DR Trip Post 2

My apologies for the delay in these trip posts - I've been in the process of finding a house...

I thought I would include a map so everyone can see where in the country we were. As I mentioned before, we flew into the country's capital (and where Columbus first landed, mind you!) of Santo Domingo, and drove the four hours along first the coast and then the hills to get to La Meseta, which is just outside the city of Elias Pina, which is circled in red in this map. The village is fairly large, with several hundred kids attending the primary school where we stayed. Most of the families have crops, some have small patches near their homes, and then larger sections surrounding the village.

Obviously the village is very close to the border with Haiti, but I am not sure of the exactly split of the village between Dominicans and Haitians. I would say there are more Dominicans living there. Some of you may have been following my adventures last summer on the north coast in the Haitian bateys that are set in the sugar fields there. Most of the sugar is grown close to the coasts, with coffee and fruits grown in the interior and more hilly regions. Haitians are the primary laborer in the sugar fields of the Dominican Republic and usually will settle near the fields (or quite literally, in the fields).

For construction, our team produced five latrines during our stay in the village. This was a two day process. The first of the days we mixed and poured concrete and layed the cinderblocks. The second day (after the concrete had dried) we would come back and build the frame, door, roof, and lay the seat. Needless to say, we all got lots of experience in mixing concrete, leveling concrete, laying block, sawing, building frames, hammering and more hammering, and piecing everything together. Construction efforts were led by Mario, one of the villagers who has helped the FPC groups build most of the latrines in the village. He was phenomenal (at correcting our mistakes!)

Here's a photo of Mario and Craig finishing the door on one of our latrines. Funny story about Craig, he usually was inside the latrine while we were hammering, pushing nails back, making sure everything was straight, and other important tasks. He was standing over the hole (use the picture below as a recreation of actual events) when somehow the hammer slipped from his hand and plummeted the 12 feet or so down the now almost all covered up latrine hole. Well, Super-Mario comes to the rescue, and in pure Macgyver style, he uses a flashlight and some wire to retrieve the wayward hammer. Needless to say, there wasn't anything Mario couldn't do!

DR Trip Post 1

The FPC San Antonio DR Team is back safe and sound from the Dominican Republic but we had quite the adventure! To start, we only made it to Dallas the first day. Instead of being in Santo Domingo, we spent the night at the Baymont Inn in Grapevine because we missed our flight from Dallas to San Juan. Well, American Airlines decided to give all of our seats away even though we made it to the gate while the plane was there. So we were already a day behind, which took away one of the days we were in the village. But we had team members coming from all over the hemisphere - one from Seattle, one from Oklahoma City, one from Nicaragua, and the ten of us coming from San Antonio. We finally all arrived in Santo Domingo and set out very early Monday morning for La Maseta, the village that FPC has gone to each of the last four years.

Once in the village, we made up for lost time through five days of VBS and four days of building latrines and making home visits. I will post some of my favorite photos and memories of the trip in the next few days.