The Dominican Republic has a population of about 9.6 million people. Of that, 73 percent are of mixed race, 16 percent are Caucasian, and 11 percent are of African descent. Around 95 percent are Catholic. There is freedom of faith in the country, which allows around 2 percent of the population to practice Voodoo.

A typical Dominican family has four people. Statistically, while 42 percent of the homes are run by both parents together, about 31 percent are run by single mothers, and the rest are run by relatives.

The Dominican Republic is divided into 31 provinces. Eight are in the southeastern region of the country: Distrito Nacional, El Seibo, Hato Mayor, La Altagracia, La Romana, Monte Plata, San Pedro de Macoris and Santo Domingo.

Each province depends on the central government. Each, however, also has its own local authorities: governor, senators, deputies, mayor, etc.

Families living in extreme poverty in the southeastern region of the Dominican Republic work hard to get two meals a day. The situation gets more difficult when drought limits cultivation of small crops like sweet potatoes, corn and plantains, which are the main ingredients in common meals.

In these communities, there are no steady jobs and the residents need to either travel out of the community to find a steady job or stay around their neighborhood looking for small jobs, for which they might get paid around $8 for a full day of work.

The saddest part in this scenario occurs when the children reach adolescence and find they need to help with family income. In the urban areas, children work at traffic lights selling a large variety of items, cleaning windshields, or begging by each car window.

Many times children also get involved in very risky money-generating activities like scavenging in the dump, drug trafficking, and child prostitution. Many times children will abandon school at this point.

Regarding child labor, there’s been some improvement in light of the sugarcane industry’s announcement that it won’t hire anyone under the age of 18. Nevertheless, children can be seen helping their parents plant and collect sugarcane in the southeast. A cutter is paid between $4.50 and $5.50 for every ton of sugarcane cut and loaded on the wagons.

In Batey Las Pajas in San Pedro de Macoris, families usually try to raise goats or cows. Animals are a source of income in times of great need, like when a family member gets too sick and needs medicine. But cattle rustlers sometimes steal the animals, leaving only bloody fur in the fields. These thefts drastically affect the economy of families in extreme poverty.

Primary and high school education is generally available in the southeast. Schools in some communities teach primary school only, and students often have to travel to a neighboring town to attend high school. University is a dream that just a few see come true, which is why our church partners provide technical vocational training courses to the children at their development centers. The churches want to equip the children with the skills to generate income for themselves and their families.

The weather is a sensitive issue in the region because of the passage of hurricanes. Every year, tropical storms and hurricanes affect the southeastern region causing landslides and flooding. Thousands of families are left homeless almost every year, and some people die.

Earthquakes have not been a concern in recent years; however, after the earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12, 2010, all the residents near the southeastern coast were warned to leave their homes and go to more distant higher grond because of a tsunami warning for the Caribbean zone. Even though there was not a tsunami, the fear that one could occur at any time remains in people’s minds.

Examples of child development centers located in areas like this include:

DR-120, 126, 130, 160, 161, 163, 203, 243-245, 249, 256, 290, 292, 302, 304, 308, 309, 315, 320, 340, 347, 349, 366, 368, 369, 371, 375, 384, 385, 389, 401, 401, 407, 408, 411, 412, 420, 431-437, 450-454, 456-458, 461-465, 468, 480, , 482-484, 491, 521-523, 525, 527, 528, 530-533, 535, 536, 540, 550, 630-635, 701, 705-707, 710, 720, 810, 900, 901 and 915.

Batey Aleman, which is part of DR-002, is in the San Pedro de Macoris province and is part of the Dominican southeast.

View of a neighborhood near DR-245

Donplines Recipe

A typical dish in the southeast is donplines, or dumplings, boiled balls of dough.

Ingredients: wheat flour, water and salt. (Because wheat flour makes very soft dough, some people use corn flour instead, for stiffer dough.)

Put water in a deep pan and place over the stove flame until water starts to boil. Simultaneously, put some water in a small bowl and add a little salt to taste and mix.

Put wheat flour in a bowl, pour some of the salt-seasoned water in it and start to mix and knead until you get soft dough.

Take little pieces of dough and shape them all into half-inch-thick and 3-inch-long chunks and submerge them into the boiling water in the pan.

Boil the dough chunks for around 20 minutes or until they are well cooked.

When the donplines are cooked, turn off the stove and serve them hot, either with codfish in red sauce, fried sausage, fried eggs, herring or any other food.

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Communications is my profession and expertise, but blogging, well, that’s something I am hoping to figure out (partially) over the next week with as little pain as possible. My name is Katherine Redmond (affectionately, Katalina or Kata in Latin American countries) and I am the Communications Director for Compassion U.S.

I’m heading to the Dominican Republic (DR) today with the Pujols Family Foundation. We’re going to Batey Aleman, and we’ll be there through July 29.

A batey (buh-TAY) is a sugar plantation in the Dominican that mostly uses the labor of Haitians. Most bateys are defunct, but in some case the Haitians have been permitted to stay on the land, living in slums with little clean water or any means of support.

Batey Aleman is located in southeastern Dominican Republic in a rural area. This batey as well as others are fairly desolate, dusty and isolated with little to offer those who live in it, even though the image many of us probably have of the Caribbean is lush, green and tropical.

The sun is scorching and few trees exist for shade on the batey. Surrounding the community are brown, dilapidated sugar fields and a dump that families sift through. It’s a few miles from the main highway, and it seems like an eternity to the next town.

One thing this batey has is a baseball field. On a previous visit to the Dominican with the Pujols Family Foundation last March, we scouted the field and figured out some areas of improvement that we hoped the community would help us address so we can get the children involved in a baseball program. Baseball is “the” sport in the country.

The community rallied around the idea, and pitched in to help clean up the baseball field. What an awesome display of love for the kids to see — parents and community participating together to support the children in this way. It sends a beautiful message of the importance of these children to the community. A message many of them don’t normally hear in their own homes.

This league we’re creating, however, will be about more than giving kids a way to get exercise, and it is certainly not being created to find the next Albert Pujols. This batey baseball league will be used to engage the children, to help keep them in our sponsorship program, and to teach these future Dominican men character, values, responsibility and leadership.

I hope you’ll join me and the Pujols Family Foundation on this journey of faith, hope and love as we start batey baseball in Batey Aleman. I’ll be blogging for the duration of the trip as well updating Twitter and Facebook.

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When I came home from that trip, I signed up to be a volunteer child advocate. I made coffee mugs with photos of my sponsored children on them, and I spoke of the kids often.

“Hey Patterson, you know those kids that you’re so fond of? ”

“Yeah, Norm.”

“I think we should sponsor one of those kids as a shift.”

I explained to Norm that a typical child sponsorship is under $40, but then I told him about the Leadership Development Program. I suggested that if we were able to get 12 firefighters together, we could sponsor a Leadership Development Program student and it would cost only $25 per person each month.

Norm made a commitment immediately and started recruiting others. I contacted Compassion the following day, and later that afternoon we had a student to sponsor – Juan David Dominquez Galvez.

At age 5, Juan David had lost his father in a construction accident. His mother was left alone to care for four children. In her desperation, she enrolled Juan David in the Compassion-assisted child development center in their community outside the capital city of Santo Domingo.

Shortly after enrollment, Juan David was sponsored. His new sponsors, the Hopper family in Australia, wrote letters of encouragement often and continued to do so for 13 years.

Thanks to the support of his sponsors, Juan not only graduated high school, but he also earned his school’s Most Excellent Student Award. Then Juan applied for the Leadership Development Program and, after months of academic tests and intensive interviews, was accepted into the program.

Just a couple weeks after Juan David became eligible for the program, I returned to the Dominican Republic with my wife and daughters on another sponsor tour. We knew that on this trip we would not only be able to visit the girls we sponsor, but we would also have the opportunity to meet Juan David and tell him about a group of firefighters who would be his sponsors for the next six years.

On Wednesday evening of the trip, the Compassion staff had prepared a meal for the visiting sponsors. Four Leadership Development Program students were asked to give their testimonies. One of them was Juan David.

It was on this evening that Juan David learned that he had been sponsored, and that his dream of becoming a pediatrician is possible. When he heard the news, he wept. So did 40 Compassion sponsors.

Being part of this amazing student’s life has had great impact on many people. Juan David continues to communicate with the Hopper family in Australia. My family and the Hopper family communicate with each other regularly by e-mail. Juan’s letters to his sponsors and to my family are regular reminders of God’s grace. To my children, he is a living example of faith.

Today, Juan David and his fellow Leadership Development Program students in the Dominican Republic express their gratitude for the opportunity they have been given by sponsoring a little girl in Haiti, named Lovina.

I look forward to the day when I sit beside a group of firefighters from Seattle at Juan David’s graduation ceremony.

Who can you sponsor a student with?

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Gualey, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Like in any place where drug smuggling is done, a strong clandestine support structure is needed. A list of packers, sellers, messengers, gunmen, guards, lawyers, policemen, drug-storage-home owners and front men are supposedly kept on payrolls, and the financial benefits are still enough to make the capos richer.

Gualey is no exception.

“Drug trafficking is a very strange behavior,” says Pastor Rodríguez of the Church of God of Gualey. “I’ve stayed worshiping over night at the church and seen the vehicles enter the community and leave. You can see the moves.”

The national anti-drug agency is constantly doing drug raids, and it arrests many involved.

In October of 2007, in only 24 hours, the Dominican authorities disbanded a total of 223 drug rings nationwide and stripped several kilos of cocaine, pounds of marijuana, hundreds of portions of crack, and arrested several hundred people.

A press release published by the Dominican government on June 21, 2007 revealed that since August 2006, the national anti-drug agency had performed 8,715 raids and confiscated 5.5 tons of drugs.

Sociologists believe that drug smuggling is like a symptom of a disease, and if you treat only the symptom and not the cause of the disease, you won’t get a real cure.

“This is the reason why ever since we arrived we made a proclamation that Jesus Christ is King and Lord of Gualey,” says Pastor Rodríguez. “If there is no transformation through Jesus Christ and through education in this barrio, we understand that there is no other way.”

Drug trafficking in Gualey seeks to perpetuate itself under the disguised face of a helping hand, and children are at the top of the list for recruitment as prospects. At Compassion’s partner Church of God of Gualey they’ve had to deal with attempts of traffickers to gain the kids for their network.

One of these events took place in 2007 while making arrangements for the summer break recreational tour for three hundred children in the community, for which a minimum sum of money is requested from the families to cover some costs of the trip.

“A lady approached and said to me that a drug trafficker near the river used to pay for the trip for 15 or 20 of the children down there,” reports Eugenio, 51, a member of the local church. “He did so to start to coax them into that atmosphere, and he also gave them 20 pesos so they could buy some ice cream on the trip.”

Drug traffickers in Gualey begin by giving 20 or 30 pesos to children for running small errands. Then they send them to deliver a package at the corner, and that’s when children become drug mules.

If the police catch the children carrying drugs, there is no criminal consequence for anybody, not for the child because he is a child, or for anybody else because they are prepared to cover for the supplier for fear they will lose their source of income.

“When a 12-year-old kid gets a 500 peso bill, he no longer wants to study or work,” says Robinson, an evangelist at the Church of God of Gualey. “But when that boy tries marijuana, and then he tries cocaine and then crack, that boy who was the one in charge of delivering the drug is now stealing, and if necessary killing people, in order to buy from the same guy who gave him the 20 pesos to deliver the drug.”

Robinson gives thanks to the Lord because He transformed him. As a former drug addict in Gualey, Robinson has a very clear understanding of the problem there:

“Drugs enter a neighborhood by helping those who don’t have food to put food on the table so they will be able to set up a quiet sales spot. They will pay for medical prescriptions for the sick and cover any other need. The lack of employment also makes the neighbors cover the drug sellers.”

The neighbors that don’t agree with that illicit trade will not dare denounce it because, if arrested, the sellers may be out of prison soon, and they will gain a dangerous enemy.

“Family values are put aside,” says Eugenio. “Drug traffickers use a system here. They give bicycles, dolls, shoes, a lot of food and money to the kids. The child who is hungry at home, they send him to buy a fried chicken for them and one for himself. At Christmas eve, they give the child good clothes for free and on the Kings’ Day they give him his bicycle. That’s how the child begins to cherish money with no sacrifice.”

Sometimes after the family provider is arrested for drugs, a close replacement will keep the business. “When the parents are arrested, the children will continue to save the drugs for the sellers, and they will even pack it, because they have seen their parents do it,” says Robinson. He has been a witness of how drugs influence the children.

“What all the young kids long for is wearing Nike Jordan shoes, 22 and 23, and then they see those people who buy those shoes five pairs at once and even wear two pairs a day. That traumatizes them and entices them into that lifestyle.”

Eugenio has witnessed how entire homes have been ruined by the scourge of drugs.

“Sometimes both parents have to go for work because they have many needs and they leave the children alone at home, and before they can figure it out they don’t have children any longer — what they have is monsters, and they have completely lost their family.”

Unfortunately, illegal drug consumption is one factor that sternly regenerates the cycle of poverty. It is a cause of crime and prostitution, resulting in early pregnancy, homes run by single mothers, and children living with relatives because one or two of their parents are in prison for drug trafficking. These events cause a lot of pain, especially in the children, who don’t understand what’s going on.

“Recently, the center director informed me that a child’s mother went to jail,” says Pastor Rodríguez, so, around three days ago we went to his home to see how he was doing. The father is in prison too. What did they tell the boy? That the police is the bad side because his parents were at their business and they were taken to jail. Hatred has been growing in the heart of this little boy; for this reason the church is taking actions to provide this boy with professional help so that he will be able to better assimilate why his parents are in jail.”

Gangs inspire fear in the residents of Gualey and neighboring communities. Sometimes they fight for the control in one area and start a dangerous shootout. In many needy neighborhoods, innocent people are injured and killed by stray bullets during these criminal shootouts.

This was the case of a daughter of one sister of the church. The young girl went out to rescue another girl who lay in the middle of the street, shot, but young girl was shot, too.

“That was a time when a gang from Las Cañitas and a gang from Gualey were so upset between them that they shot one another, even with M-16’s,” reports Pastor Rodríguez. “Our church sister’s daughter died.”

“I know a boy from the Compassion child development center whose father uses drugs,” says Eugenio. “His sister died during a shootout. A sniper from Las Cañitas shot her in the chest and killed her. The family is traumatized, the mother cries a lot, and also the boy has a violent attitude because his sister was taken way from him.”

In Gualey, having a drug-addict at home is a very tough situation. “When a family has a person who uses drugs, he will steal all the things that they have to buy drugs,” says Eugenio. “He will be very violent and aggressive and not understanding. He will be somebody with low self esteem, and his family will reject him.”

The phone rings at many homes at night. Those are the wives and youth coming back from work, and the children coming back from school. Many call when they are arriving to the entrance so that a mature adult will come for them, for fear that they might be robbed, or that the police might mistakenly arrest them in a raid.

“You cannot walk the streets at night because you are robbed or killed,” says Eugenio. “You have to be careful when walking in the streets, because you don’t know who is watching you.”

Extensive parades with placards, prayer campaigns, and child ministry with the support of Compassion International are some of the efforts that the Church of God of Gualey is doing to fight the empire of drugs. This church has gained the respect of the community since many of its members are former drug consumers and traffickers and lived a life of crime. The neighbors are never too tired to confess to them “God has changed you in deed”.

When Pastor Rodríguez was appointed Pastor of the Church of God of Gualey in the year 2003, the members of his former church in Gaspar Hernández could not believe it. “The change was as big as from heaven to earth”, testifies Pastor Rodríguez.

“In Gaspar Hernández the people run away from the bullets, and here, when there is a shootout with the police, the people run to see what is happening” (The Pastor paraphrases the well known saying that in Gualey the people run away from the rain but run towards the bullets).

The Community of Gualey

Some say that the first residents of Gualey settled in the 1950’s during the dictatorship of General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Gualey is located on the western bank of the Ozama River in Santo Domingo. It is a gathering of mostly poor construction homes built on hilly land. It has few paved roads, and most of it consists of a lot of narrow alleys and long and steep stairs that wander in a puzzled labyrinth of crammed homes down to the edge of the river.

When people say that they are from Gualey, a preconception arises in people’s minds. “When our youth go to a firm for a job, the first thing they ask is where they live. ‘Ah, in Gualey’, and they won’t employ them. They will believe they are criminals,” reports Eugenio.

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