Friday February 1st
Day 7 in DR; Day 3 for Rotary

After breakfast, we leave in the buses and SUVs at 8:30am. Our team is doing construction today, and we are going north, past the town of Guaymate, almost to the mountains, to a batay with name of Cabeza de Toro (Bull's Head).

It takes 45 minutes to get there. This whole area of many square miles of sugar cane fields around La Romana is networked with railway lines which are owned by the sugar company Central Romana. We pass frequent loading areas where the cane is brought from the fields and loaded onto rail cars for the trip to the refinery in La Romana.

One of the other teams was at this same batay yesterday, and we will continue their work, helping with the construction of two latrine buildings. There are 4 Dominican bricklayers, and our job is to mix the mortar, by hand, and to keep the bricklayers well-supplied with mortar and concrete blocks. It sounds simple enough but it's hard work because of the heat. Team members can work as hard as they want - or not. One member from the Houlton club is accompanied by his 17-year old daughter, Frankie, and she puts most of the men to shame. She is tireless and is always doing something: She finds things to do. She tells me that she was interested, but not happy, yesterday when we were installing filters because there was so much waiting around, and she felt she could be doing more. Today, she is in her element.

If you think you are hydrating enough in this environment, you're not. It's important to force yourself to drink lots of water. The hospital provides each of the teams with a huge cooler of ice water, another huge cooler of soft drink bottles, as well as lunch. Yesterday that was a large sub, and today it's a sort of paella - very good, and lots of it.

Previous teams - mostly church groups - have dug the pit, which is about 10 feet deep, and 12 feet wide by about 20 feet long. They lined the bottom and sides with concrete and concrete blocks, and poured a concrete slab on top, at ground level - so it is basically a septic tank. Now, we are building-up the walls and internal divisions to make the building itself, which will have 4 separate but identical compartments, going up about 12 feet, and which will have, eventually, a peaked tin roof.

On the other side of the batay, a hole has been dug previously for another latrine, but the rubble from that has been left too near the edge of the hole, and Dave (Fredericton club) and I have to move the rubble away from the edge with shovel and pick axe.

This is a very different batay to the one we saw yesterday. The homes here are not in orderly rows, and each is different, most of them just collections of corrugated sheeting not only for the roofs but for the walls as well. I learn that the reason for the difference is that this batay was not built by the sugar company. This batay has not received any filters yet, the priority being sanitation. At yesterday's batay, built by the sugar company, there were many small company-built outhouses, but in today's batay, I don't see any such conveniences, which means that these latrines are the first attempt at any basic sanitation here.

I notice that every home has a donkey, which the men use to carry sugar cane. One home has a wood oven outside, and the woman is baking cookies all day long. These are large - about 9" round and 3/4" thick - and ginger-flavoured: She offers me one, and it's delicious. She sells them to the batay and in town.

It rains periodically through the day. Some of the local batay boys are helping with the building tasks, and they scuttle for the shelter of the church as soon as it starts to rain. I find it cooling and refreshing, and I take off my hat and stand there letting the rain shower wash over me. One or two other Rotarians are not phased by a little rain either, but the boys are shouting for us to join them in the shelter. They must think we're crazy, and I'm thinking "It's not snow".

We leave the site at 4pm and head back to base for hot tub, pool, shower, drinks, relaxation and supper. Tonight, the members of the two La Romana Rotary clubs have been invited to join us for a social evening. The villa I am in is large enough to accommodate everyone with ease.

Thursday, January 31st
Day 5 in DR, Day 2 of Rotary

My room-mate Greg was supposed to arrive from his home in the US Virgin Islands at 10:30pm last night. He didn't get here until 2am, and without his bags. Worse, for him, his hearing aid batteries are in his bags, and he's deaf without them.

We gather together for breakfast at 7am in the largest of the 3 villas. Moises, the head of the Good Samaritan Hospital, and his team, are supposed to meet us here at 7:30am, but don't arrive until 8:30 - that's typical Dominican time, says Dr Bob.

Dr Bob has split us into 3 groups of 8 each: One team will do filter installations, another will go to a different batay to build a latrine, and the third will go to yet another batay to build a fire pit where the batay's garbage can be burned. The teams will rotate over the next few days. We learn that no-one is sure of the derivation for the word 'batay', not in English, Spanish, French or Creole. Something like 3000 of the filters have been installed so far, but it's only scratching the surface. Batay's can have from 50 to 100 homes, and the aim is that eventually every home will have it's own filter, and there are thousands of batay's. Moises has a team of technicians who do filter installations year-round, full-time. They are paid and trained, and Moises runs a tight ship. They accept up to 60 teams every year, of various sizes, from Rotary, medical groups and church groups, to participate 'hands-on' in filter installations, sanitation training and so on. In reality, we are interruption to their work, but everyone is so grateful and happy to see us.

We go first to the hospital where the filter supplies are kept. From there, we head out to the batay's in a variety if vehicles - a 12-person school bus, a larger travel bus and two pick-up trucks. The roads out of La Romana are in excellent condition - and paved! - probably because the government bends over backwards to accommodate the sugar company. At some point, though, after about 20 minutes, we have to break off onto the dirt roads that network the sugar cane fields. Even the dirt roads are in good condition, and we arrive at our batay after another 20 minutes.

Batay homes are wood shacks with tin roofs but built on raised concrete foundations. The homes are in orderly rows, built by the sugar company, and sequentially numbered. The batay's themselves are usually numbered - we are at batay 105 today - but occasionally have quirky names, such as Noir (Black) and Comoquierra (Whenever).

This is the first time a filter installation team has visited this batay, and so the first order of business is for the occupants of the homes that have been chosen to receive today's 15 filters gather in the only meeting room large enough, the chapel, for training. The team leaders, who are part of Moise's team, have a flip chart pictorial presentation that they go through, because often the Haitian women can't read. It's just the women present because the men are away in the fields cutting cane. The homes chosen are those with the most children, or with old folks...in other words, those at greatest risk. They will supply clean drinking water to the other homes around them, until such time as each home in that batay has its own filter.

The children are attracted to the goings-on, and several of have fun taking pictures and showing them to the children. Some of them can really ham it up, and they often collapse in laughter.

Once the training is done, it's about 11:30, and the team leaders distribute the filter housings. I think that sense of immediate possession encourages the families to want to protect and take care of their filter. We go off to help with the distribution of the bags of sand to each of the designated homes. Once that's done, it's time for lunch. We pile into the bus to leave the batay, otherwise the children would pester us for food, and we go a short distance away to the water pumping station, where is the well and a diesel-driven pump that sends the water up into a 10,000 gallon water tank raised on concrete pedestals about 30 feet in the air. That tank supplies the batay with its water, usually a communal tap but, in newer batay's, to a tap in each home.

The filter itself quite a genius piece of simple engineering: a conical plastic housing into which we have to pour and level 3 different grades of sand. We verify the flow rate - too slow and the filter is not efficient, and too fast might mean that the filter is not filtering enough - which should be 700-800 mL in 60 seconds. Then we put on the lid and attach it with a plastic tie tag that carries a unique identifying code. We give that code to the team leaders, and they will check on the family periodically to make sure the filter is being used properly.

The families are warm and welcoming. The simplicity of their lives is striking, and yet the homes are neat, with their few possessions stored around the frame if the shack and which serve as shelves. Their is usually a table, and it always has a tablecloth, sometimes in simulated lace. The floor is clean and swept, and we feel we should take off our shoes, as they do. The yard around their homes is beaten earth and it is generally SWEPT: Swept, that is, into a no-man's land between each home, where the garbage just accumulates. Many homes a small fenced plot - small meaning 8 feet square, perhaps, in which the home will be growing its own papayas, peppers, beans, bananas or other food crop. Most homes have a chicken or two, some have ducks, one might have a pig or a goat.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of idle time, and it may be a Dominicano thing. For instance, it takes the better part of a half-hour for the team leaders to divide 15 homes on a list into 4 teams. It's not that complicated. Never mind...it gives us more time to have fun with the children. Everyone, mothers and seniors included, respond to 'Bonjour', or in Creole, 'B-joo', smile and reply. Sometimes they'll come over and shake your hand. If you make the first move, they really seem to appreciate it.

A the end of our day we go to join with the team building the latrine. One if the members the shows a photo she took of a huge spider they killed and that she was told was a tarantula. Yuk! Despite that, they have made good progress, but they worked a lot harder than we did.

We return to La Romana, visit a money exchange place for those members who didn't yet change their dollars into pesos, and then stop at a supermarket to add to the supplies of booze and snacks that Dr Bob had already laid-in for us.

After supper tonight, we will be attending a regular meeting of one of the 2 La Romana Rotary clubs. It's supposed to start at 9pm, but Dominican time means that it might be a late night!

Wednesday January 30th:
Day 5 in DR, Day 1 of Rotary

I left Constanza this morning at 9am, where I have been staying, since Saturday, with a University friend from England who now lives in DR and whom I haven't seen for over 30 years.

Constanza is in the mountains in central DR and few tourists go there. It is the market garden for DR, growing all kinds of crops such as lettuce, cabbage, beans, potatoes, bananas, guava, oranges and the largest carrots I have ever seen. Constanza is at 4,000 feet, in a fertile bowl surrounded by mountains, some up to 7,000 feet high.

By 1:30pm, I have returned my rental SUV to the airport agency and have met with Dr Bob in the airport terminal. With him is Daniel, a Domincano who works at the Good Samaritan Hospital in La Romana and is in charge if the water filter project, and Wendell who is from Florida and has been working with Dr Bob on water projects for 10 years. We wait until 2:30pm for other team members who are arriving from Rhode Island and Louisiana.

The drive from the airport in Santo Domingo to La Romana is pretty, along the edge of the Caribbean for some of the way, where blowholes are spouting plumes of spray driven by the surf underneath the coral ledges. It's about a 1.5 hour drive to La Romana, and Dr Bob is talking the whole time. Always interesting, and often amusing.

La Romana is the centre for processing sugar cane, and just about the whole eastern end of DR is owned by Central, a sugar cane company founded by a Dominacano-Cuban who is now a billionaire. I learn that the name La Romana comes from the weigh scales where the sugar cane is weighed as it comes in from the fields on trucks before being processed: The brand name of the scales was Romana, and the truck drivers would say, "I'm going to the Romana", meaning...I'm going to the scales.

The group this year, the third year for this kind of Rotary working visit, is 21 members. Most are Rotarians but not all: The others are folks who have worked in DR before with Dr Bob on medical teams or with church groups. Bob has arranged through the local Rotarians to put us up in private villas that are part of the enormous resort called Casa de Campo. It is, apparently, the largest resort in the Caribbean. The villas each have many bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, are fully-equipped, each villa having its own pool, and Dr Bob has arranged for Dominicanos to staff each villa just for us.

3 villas have been secured for us, but we will eat together in one of the villas. The last 6 members, coming from Houlton, have not arrived yet, and those that have arrived got together at 6pm so that Dr Bob could give us an overview of the coming week. We had supper together at 7pm, provided for us by the Dominicano staff, and most have now gone to bed. I'm sitting out on patio by the pool as I write this, in the dark except for the mood lighting around the pool. Breakfast is at 7am, and our first work day begins at 8am, so I'm off to bed myself now.

Our Bikes and Boots Collection depots will be operational Oct 19 / 12. Here's a poster you can download and print off to help us advertise our Boots, Bikes 'n Bandaids campaign.

Click Here

Introduction

In 2010 the Rothesay Kings Rotary Club  collected bicycles and shoes to be shipped to the Dominican Republic. The community support we received was overwhelming and we collected enough to fill a complete seagoing container! 

The bikes and shoes were distributed in La Romanna in the Dominican Republic with the help of local Rotary Clubs and the Good Samaritan Hospital. The items were very much appreciated as the areas where they were distributed are very poor.

The program was such a success that were are doing it again this year along with the support of the Hampton and Sussex Rotary Clubs.

Stay tuned for additional information on where you can drop off your gently used footwear and bikes.

Pictures from 2011