Participants Blog

Two Months Gone By

Two months have gone by, and like many Canadian summers in the past I find myself asking where the time has gone. Though I do keep busy working in a school for impoverished children called Casa Leandra, there is a lot of sitting around with the lopcals, and a lot of domino playing! The kids in my school program are from local barrios (neighbourhoods) that are basically batey´s inside the city limits. Consuelo is a former ingenio town, built approximately 100 years ago around a sugar factory which closed it´s doors and shut down about 5 years ago, leaving many, many people unemployed. Some of those who were hit the hardest by the abrupt stop in the small, country-side city´s economy were the cane cutters living in bateys, which are small little community´s living just on the outskirts of Consuelo, pocketing the nearby land. Many of the sugarcane cutters were Haitians who made it over the border with their families looking for work, or were brought in by ingenio workers for cheap labour, giving the promise for a better life.

I was curious to see how people feel about having the ingenio being now closed, if there was any emotional dilemmas as the cutters now didn´t have to swing a machete for twelve hours a day in the hot Dominican sun for $100-300 pesos a day, but the answer has so far been the same wherever I go. Bad. Bad Bad BAD. There´s no work except for cutting sugar cane, and so many people have left to start up small vending businesses, or those who choose to stay working in the crops are forced to sell their labour to further away ingenios or on the back of horse-driven carts in the local towns. The way a corporation can just walk in and walk out out the lives of hardworking people, not supporting but only caring for a better monetary cut, is a very infuriating and frustrating thing to be living so close to.
But the kids don´t seem to mind. I work and play with children from Barrios 41 and Filieu, two of the more poorer, more batey-like communities and they are so full of energy, joy, smiles and spirit. Casa Leandra was started by the husband of a woman of the local Biblical Evangelical church who was very much concerned for and involved in the care and well-being of the local niños y niñas, but sadly died of Cancer. In this humble monument to her memory, 14 kids from the ages of 7 to 10 are enrolled in spelling classes, mathematic and biblical lessons, and of course lots of play time with yours truly. With their big smiles, matching blue shirts and shoes, and lunch and snack time, I didn´t at first think that they were the more impoverished kids around Consuelo, but just walking into their muddy pathed, multi-colored tin housed neighbourhood to meet their families definitely changed my perspective of them.
When I´m not teaching at the school, I am reading, being tranquil with my family and friends, learning spanish, teaching bboyin, and now for the next month I will be visiting and helping to do physiotherapy with a young nine’year’old girl named Pamela who has intense cerebral palsy, perhaps scoliosis and perhaps some cranial damage. I was introduced to Pamela who has never sat up, never walked in her life, always lying in bed in a small shack with her grandmother, two days ago and have been coming back everyday. Her story of parental abandonment is heart-wrenching, and my admiration for this grandmother soars when I see the good condition Pamela is in, despite her abuela having zero education or training on her granddaughters condition.

-Daniel Blais, Dominican Republic