These last couple weeks have been some of my most stressful and thought provoking yet. As a group we made a trip to the Dominican-Haitian border to see the market that happens two times a week. A bridge in the DR is opened and Haitians are allowed into the country from 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. to buy and sell any goods they may possibly need to survive the rest of the week. The sense of desperation these people gave off was heart breaking. Not only were they rushing into the DR but as soon as they had finished their business there, they were in just the same rush to get back. The poverty we experienced was eye opening, it was like nothing I had seen before.
As I have mentioned before my service site is at an elementary school in a barrio called Cienfuegos, a poor area of Santiago built right next to the city dump. Last Wednesday for the first time I was able to visit the dump. Many of the people in Cienfuegos work at the dump, many of them are just children. At the dump people would swarm to where dump trucks of trash would dump their loads of garbage. The people would rummage through the garbage, breaking open bags and digging through them with their bare hands. They were looking for plastic, cardboard, or metal, basically anything they could sell for a little bit of money to feed their families. An administrator at the school informed me that some of the students who attend classes there, work in the dump after class. I cannot imagine living that type of life.
I have had a lot of things to process over last couple weeks and to top it all off I have a 20 page paper due next Saturday. I am feeling a little bit of the pressure and stress but this is still an experience I would never give up. I cannot wait to see what the coming weeks have in store for me.