Our Beginnings
Project Esperanza is a service organization that was started by two Virginia Tech students in the fall of 2005. It sprung out of volunteer trips they had taken to the Dominican Republic with another organization. They had a deep conviction to continue to return, bring along others, and as a group to use their gifts and resources to give all they could to a community in the Dominican Republic. Since the student organization formally began, a strong body of ambitious and loving students and graduates from all different majors has formed. This group is dedicated to the project.
Throughout the 2005-2006 school year a number of fundraisers were organized to raise money for the summer trip. These fundraisers served to get people involved in Project Esperanza and to inform the general public of the organization. Fundraisers included selling t-shirts on campus and in local stores, selling mistletoe in December, face painting in front of Wal-Mart, running a thrift sale, a 5K, and much more. During the summer of 2006, 29 people volunteered with Project Esperanza in the coastal city of Puerto Plata over a span of two months. Four volunteers stayed the entire time while others came for different amounts of time within that summer. During these two months volunteers worked on several projects. For the first month, half of the group taught English lessons in an extremely overcrowded, understaffed, undersupplied, and structurally unsound elementary school, providing relief for the overworked teachers as well as structure, excitement, and learning for the children. Meanwhile, the other half of the group worked on the construction and painting of a much needed new school until funds ran out.
Kids in a school in Cangrejo where volunteers taught lessons.
Volunteer Colleen Miller helps paint a new school being built in Cangrejo.
Volunteers also performed a street census to collect information about the lives of the hundreds of young boys that work on the streets selling hard-boiled eggs, sweets, and shining shoes. They found that the majority of the boys come from Haiti and have lived in Puerto Plata for a short while. They cannot attend school in the Dominican Republic and many have attended little or no school in Haiti. Most of the boys have mothers and families in Haiti whom they wish to help support. At an average age of thirteen, the boys are amazingly independent by American standards. Volunteers also met boys as young as six and seven working on the streets. During the street census Project Esperanza volunteers developed relationships with the boys and eventually began a program in which they came over to the volunteers’ house every afternoon for lunch, lessons, and activities.
At the end of the summer Project Esperanza acquired the lease to the house in Puerto Plata where volunteers could return periodically. We knew that we would continue to do service work in the community while also providing opportunities for the street kids that we had met. Several relationships were built with individuals, churches, and schools in the Puerto Plata community. While maintaining its roots as a Virginia Tech student organization, Project Esperanza became incorporated and started seeking non-profit status. Our next goal was to start writing grant proposals, and we began fundraising efforts to enable the group to find solutions to some of the problems we had seen.
Returning to Puerto Plata
Three Project Esperanza volunteers returned to Puerto Plata for a week in November to prepare the house for a group of volunteers that would come in January, plan future projects with members of the community, and visit with the boys that we had begun working with over the summer. Susana Sanchez is a pastor of a church as well as principal of a school in Puerto Plata. Her church had already begun adding facilities onto their existing school in which they planned to begin a program to serve street kids and eventually integrate them into the school. We planned to join forces in order to provide these kids with education and life coaching, since they were in need of certain skills that they had not been able to acquire growing up in poverty. Reverend Susana's church planned to finish the building structure they had recently pooled their money to construct, but they had ran out of funds. We joined forces with her to raise support for this building project, which would benefit the children we were working with as well as others in need in Puerto Plata.
While we began forming a partnership with Susana Sanchez we also met Pastor Milien, the leader of a church that had recently begun a small school to benefit the children in their neighborhood, Padre Granero. Haitian children, because of the obstacles of language and citizenship, usually miss the chance of education while their parents are living and working in the Dominican Republic. Pastor Milien's church decided to combat that situation by founding their own school that would provide regular learning for their children. The only problem was that they were operating out of a tiny, leaky church building, had no materials or even desks (kids sat in plastic chairs), and the teachers were working without salaries. But they kept at it for several months, leading up to the time when we met Pastor Milien. At this point we returned to the States and started fundraising to support their school, and since then have been able to provide teacher salaries, chairs, tables, books, school materials, as well as help individual students with enrolling and uniforms. Since many of the kids we had been working with lived in Padre Granero, we were able to encourage them to go to school.
The Meal and Tutoring Programs Form
In January a group of fifteen volunteers travelled to Puerto Plata in order to gain leadership experence in the area and to work with Susana Sanchez and her church, laying the foundations for her building project that we planned to continue during the summer with more volunteers. During this January trip we also developed a program in which lunch and dinner were provided daily to any kids that needed it. We offered tutoring as well, teaching reading, writing and math to kids that worked on the streets all day and even with the forming of the new Padre Granero school were often hesitant or unable to attend. Tutoring at our house meant they could come when they were able and were not tied to a school schedule that ruled out the possibility of work, their means of survival. As we tutored them we tried to find longer-term solutions for how they could begin attending school. One solution was to work with the Padre Granero school to offer weekend evening classes that eased kids into education while still giving them a chance to work during the week. We also tried to make tutoring practical for the boys by offering a points and rewards system in which a half hour with a tutor would earn 5 points, while an hour would earn 10 points. Kids could then use these points to buy necessities like clothes, shoes, toothpaste, pens and pencils, etc.
The Boys' Home Forms
During our volunteer trip in January we met several boys who had been sleeping on the streets, on the beach, or on someone's porch. This particular group of five boys had been sold across the border to work but had eventually broken away from their bosses and were consequently living without a home. We provided them a place to sleep for a few nights, and then before returning home for the semester we transformed the previously empty rented house into their new home. Bernard and Enso, two trusted Haitian friends, agreed to stay with the kids until we returned, and suddenly they had a roof and a chance for school when they had previously spent their days looking for the next place to sleep. Several other boys began to stay in our new home.
A few of the boys on one of their first nights sleeping under a roof.
Summer of 07: Strengthening Our Foundations
We returned to Puerto Plata briefly during spring break with another group of volunteers, and then in the summer for three months. Three volunteers stayed for the entire summer, while others stayed for varying amounts of time. The summer began rocky, provided many trials, and ended with a new beginning and a place to grow roots. During our first few weeks we were not only dealing with an influx of many volunteers, but were running a house of what had grown to be seventeen boys. The need was so great that our home had stretched to the limit of its capacity. This was a learning time for everyone. We were passing the friendly, polite stage with the boys and were entering into their lives, learning their histories, and dealing with the issues and wounds they dealt with daily as a result of their pasts. Kids that had learned to survive on the streets through a survival-of-the-fittest mentality were challenged to unlearn this through living in our home, and the battle towards unlearning was often hard. Every day we were celebrating the successes of regular school attendance, nightly bible studies, and a growing soccer team. But we also struggled with the habits of fighting, stealing, and lying that many of the boys had carried into the house. It was a long struggle towards learning discipline and rules, but by the end of the summer a new and more secure family had formed.
How did this happen? Several ways. The number of boys living in the home diminished to ten, then seven, as those who missed their families in Haiti and wanted to return did so with our help and supervision. Many could not previously return home since it is necessary to pay money at several check points, so those that had been up to this point stranded in the Dominican Republic were finally able to return to their families. Those that were most strongly commited to the project and most serious about changing their lives ended up remaining in the home, so that what could have been a transient shelter became a rooted and committed family.
We also moved houses in the middle of the summer. The neighborhood out of which we had been operating our program was fairly wealthy and residents did not appreciate large numbers of Haitian street kids coming and going during the day. In order to avoid further conflict we moved into a house in Playa Oeste, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. The house had been provided to us by a local church and we took the opportunity to move our kids until we could find a better home. This moving experience provided the challenges of living in a new and unfamiliar neighborhood in cramped living conditions and no running water or regular electricity. At one point the boys and staff combined were sharing a small bathroom among fifteen people. But it was in this house that the now smaller group of boys began to settle, not so much in their environment, which was temporary, but with each other.
The deciding moment came when we could finally move into our dream home. With the help of a local pastor we found a house situated in the countryside just outside the city. It is an old but beautiful house that sits on ten acres of land, right by a stream. After weeks of negotiating we signed a contract to pay monthly towards our purchase of the home.
Where We Are Now
Where has our story taken us so far? We now have:
One Boys' Home where kids receive daily schooling and care.
Three Grassroot Schools that fight daily to give kids an education who wouldn't have it otherwise.
Two Soccer Teams for street kids.
One After-School Program in Blacksburg, Va.
