Youth retreat

They brought materials and people together.

They planned, organized and invited.

When everything was ready,

they prayed.

As they drove to Bahia de las Aguilas,

on another part of the island,

a man sat down to drink beer.

When they put up their tents on the beach,

the man got up from the bar

and mounted his motorcycle

in a drunken stupor.

One cell phone.

The retreat conference began beautifully.

The youths entered into the rhythm of the themes.

Between one event and another,

two girls go off alone

with the cell phone.

A frantic mother interrupts her daughter´s retreat:

your uncle has just died after being in an accident with a truck.

The girls return crying and shouting.

The retreat begins to spin off in an unanticipated direction.

That night Luis brings all of the youth together.

They pray for the family who has just lost the chief benefactor,

the one with the highest paying job.

The one who was to pay the girl´s university tuition.

Luis asks: Do we continue with the retreat, or do we end it now?

Why the question?

Why give the youth the power to cancel the mobilization of so many resources?

They vote to end the retreat.

The next morning they fold up the tents

and return to be with a family still in shock.

Lord, where do you live?

Where were you in the vote?

Did you give the apostles a vote when you went to Jerusalem?

Are the dead still required to bury the dead?

Medio Mundo and water

In the dry season, a different kind of work:

The well project in La Canoa needs to be revised because the land owners do not want a well on their property. The alternatives are: to dig above this property or below it and hope to find water; to improve Medio Mundo; and finally: to add rain catchment materials to the school. The first choice has a relatively high risk of failure because the water tends to sink between the rocks and go down to levels beyond the reach of ordinary hand dug wells. Medio Mundo lies about six kilometers from homes in La Canoa and is extremely isolated. Any improvements in Medio Mundo could easily be damaged or the pipes removed and no one would have a clue as to who did it. That leaves the school.

Rainwater from the school:

The big advantage of catching rainwater is the closeness to children who need the water. The chief drawback is the uncertainty of land ownership. Some of the Catholic schools have titles for the land while others have agreements that could be terminated at the owner´s whim. La Canoa appears to be in the latter category.

Why did they not buy the land?

When the Catholic schools started in the mountains, no one knew for sure how long the immigrant population would remain in the area. Father Antonio began during a severe drought and the immigrant population was in movement out of the area in search of agricultural work with more reliability. In addition, the community faced increasing hostility from the military. So the schools began as simple structures with land agreements that seemed to cover the needs at the time.

The children with blue shirts:

The boys in the above picture attend morning classes in La Canoa. Their parents will encourage them to keep going with school, requiring long trips down the mountain to Los Patos. We observe a pattern of Haitian families moving closer to the towns in order to better serve their children´s educational needs. Thus we encounter mobility in our student population... another reason to use materials that can be moved from one school to another. We will go ahead with the idea of fixing the roof for rain catchment and purchase a large polyvinyl holding tank to store the water. This option seems to meet the most needs. How blessed we are with the funds from Elko to be able to choose a response to the water needs, especially of the school children!

Miguel Angel

Miguel Angel on the DT:

Here is a "happy camper" with his main means of transportation. Miguel Angel worked for many years in the Education project, receiving a salary that is more a gratuity for volunteer work than a real salary. He earns R.D. $4,000.00 pesos per month, just like the other teachers in the rural Catholic schools. You can take that number and divide it by 33 to have an idea of the dollar amount.

All expenses paid by the teacher:

To get an idea of the demands that are placed upon the teacher who earns this small amount, one may consider the fact that the salary does not include health benefits or retirement nor transportation costs. For Miguel Angel that last item has more impact than for the other teachers, as the El Toro school requires more gasoline than any of the others.

Lack of jobs in the area:

If the Paraíso area had more sources of employment, then the Church could never find people willing to drive up difficult mountain roads and teach for the small benefit that the program offers. The Church does not deliberately have such low salaries. They are the result of a strategic decision some seven years ago when the schools began: to finance the schools by a godfather system where the godparent sponsors an individual child, rather than a school. As the sponsored children moved away from the school or the sponsors retired from the program, the schools were left with many more children without godparent "sponsors" in the USA than children with sponsors. Thus the salaries had to reflect that stark economic reality.

A blessing:

The DT and interest free loan that comes with it are a huge blessing for Miguel Angel. The used motorcycle cost 76,000 pesos... a sum that he could never repay under normal loan conditons. The campesinos, teachers and agriculture extention workers all prefer the Yamaha DT 125 to the Honda 125 because of the two stroke motor. They say it has more power than the Honda. The Elko fund enables the Church to respond to the needs of the teachers and offer alternative forms of compensation that were unavailable only a few months ago. Thank you to all who shared with this parish and brought forward this tremendous blessing.

Yesterday:

Miguel Angel brought a youngster down from the mountains yesterday. He had a fight with another student and was losing blood from a knife wound. So the motorcycle serves as ambulance as well as his home vehicle to carry his wife and children. Given the huge rise in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel (it now costs more to fill the tank than go to the mechanic and have serious work done on a vehicle!) the motorcycle will remain the prefered choice for transportation among the "middle class" in the Dominican Republic.