Riosito at 10 AM
From Paraiso you take the main street and keep heading back into the mountains. You reach Riosito after about thirty minutes drive. Then you must cross the stream and climb steeply for about six hundred yards, and then you turn right and start down the hill towards the stream. Finally you come to the school, which is on your right.
Why a Catholic school:
This community is considered too small by the Dominican Government to have a teacher paid by the state. However there are children who need a education and they live over seven miles from the nearest public school. Furthermore the Haitian children often have difficulty attending school since they arrive with no documents. Literally, they are people without a trace; having no birth certificate either in Haiti or in the Dominican Republic. In response to this situation, the previous pastor of Paraiso, Father Antonio, asked volunteers from Kansas City to help establish little rural Catholic Schools. This building in the picture is one of them and the students before it are all active in the school. Other children from this school were in the mountains above it on this particular day, since the teacher had a meeting in town and could not show up on time.
Structure:
The school, as you can observe, is a very simple affair. It has a cement floor, a zinc roof and a zinc storage room where the desks and a few books are stored each afternoon, after class. The teacher lives in Paraiso and rides out to school every morning on a little motorcycle. He earns around U.S. $135 dollars per month, which barely covers his expenses. The money to pay the teacher comes from sponsors for a few of the children. The sponsors' funds are used to buy uniforms, food and to pay for the teacher. This year we will have classes until the end of April because we will run out of funds to pay for ten months of teaching (the whole year) and we are required to pay three extra months salary as part of the agreement with the teachers in the ten parish schools.
Need:
We wonder what it would be like to have groups who sponsor a school, rather than a child. The benefit to the children is continuity. The sponsor project is fragile since children and sponsors move away, sponsors retire or lose income available for their sponsored children, etc. What would happen if a community group sponsored a school? Maybe they would come down and visit their school; perhaps they could become involved in establishing add-on projects like teaching the children to raise rabbits for food or to have a garden. What would happen if a USA class of children adopted one of these little schools? Maybe they would follow it along as they journeyed through primary school, etc.
Simple beauty:
In an age when there are so many meetings, paper work, forms and guidelines for a teacher, here is a starkly simple arrangement: one teacher for a group of students who walk to school, often without much of a breakfast. Our teachers are students themselves who attend classes on weekends in the University at Barahona.
