Dominican Trip 2015
The Gaylord and Manistee Rotary Clubs, along with others who are not Rotarians, just returned home from our 18th Dominican Republic trip, continuing to build a small community building (like a community center) at the end of a barrio near Los Alcarrizos. Our team was comprised of 22 Michiganders, 7 local Dominicans, plus children from the barrio. The purpose of the community center is to try and keep kids off the streets, drugs, etc. by providing recreational structure for them. A previous team already built a basketball court for the kids. Our goal was to continue constructing the building and flush toilets.
During our week we laid block, poured vertical, horizontal and arched cement beams, poured cement floors in 2 bathrooms, and on one day, five of us broke from the team for a day and went into the barrio to build and finish off a septic tank for an elderly woman recently widowed. Next week’s team will construct an inside bathroom and plumb it into the septic for her.
This trip was fantastic, especially with the amount of local adults and children that worked side by side with us. We finished everything on our bucket list for the week. I think the trip can be best summed up using a quote from one of the high school students we took with us when he said in his email to me “ Going into this trip, we were told about what we would see and experience. What we were told could never do justice to what I experienced. The people were so happy to have us there, despite the poverty that they go through. They were some of the happiest people I have ever met. That was the biggest thing for me. It was an amazing feeling to be able to help out, but the response we received from the people we were helping was something I will never forget. I would go on this trip again in a heartbeat.” (Bryce Cameron)
This trip was fantastic, especially with the amount of local adults and children that worked side by side with us. We finished everything on our bucket list for the week. I think the trip can be best summed up using a quote from one of the high school students we took with us when he said in his email to me “ Going into this trip, we were told about what we would see and experience. What we were told could never do justice to what I experienced. The people were so happy to have us there, despite the poverty that they go through. They were some of the happiest people I have ever met. That was the biggest thing for me. It was an amazing feeling to be able to help out, but the response we received from the people we were helping was something I will never forget. I would go on this trip again in a heartbeat.” (Bryce Cameron)
At the end I took the team to the Old Colonial City in Santo Domingo (Ciudad Colonial), founded by Christopher Columbus in 1498, just 6 years after he arrived on the Island. This city is the oldest permanent European city in the Americas. We also took the students into the Cathedral of Santa Maria la Menor in the Colonial City. The Cathedral was built between 1512 and 1540. The architecture and paintings from Europe were unbelievable. From there we walked to Fortaleza Ozama (the oldest fort in the Americas, built between 1502-1508 by Christopher Columbus’s son), and then later used as a prison until 1961 when Dictator Rafael Trujillo was beheaded.