HABITAT FOR HUMANITY – DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

February 16 – March 1, 2008

The Habitat project site we worked at is located on the outskirts of San Francisco de Macoris, Dominican Republic. San Francisco de Macoris is a small city situated in Duarte Province in the northern portion of the country. It is not a tourist area and we saw very few foreigners while we were there.

The Habitat project we worked on is called Mount Zion and once competed will include 43 housing units comprised of five single family houses, one duplex and nine two story fourplexes. Construction started in 2006 so by the time we arrived all of the single family houses, the duplex and four of the fourplexes were structurally completed. The individual living units range from 42 to 52 square meters each (444 to 534 square feet). They are concrete block construction and are designed to resist hurricanes and earthquakes. To learn more about Habitat in the Dominican Republic and other Latin America & Caribbean countries visit Habitat for Humanity.

The Team I was with was made up of twelve Canadians originating from Ontario, Alberta and BC.  We were joined by a group of 12 Americans for the first week and in the middle of the trip we spent the weekend at Las Terrenas, which is a fairly laid back tourist area on the north coast.

We flew into Santo Domingo and spent part of a day there before traveling to San Francisco de Macoris and returned and spent another day there after the build. We stayed in the old part of town and were able to walk through some interesting history connected with the discovery and original exploration of the Americas. Santo Domingo was where Columbus set up the first colony and where he is now buried. We saw buildings that dated from the early 1500’s Photos of Santo Domingo

Work at the Habitat  build site was all manual labour – no power tools, no power equipment of any kind except a cement mixer on a couple of days when a LOT of concrete was needed. We moved large piles of sand and gravel in buckets and wheelbarrows and hundreds of concrete blocks by hand. A rope and pulley raised concrete, mortar and blocks up to the second floor. Shovels dug holes and wheelbarrows moved dirt. Photos of the Build

We saw various sides of the Dominican Republic - Santo Domingo and Las Terrenas, which are on the higher end of the economic scale, San Francisco, which has some visible poverty but for the most part appears to be lower to middle income, and some rural areas that were defiantly on the poverty end of the scale.

We experienced the Dominican Republic Independence Day (Feb 27) first hand by attending the Carnival in San Francisco. Masses of people and lots of noise. Photos of Carnival, San Francisco and Las Terrenas

We visited the “Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Agropecuarias y Forestales” which has a research centre in San Francisco for the growing of coca (chocolate) beans. They crossbreed and clone different varieties of cocoa trees to improve the varieties available to the local growers. Cocoa is a major export crop for the Dominican Republic.

The two weeks sped by very quickly and we all had a wonderful time mixing with the locals both at the work site and participating in other offsite activities.