We are now in the end of our 4th
week here in the Dominican Republic, 29 April 2010 to 5 May 2010. The highlight of this week was our visit to
Padre Las Casas with Fundacion Sur Futuro, but we will leave that to the end of
this week’s exciting DR Adventures!
We met with one Stake President
to discuss a potential school project.
They need computers, desks, fans, blackboards, and other miscellaneous
stuff. The Stake President gave us the
name of the school and who to contact and turned the project over to us.
At this point we have begun to
feel extremely overwhelmed. The previous
couple left 25 projects in one state of completion or another. We can never seem to get a real handle on
anything and every day some new project is delivered to our door step. They are stacking up.
The process has been that we, the
Country Humanitarian Directors (that is just a big name for the fact that we
are the ONLY Humanitarian Missionaries in the entire country) take the project,
plan it, meet with the beneficiaries, determine what is appropriate, work with
the benefiting organization to write up the project and obtain quotes, etc and
prepare the project to be submitted to the church for approval of the funds,
get the materials purchased and delivered.
The members of the local unit of the Church are asked to perform some
kind of service for the recipient organization incidental to the work we are
doing with the benefiting organization.
Drawing upon our own experience
working on service projects for our stake back home, reading the principals of
welfare as found in the church handbooks and reading the scriptures, we came to
the conclusion that we are doing this all wrong.
To begin with, every one of these
service projects is a wonderful opportunity for the local members of the church
to put into practice correct welfare principals and then learn for themselves how
to organize, plan, perform and enjoy the blessings of service---it isn’t about
us and what we can learn or development of our talents, it is about them. It is about what they learn and do to help the
people in their own neighborhoods help themselves.
With that thought, we are
starting to work a little differently now.
When someone comes to us with a request, the first thing we do is have a
meeting with the stake president and/or bishop of the ward where the potential
project is. Our plan is to immediately
begin to teach welfare principals to the local priesthood leaders. They can decide if the request is reasonable
and the benefiting organizations is legitimate.
They then call a “Welfare Specialist” and a “Special Welfare Committee”
to plan and carry out the project. We
teach and assist along the way and when the time comes, we then submit a
request for funds from the church. In
this way the local members drive the project and only call on us if there is a
financial needs. Consequently, the local
members grow and are recognized in the community in which they live and we are
not worked to death!
We haven’t really gone through
this entire process yet, but it rings true to us and follows the pattern we
have seen in our own lives as we have worked in our home ward and stake
callings.
We also walked a different route
on our morning walk and saw some other interesting things. We do not live very far from the beach. But we use that word loosely. There is a shore line, but most of it is very
rocky and the little part of it that could have potentially been a very pretty
beach is literally covered with garbage.
It would be totally unsafe to set foot in the water.
The following are a few pictures
of our little walk.
Figure 101 Street Monument
Figure 102 Beach Scene
Figure 103 Graveyard
Figure 104 Wallace shooting a hundreds
year old cannon
Figure 105 Santo Domingo Temple
We have been able to attend the
Temple only once since we arrived, but this week we had an opportunity to catch
the Temple in good lighting conditions and took some pictures.
As mentioned, the highlight of
our week was a trip we took with Fundacion Sur Futuro. They are a non-profit organization whose
founder is the wife of the owner of the largest bank in the Dominican
Republic. She originated from Padre las
Casas, a little town about 3 hours to the West of Santo Domingo. Now she has created a wonderful organization
whose mission is to help the poor in the Dominican Republic by constructing
clean water systems, improving farming production by building drip irrigation
systems, teaching best farming practices, assisting schools, and maintaining
libraries in rural areas. We were very
impressed with the expanse of their activities including a huge reforestation
nursery.
Figure 107 Sur Futuro Reforestisation
We are teaming up with them to
construct a water system in a little town called Cigual. The project is almost ready to kick up. We are working on final agreements and
reviewing the final plans, so we visited the project location and visited with
some of the local town people.
Figure 108 Wallace participating in town
meeting
Figure 109 Drinking water supply ditch
We also drove a long way on a
long winding mountain road to visit and potential farming sprinkler system we
may participate it.
The landscape is stunning! It is
a good thing we had a 4-wheel drive. The
roads were steep and the ground muddy.
At the end of the road, we met with one of the farmers who explained
what his day is like.
Figure 110 Las Palmitas landscape
He has planted approximately 7
acres of land on the side of the mountain in bananas and avocados and
yucca. These will become his main
production crop, but in between these he has planted beans and corn. There aren’t any rows. Everything is just scattered out across the
hillside. Until he pointed it out, we
didn’t know what we were really looking at, but as he explained it and we
looked closer, we could see small concrete tanks at different points across the
mountainside and could start to distinguish the outline of different hillside
farms. There were a lot of different
farms, each managed by a man and his family.
Figure 111 Farming in Las Palmitas
Each tank had a pipe from a
spring somewhere further up in the hills.
But from there the farmer has to use hoses to water or he has to carry
water. The result he is limited in the
amount of food he can produce. Sur
Futuro proposes to design and construct sprinkler systems fed from the existing
tanks that will reduce the amount of manpower required. It is an interesting project, but I’m not
sure at this point if it is something we will participate in.
It was a very interesting
trip. Along the way we learned a lot of
valuable information about the customs of the people and why things are the way
they are. SUR FUTURO fed us breakfast
and lunch where we experienced eating yucca prepared the Dominican way and the
traditional “La Bandera”, a meal of rice, beans and chicken.
We discussed the traditional diet
with the representatives of SUR FUTURO and questioned why they were not helping
the people learn how to grow different kinds of vegetables. The did start teaching, but it fell on its
face because the people went to a lot of trouble to grow vegetables, but then
went they went to market, no-one purchased them and it is a huge problem to
transport vegetables before spoiling to the capital where there would be a
bigger market. So the people eat what
they grow and can transport---beans, rice, bananas, yucca, mango and
avocados. The result is a very limited
diet and lacking nutrition.
We concluded that things are not
necessarily bad here, just different.
Wow, that's a big assignment! On the diet, there must be a lot of good nutrition in fresh raw bananas, yucca, mango, and avocados. Beans and rice compliment each other. A few fresh greens would help.
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