Dominican Republic

Today was the first day in which our group got to explore Santiago.

The first thing we did was that we visted a cultural museum. The museum was very large, it looked very nice, and it was very clean and technological. The tour guide very was nice, and it was very interesting to see how Dominicans came to who they are as a culture today.

One thing that struck me, as I was watching a high tech projector film with fancy photos, was that why did they spend so much money on this museum while people are begging outside the very museum’s gates? This to me is very unethical. In my view, you can’t have a museum romanticizing about their country while people without limbs are begging for a better life, or people selling dogs on the streets so they can eat. From what I saw, there is a fine line between the rich and the poor.

Could this be because of a lack of a welfare department? Instead of spending millions of pesos on a museum that no one can go to because there is no money in the hands of the poor to pay for a ticket to see their own culture, they should have a better health care system. Just this morning in the hotel lobby our group encountered a frail old woman with cancer. No one could help her, so she left. Why is she begging for help in the first place?

It is apparent that the health care system in the Dominican Republic is weak. In Cuba which is just a few hundred miles away, has a much better health care system. Should the people of the Dominican Republic look at their society as a whole to see why there are barefooted children on their streets, or why an elderly cancer patient cannot receive health care? I know I have been here a total of 24 hours, but I can clearly see through the museum wall from the inside.

Cody Bralts
Urbana High School
Urbana, IL