Today we arrived a bit late to the batey. We spent what was left of the morning picking up trash in the central parts of the community. Although it was extremely hot today and several of us had to take breaks, many of whom were already suffering from illness or aches, this task was very satisfying because we could immediately see a difference after we were done.
A few of us started our interviews for the documentary today. We interviewed Milanda, a seventeen year old attending university in Santiago in a year, about the benefits and the obstacles the batey creates in terms of growing up and in terms of going to college. We talked with her about racism outside the batey and about gender roles within it. We plan to interview several other youths about similar topics and eventually Papito about his efforts at the batey right now and about the history of the batey, including the revolution in the 80s/90s against American companies who owned the nearby land.
After lunch we got to participate in (and film) a Football Para La Vida class. Football Para La Vida is a Grassroots Soccer program that began in Africa. University students from the states brought it to the Dominican Republic years back and since it has become established in several different communities as an effective way to teach youth about HIV/AIDS in an open and supportive atmosphere.
The program uses soccer to explain issues of sex and protection, which I have always thought innovative and brilliant (soccer really does explain the world) but I´ve gained a greater understanding of how it works now after seeing it. The class is interactive and energetic, using games such as ¨buscar la pelota,¨ in which kids have to figure out who in a line of students is hiding a tennis ball behind their back. It might seem random but after the activity Yanlico, one of the youth trainers at Libertad and our coordinator for this trip, led a discussion about how one can protect oneself because you can never tell who is hiding AIDS behind their back. Having that interactive game to connect it to makes it much easier to understand and it engages people enough to learn much more about a subject that might seem boring or irrelevant otherwise.
During the Football Para La Vida class something completely unrelated also became apparent to me - an identifiable divide between lighter Dominicans and black Dominicans of Haitian descent. This was actually the first time in our days at Batey Libertad that I had even seen lighter-skinned Dominicans save for a couple families who live near Papito, which means they don´t come out much to the central part of the batey (the majority of Dominican Dominicans live slightly outside the center) to hang out with their Haitian neighbors. It was striking how separate the light-skinned Dominicans and the black Dominicans staid during the class, yet there didn´t seem to be tension, or at least I couldn´t see it. I suppose this is actually quite similar to the separation by ethnicity or class in American high schools.
Tonight we will go see some live Merengue here in Santiago- very exciting. Thanks for reading!
Shara Esbenshade
University Laboratory High School
Urbana, IL