Life in a Dominican Batey

Let me introduce you to Willie, a 10-year-old boy from Batey 50, the poorest village the Connecticut-based Dominican Republic Mission Team helps. Willie is a happy, smart, kind and beautiful boy, who cannot wait for his American friends to arrive each morning so he can run up and hug us. The problem is Willie is almost at the age when he will no longer be able to go to school, no longer be able play with his friends in the afternoon, no longer be there when the old school bus arrives with his friends from Connecticut. His future in the next year or two is to start heading out into the sugar cane fields with his machete at 6 am every morning to cut cane, as his father and so many others from the village need to do to barely survive.

Willie’s family is typical of life in a Dominican batey — his father works from dawn to dusk, six days a week, cutting sugar cane by hand with a worn machete. For all of his toil and sweat, he may make $5 per day as he is paid by the weight of the cane he has cut. Willie has four brothers and sisters, all tended to by their hardworking mom, who spends her day cooking over an open fire whatever is available for her family to eat. She works continually tidying up her shack (dirt floor and all). Their home is provided for them by the owners of the sugar cane plantation, as long as the cane cutter remains healthy and productive in the fields. “Home” is probably a term that most would not use for the family’s dwelling place, and even shack is generous. It is an eight-foot-by-ten-foot structure of scrap pieces of wood — nailed gingerly to the supporting “beams,” which actually are just branches and sticks. The roof is a combination of scraps of metal, banana tree leaves, and random pieces of trash that have been tossed up there to try and keep the rain out.

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