I wasn't exactly sure what to expect in visiting a Dominican Hospital, my limited visual indications of what to expect being from movies or TV shows. I was pleasantly surprised to find the facility that we toured on Day Four, The Robert Reid Cabral Children's Hospital; to be quite modern, and while Debbie (she's a nurse) had a few questions and concerns, for the most part, it was clean, well maintained and well staffed. As it turns out, the First Lady of the Dominican Republic had thus taken a special interest in that particular hospital after a tour of her own, and money had been earmarked to ensure that it was re-fitted and renovated properly to respond to current needs and specifications.
We toured several areas of the hospital, seeing children of all ages in all stages of treatment, from newborns to adolescent youth and everything in between. As one would expect, there were several kids bawling their eyes out as they were injected with needles or intravenous, others quietly slept in hospital beds or played busily with toys while hooked up to dialysis machines or respirators. Every child, whether crying, snoozing, babbling, etc. was accompanied by their parent, usually their mother, and each of them wore on their face and in their eyes the concern on their mind and the hope in their heart.
It was honestly difficult for me to walk through each room and see the children sitting with their parents, each struck by some disease or affliction, without averting my eyes and hurrying my pace out of the room. After four days in the DR, I was struggling with the feeling that these people saw me as nothing more than a tourist, someone coming to simply consume their poverty and pain, only to fly off back to my home of comfort after a brief stay. There is no comfort in admitting your own child into a hospital, though these families were lucky to be able to do so. And as heart wrenching as it was to watch children in pain while their parents looked on, there was little consolation in knowing that in leaving the hospital many of these children would return to the impoverished streets and communities that we had already seen. My glances into their eyes, as a result, remained brief and sheepish.
The highlight of our visit to this hospital for me was in touring the feeding area where newborns were being fed by their mothers. A new mother was bursting with pride as we entered, showing off her three-day old daughter, already sporting a full head of jet-black hair. When she told me how old her child was, I exclaimed to the rest of the group that she was precisely the same age as Madelyn Elizabeth, Jason and Steph's daughter, who had been born with hours of our departure from Canada.
As we moved back toward the entrance, we were shown the newly renovated kitchen that rivaled any in size or caliber that I have ever seen in Canada. It was a final example of progress being made, but also that great change could be initiated simply through a single act of political will. At the same time, while the children at this hospital received excellent care and benefited from the use of state-of-the-art equipment, if work was just beginning at this central hospital, it also suggested that there is more work to be done. This was in the centre of Santo Domingo, and while this hospital served a large area, this is a country of nearly 9 million residents, with many spread out in rural and remote areas.
The importance of this one hospital is reflected in the fact that while one entire floor is currently under renovation, the remainder of the hospital remains in operation, as there is simply no other facility capable of taking on its day-to-day operations. The progress being made was encouraging, but there were many indications that we would see in our own communities, that many Dominicans aren't able to seek proper medical attention, allowing for the worsening of what would otherwise be easily curable afflictions.
After briefly visiting a public session on HIV and AIDS put on by a NGO that works to support Dominican-Haitian women, we headed back towards the Santo Domingo Airport, near Boca Chica, where, off the main highway, we drove slowly down a dusty and bumpy trail between fields of sugar cane for what seemed like forever until we arrived at a collection of houses, clustered in what was, quite literally, the middle of nowhere. This community was built around the sugar cane fields, and the poverty we witnessed in this 'batey' was beyond anything I have ever witnessed or would care to witness again. As we walked among decrepit houses, a curious group of barefoot children followed our group from building to building, gnawing hungrily on mangoes from the trees above. Our host pointed out the single-rooms in which entire families lived, the pair of out-houses that serviced the entire community, the small pipe that served as running water for everyone who lived there. An elderly man on a wheel chair peered at us suspiciously before struggling to get back in his shack, out of sight. Another man in his fifties returning from the fields stopped and talked to us for awhile, telling us that someone had been burning the fields and destroying the crops. Apparently not fazed by the development, he smiled a toothless grin and nonchalantly swung the machete in his hand as he walked to his hut.
The workers in the sugar cane fields do not own their own land, and so, as is wont to happen in any like situation, they are at the mercy of the companies that employ them and to the markets that determine prices of the cane they produce. The result is extreme poverty, leaving the people to work on developing gardens and maintaining livestock, although at some points in the year, there is nothing to eat but the sugar cane from the fields or the mangoes that fall from the trees when they are in season. Obviously struck by the extreme conditions we were witnessing, a member of our group was prompted to ask our host: "What brings you joy?" The young woman named Natasha who had been escorting us from house to house and to the community's place of worship where we now sat, smiled her beautiful smile and told us that watching her children grow and having hope for their future brought her joy. I have never been as humbled as I was in that one moment.
Here too however, amidst the poorest of poor, there are signs of progress. A school that boasts attendance of over a hundred children of all ages stands at the edge of the community. The walls inside are lined with what you would see in any classroom, the alphabet, a map, a flag, and the names of each student. The teacher told us briefly about the instruction of the youth and of how they could move on to High School at communities further down the road. As Natasha had expressed, it seemed there was indeed hope for her five children and the others in the community to begin the process of ending the cycle of poverty in their community.
As we headed back to our van, the group gathered for a picture with our host and with the children of the community. I snapped the picture and then showed the image on the digital display to the children. As they realized what I was showing them, they were absolutely thrilled, flocking around me, nearly knocking me off my feet and tearing the camera from my hands as they pointed to themselves in the picture. It was almost a relief to be able to make them giggle and just be children in a place that seemed so forbidding. Children lose their innocence young here, and are often sent to the field before they ever get the chance to finish school. The path out of poverty for these communities will be a long-term battle, and the burdens and obstacles facing these children seem huge, almost insurmountable, but in that moment, they were just children.
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