La Republica Dominicana, pt. 2

After an exhausting day of travel, as mentioned in my previous post, the time had finally come. We were settled into the Tropicana Hotel in Santo Domingo, ready for a week of service. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect for the week. This was my first time ever out of the country, let alone to experience poverty of this magnitude.

Fortunately for us late arrivals, breakfast wasn't served until 7:30 the first morning, so we had an extra half hour of sleeping in. Since it was already dark by the time we had landed the previous night and we were all off our bearings from travel, breakfast was our first taste of Dominican culture. Everybody gathered around a collection of table and the ladies working served us like we would serve a family meal. An assortment of different fresh fruit juices topped the meal every morning. It was fantastic.

After breakfast, we all filled our water bottles, loaded onto the bus, and headed for Batey Mojarra, the community where we would be serving. Here is an excerpt for the website of Mika's Lunch, the organization that we went to serve in building a kitchen for:

"Outside of Santo Domingo, the capitol of the Dominican Republic, lies Batey Fao.  The village is a shanty-town, made up of tin shacks and inhabited by Haitians from the other side of the island.  It lies under a set of high power lines.  The Haitians are mostly illegals, having come over from Haiti to work in the sugar cane plantations that used to be owned by the Dominican government.  The plantations were later privatized, and the new owners fired the Haitians and replaced them with Dominicans.  The Haitian people, often living as squatters, are now day laborers, hustling to get work wherever they can find it.  In a good day, they might make the equivalent of two American dollars.  The conditions in Haiti are so much more horrific, however, that the Haitians remain in the Dominican as they seek to make new lives for their families."

[Please take a deeper look into Mika's Lunch and read about all that they are doing. I truly believe in the program and the opportunity that it gives to the children in these bateys. If you feel so lead, you can also donate to the organization to support their efforts. All support goes directly to the students, allowing them to feed a child for a mere $88.40 for an entire school year.]

Kitchen and picnic tables
at Batey Fao

Batey Fao was the original community that Mika's Lunch began working with, in partnership with Harderwyk Ministries. Now, alongside Drenthe CRC, Community Reformed Church has begun building a similar relationship in Mojarra.

Our task for the week: finish building the property wall and build the kitchen for Mika's Lunch to begin preparing hot lunches for the students in. Because of the extreme humidity on the island, it is entirely unrealistic to build anything of wood frame, so we all got to become expert brick layers throughout the week.

Our wall half way through the week

By the end of the week, we estimated that we layed somewhere between 180 and 200 linear feet of brick for the wall, standing 8 feet tall. Then there's whatever it took for us to build the kitchen. That's a whole lot of brick. By the end of the day Tuesday, it seemed like there was no way we were finishing all that we had been tasked to do. Even with the 21 person crew, not counting the hired workers from the community, work was slow to get done compared to all that was needed by the end. Thankfully our God is so much bigger than we could ever imagine and He has the ability to counter our doubt right before our eyes. By the end of the day Friday, all was complete. We had finished all that we were tasked with. The only things left were installing the gate, which had been shipped during the week and might possibly be there by now,
and the concrete poured for the ceiling and floor in the kitchen. The floor couldn't be poured until the ceiling was finished and the ceiling was worked on by contracted help, so that was out of our hands. What an amazing feeling it was to see all of the progress God had made through our hands in our time there, even with all of the extremely non-conventional work methods we got to learn. Not to mention, we stopped back by on Saturday after we had ventured Santo Domingo, and the ceiling was poured and set!

The kitchen is set for pouring its
concrete ceiling

While we got to see all of this progress right before our eyes, it certainly wasn't all of our work while in Mojarra. To be honest, I wouldn't even consider it the most important work we had to opportunity to play a part in while we were there (not to take away any importance of the wall and kitchen at all). But the part that excited me the most about being there, and the part that I think will be most influential in bringing Community Reformed Church back to the Dominican Republic was the relational work that we got to play a part in.

That work is by no means done. We have an entire community to meet and to love, to show Christ to. It was great working alongside men of the community in building throughout the week because we got to see their care and devotion to supporting and building up their community while they got to see the same desire in us

as newcomers. We spoke different languages entirely, yet we all managed to scrape by with the most basic of words and hand gestures. You could see God breaking down that barrier of communication right before our eyes. We didn't need to speak the same language to work with each other and love one another.

As the week went on, more and more children would come out and play each day while we worked, latching to our sides and loving every chance for a photo opp. These kids melted our hearts. We would have mandatory break time just to spend some time goofing off with the kids and remembering the true reason for our presence there; that Christ might shine through us and provide a hope that they cannot find elsewhere.

Wilkins' old shoes

As the week came to a close, it was so hard to leave. It felt great to have completed all of the physical work, but we did not want to leave all of our new friends and fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. Bittersweet for sure. I had the opportunity to leave my work boots with a man named Rafael, one of the hardest working men I've ever met in my life. He worked in what looked like dress shoes to me for the entirety of the week. To see the gratitude in his smile was payment enough. I also got to watch another worker, Wilkins put on a pair of boots given to him by another person on our team. Through the week, he was our concrete mixer. No machine, just his arms and a shovel. And he wore some Nike tennis shoes that were so busted up that his foot was falling out the front. He didn't even know how to respond to receiving boots that simply covered his whole foot. These gifts were nothing more than material objects to us at this point. But to our friends who we were able to bless with them, they were God's provision.

My mentor/boss man, Victor

All in all, what an amazing experience it was to spend my spring break building new relationships with both people in my church and people from an entirely different country. We got to watch and experience God move in incredible ways. And I absolutely cannot wait for the opportunity to return and continue working at the school and with the people of the Mojarra community.

Up next: Exploring Santo Domingo