Cien Fuegos

I just wanted to tell you a little bit about the school that I am working at for two hours twice a week. Every Monday and Wednesday, we take the guagua to downtown Santiago to walk a block and take the F car, which is like a taxi,but operates like a bus in that it just makes a loop to one part of town and back. The F car takes us about ten minutes out of downtown to a little suburb called Cien Fuegos. The community started off in the 70's when one hundred (cien) families were displaced from their homes to this community that surrounds a garbage dump due to the fact that the houses they lived in, that were small and all connected, had burned down in a fire (fuego). A new community was born that lived on the outskirts of town and were never really considered a part of the community. They were treated poorly, never hired for jobs, adn consequently turned to crime to support themselves. They were not given the time of day, so many turned to robbing people in order to pay for the small amounts a food that they could not afford by themselves.

The community quickly grew, and it is now home to more than 150,00 people, on less land than makes up the City of Burlington. There is a hospital, four schools, and still many are unemployed and struggle to make ends meet. Many adults and children work at the city dump that remains right outside the community, sorting through the garbage for metal that can be salvaged and sold, materials that could be used to make a kite to fly, and throwing the rest in a pile to be burned. It is a community that is growing exponentially, but is not being developed at all. The people there have little hope of getting out of the rut they find themselves in. 

My job here is at the school. I work in one of the smaller schools for two hours in the morning. In the Dominican Republic, all the public schools have a uniform of khaki bottoms and a light blue top, and everywhere in the country, the younger kids go to school in the morning, and the older kids in the afternoon. As I work in the morning, I am with the second grade class of 40 students with one teacher, and far less than 40 desks. The teacher has maintained the room away from chaos, but when she leaves, I am left telling the students to sit down and do their homework as they all get up to roam around the room, leaving their notebooks on the table, and the writing on the board that they were supposed to copy goes ignored. The teacher comes back into the room, and they all sit back down, but then she moves on with the lesson, although many students have not finished copying what was on the board previously. Some can learn this way, and do, but there are also some who copy what is on the board letter for letter, having no idea what the word is that they are spelling, or what the whole sentence means. There is just no way for one teacher to manage 40 students who already do not listen, and make sure they are all learning what they need to be to move onto the next level. 

Halfway through the morning, a few older students bring in a few bags of bread, and on a good day a case of lukewarm milk in juice boxes. The hungry children scarf it down, and for many they will not get a whole lot more than that, before heading outside for recess. Some play tag as other climb on top of the roof of a shed and jump off, bringing old broken school desks with them to push around the basketball court. Other kids climb over the barbed wire to go retrieve some things that have fallen down the hill. After running around for fifteen minutes we go back into the classroom. At that point 5 of the children come up to me and ask for a sip of my water. They are thirsty after running around, and there is no running water at the school. I gave them each a sip and resolve to not bring my water bottle back to the school. It is not fair that I can drink water whenever I am thirsty right in front of these kids when they have no running water available to them for the majority of the day. I can wait until I get back to ILAC to quench my thirst if they have to wait all day just for a sip. 

As hard as it is to imagine, these kids grow up this way and don't know anything different. They are happy. It is not my job to show them what they are missing, or to make them feel bad about their lives here, but to show them that I care, to offer them that sip of water when they are thirsty, and to play with them like they are the children that they are, not treat them like they are nothing, which is how they are treated by most of society. I look forward to working here, and I can't wait to build my relationships with the kids and the teacher. I know that although I may not be able to change the world, if I can make just one child's day a little brighter, I will have done my job and this trip will have been worthwhile.