 6: Poverty Day!

Today was a very long emotional day for many of us since it was poverty day.  We began the morning bright and early with breakfast and directly went into our seminar on poverty where I lead the group in brainstorming activity where they were given specific pictures of Bateyes and they had to answer three specific questions: What did they see? How do you think the people in the pictures feel? How would you feel if you were in that situation?  As each group had 5 minutes to write and talk about the prompt, my co-teacher and myself made our rounds monitoring their progress.  After the three rotations we did a modified gallery walk and had the three groups get the opportunity to see what the other groups wrote about the pictures and closed the activity.

We boarded the guagua on our way to the bateyes near Barahona.  A bateye is a community in the sugar plantations of people of Haitian descent who mostly work as sugarcane cutters.  We were able to visit 3 different bateyes and had some worthwhile experiences.  At the first Bateye, “Bateye 6” we had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Salvador who runs an NGO here.  One aspect that must be addressed is that unfortunately there is discrimination among Dominican’s here—particularly those Dominican’s of Haitian descent, one can say they are treated as second class citizens.  The government has imposed so many obstacles for them to get their proper documentation to become a citizen.  There are many people who unfortunately have basically had their life suspended by not being able to enroll past 8^th grade, get a passport, enroll in their solidarity program as well as receive their pension if they retire.  The students appeared to intrigued with Don Salvador that we totally went over our time limit with him but he did not mind.  He thanked us for asking inquisitive questions and being interested in the topic at hand.  During that same guest speaker time slot we met Stephanie and her emotional story of trying to obtain her proper documentation to continue her education and make her voice heard, so that she can help other people in a similar situation.

The second bateye that we visited was “Bateye 7” where our students were able to interact with the children of their community.  We had three rotations so that the kids could be entertained: face painting, arts and crafts and basketball.  Monitoring and watching the faces of the community children was just touching…grinning from ear to ear and filled with joy as they kept calling us, “norteamericano/a.”   James, Gloria, and myself though got a personalized tour of Bateye 7 while Lucy stayed back with the students.  We began our tour with our tour guides who are brothers and have lived their entire life in the Bateye.  They showed us where the local church, as well as supermarket was.  We continued to walk in the Bateye and one could see the dilapidated living conditions that these people live it truly broke my heart see some children playing in the streets with mud and making “mudpies” while some other kids just sat there looking at the ground.  As we continued to walk through the Bateye we saw where the animals were stored, and their source of water—the aqueduct where community members bathe in.  We also saw part of the sugar plantation where some of the community members work in, as we made our way back across the aqueduct we had a group of kids come to us and hold our hands as we continued to walk back to the school.  One little boy came and grabbed my right hand with his left as he was eating a guava, and kept talking to me.  It was just a touching and indescribable moment because literally as the three of us walked, our crowd of kids just became larger and larger.

As we continued to make our way back to the school, there was an incident that completely caught us off guard.  As we approached the school one of the kids was walking towards us and totally hit a girl that’s when a  boy no more than 5 years old took out a knife from his pocket and went to go lunge at the kid that punched the girl…but luckily James saw what was happening and literally grabbed his arm and said, no.  But what did the boy do, just take his knife and shove it in his pocket again, so it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.  We made it safely back to the school only to find out that the students were wrapping up and we were getting ready to take a group photo and get back on the guagua to our last Bateye.

At Bateye 9, we met and had a nice conversation with Pastor Williams—where he spoke to us as to how he and his community have been working together to make their Bateye, one of the most modernized ones of the community.

After the last Bateye we took our 1.5 hour guagua ride back to San Juan de la Maguana.  When we arrived back from the field trip we had some downtime and then went into our English prep work for an hour before we headed to the local school to continue our English classes.  Again, while I was supervising the English classes, Elvis showed up and him, James and myself talked about random stuff.  Although, a bit odd, Elvis’ presence definitely made the time fly by.   

After English class we then went to the restaurant to have dinner, which was on the lighter side…two scoops of mash potatoes, a thin fillet of chicken and ice cream!  After dinner we went back to the hotel and had our nightly meeting, which by far one of the better ones we have had, since of the experience the students had.  We wrapped up the night with a self reflection before we went to bed and lights out.

Can’t wait for tomorrow agenda…it’s our first FUN DAY!