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Hola!
los barrios in english means the neighborhoods. Last week Jose the director of the library took us on a tour of the neighborhoods where most of our kids come from. The library is located in the main part of town and the barrios are about a 15-20 minute walk from there. The town is becoming very commercialized so more and more people are moving into the barrios because they can´t afford the rent. THe barrios are the poorest areas of the town and it is amazing how different the town is when you walk from the european owned businesses and hotels to the other side where a family of 7 is living in one room made of tin. Most of the houses are just shacks somehow built and standing on the side of a hill. When we walked by some of the ¨houses¨ had more than one family in them. Besides horrible housing another thing that the kids have to live with is drug spots all over the neighborhood. Jose was telling us that one of the mothers of a kid who goes to camp had to build a wall connecting her house and the next because guys with crack pipes smoking would just walk in between where her kids were all playing. Jose also showed us a stream where all the people get their water and shower. One side of the stream has pretty much clean water but the other side is where the women wash pig and cow intestines (to sell to the restaurants, nasty). We then walked down to this valley place and he showed us a drug spot where a few prostitutes were waiting for costumers to sell crack and heroine among other things. This place is right where the kids walk past every day to go to the camps and their school. I think i may already have mentioned this but also the schools are terrible and the library has the only playground in the entire town (besides the private french school). Jose and Annette want to put simple playgrounds (a few swings and a teetertotter) in some of the poorest barrios when they have funding.
ANother very interesting program Annette adn Jose are involved with is a microfinancing group that works with women who live in the barrios. Microfinancing is very popular and very successful in poor countries and neighboorhoods. Basically women (most of the time) are given a small loan, in Jose´s case 300 dollars, and they open a small store or business, usually here it is a vegetable and food stand or clothing shop. THey then have 6 months to pay back the loan and if they pay on time they qualify for a larger loan. THe group Jose works with currently supports 25 women in las Terrenas and has a 97% success rate of paying back the loans.
If you would like to make a donation to the library, the barrio playgrounds, or the microfinancing the following site has a lot of information about how to do so. http://fundacionmahatmagandhi.com/Donations.html
THere is just one last thing i wanted to tell you about the camps. Last week we had a group of dentists come from Santo Domingo to do cleaning, cavity filling, and teeth pulling for the kids and some of the women of the town. It was two days of craziness. The dentists set up in the area in front of the library under the porch roof. THere were three women cleaning teeth and seven dentists. I was actually very impressed with the dentists. THey had anesthetic for numbing. However, normally they started drilling and if it started to hurt then they used the anesthetic. Almost all of the kids had cavities. THere were only three kids who screamed for their lives and had to be held down. I was in the other room with the kids who were waiting and from the looks on their faces i don´t think they enjoyed the sound of a drill and a kid screaming for his life.
Tomorrow is our last day of camps and i come back to the US on Wednesday. Hopefully i will get one last chance to write but if not thanks for reading!
roxanne
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