First things first: Where are we and what are we doing?
Georgia State Basketball head coach Ron Hunter is very involved with an organization called Samaritan’s Feet. The organization provides shoes for impoverished children and the founder, Manny Ohomne, has a goal of providing 10 million shoes within 10 years. It’s a wonderful organization and Manny’s story is very inspiring.
Coach Hunter and the basketball team are traveling to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic for 8 days on a mission trip with Samaritan’s Feet. Senior staff significant others were invited as well, which is why I have the opportunity to travel with Mike. Manny, his son and two others from Samaritan’s feet are here as well. We have a group of around 36 people. We will be doing three shoe distributions while we are here and interspersed with them will be some free time and some planned activities.
Mike and I are traveling without the kids, marking our first kids-free trip since L.J. was born. My parents are staying at our house with the kids. It was a little hard to leave them for so long – especially Hannah at only 6 months old – but they are in good hands and, to be honest, L.J. pretty much shoved us out the door on Sunday morning. Someone was a little excited at the prospect of spending a week with his grandparents.
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Day 1
Day 1 was our travel and arrival day. The plane ride down was (thankfully) uneventful. All the movies, shows, etc. on our seatback screens were free, so I was able to watch a movie I’ve been eager to see: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. As we got closer to our destination you could look out the window and make out islands below. At one point I saw a cruise ship, which was really neat and interesting. You could see it moving along in the middle of the vast sea located far below us.
When we arrived, customs was quite tedious. We traveled with 20 military duffel bags of shoes (think: huge and heavy) and the immigration officials were none too pleased that we were clogging up their process with all of our – literally – extra baggage. They made us match up each bag tag with the tiny “receipt” sticker you get when you check a piece of luggage. The travel planner had them all in a big, randomly-ordered stack and it took us nearly an hour to match up the shoes plus all our luggage – around 60 pieces total. I ended up at the back of our group, so I self-appointed myself the line manager and kept pointing new arrivals to the significantly shorter line next to us.
After we made it through customs, we exited the airport to a waiting bus. We ran out of luggage room on the bus, so the shoes went on a pickup truck and another van they called for us. The trip from the airport to the hotel was about 45 minutes I’d guess. The poverty in the area was almost immediately apparent, as was the lack of courteous driving. We passed at least one large banner proclaiming “Respect red lights.”
As we got into Santo Domingo, it became much more city-like, albeit very different than any U.S. city I’ve been too. It’s urban but not cosmopolitan, if that makes sense.
Our hotel is right on the edge of the ocean, but it’s like many West Coast areas where the ocean is for your viewing pleasure only. There is no beach and no way to access the water. From our hotel, you walk across the street to the sidewalk on the other side, and the water is a couple feet below on the other side of the fence.
The hotel itself is very nice and looks like just about every other upscale Marriott I’ve stayed in before. It is a business hotel, not a resort hotel. (Which isn’t a negative thing at all – just describing the atmosphere.)
By the time we got to the hotel, took our luggage up and re-congregated in the hotel restaurant, it was almost 4 p.m. None of us had had anything to eat since breakfast in Atlanta and we were starving. Keep in mind we are traveling with a group of collegiate athletes who are accustomed to large, frequent meals. Chicken sandwiches and hamburgers were ordered for us. Before the food arrived, the wait staff set little bowls at each table. It was comical watching everyone’s heads immediately lean over to see what was in the little bowls, and the disappointed look when we all realized it was ketchup and mayonnaise and not something to eat.
The food finally arrived and there were repeated requests for more ketchup. I’m pretty sure the wait staff went back into the kitchen and exclaimed with an eye roll, “What’s with these Americans and their need for tons of ketchup?!” For the record, Dominican ketchup does not taste like American ketchup. It’s strange and very sweet.
After lunch/early dinner, everyone went back to their rooms for a while before we had a team meeting to prepare for Monday’s shoe distribution capped off with pizza for a late, light dinner.
Day 2
Day 2 was our first shoe distribution day. The location was almost an hour away and the traveling journey was just as impactful as the shoe distribution, albeit in a very different way. As we left the city (we’re pretty much city-center), it was amazing to see the transition from the city to a more rural area.
The city is a city. Not skyscrapers like we are used to back home, but definitely a city. Government buildings, apartments, shops and lots of hustle and bustle. It all looks a little worn down, and it’s not uncommon to see a partially built building that was abandoned before it was finished. We saw lots of graffiti.
As we left the city, things started to look more rundown. Shabby apartment blocks with rusted railings and grates. Lots of places where there would be a small storefront with an apartment over it. What was very interesting to see were the vendors selling their wares right on the sidewalks, in front of the storefronts. It was early in the day, and the fruit vendors were out en mass. There were so many of them and so much fruit!
I recall at one point we passed a grocery store – a large building more like what we’d see at home, complete with a parking lot. Outside the parking lot area were fruit vendors and others peddling small wares. It was a stark contrast to what you see in the U.S.
In addition to being rather run-down, it’s also very dirty here. There is trash everywhere. I’ve yet to see a garbage can outside of our hotel. So the fruit vendors I just mentioned? They were interspersed between trash piles. You’d see a pile of trash on the curb, a fruit vendor with fresh cut fruit 3 feet from it, another vendor, another trash pile, etc. etc.
As we passed through the “outside the main part of the city” areas, the poverty became more widespread and more heartbreaking. Rampant, abject poverty. There were shacks situated off the road, some of which didn’t even have doors. We saw lots of small children and lots of emaciated dogs on sidewalks. Tiny, run-down storefronts, repair shops, and food shops. Butcher shops where the meat was literally hanging from the ceiling. No electricity so presumably no air conditioning either. Other shops with cages of chickens and/or chicks out front. A lot of mechanical repair shops. A lot more garbage.
Forget keeping up with the Jones’. There are no Jones’ here. The “problems” we have in the U.S. are not problems compared to what these people face daily just to survive.
I was in a window seat on our big tour bus, which gave me a birds-eye view to everything we passed. I was glued to the window, watching as we traveled further and further into impoverished areas. Mike was in the aisle seat, which gave him a birds-eye view of Dominican driving.
You think people in Atlanta can’t drive? We may be a bit aggressive, but at least we follow traffic laws and pedestrians don’t wander in and out of bustling traffic. In the D.R., lanes are merely suggestions as to where you might want to align your vehicle. There are approximately 4x as many motorcycles as cars, and they go wherever they want whenever they want. Mike lost count of how many of them wove around our giant bus like it was a Mini Cooper. As soon as traffic stops – which it really doesn’t, it more ebbs and flows like a tide – people just surge into the street. Some crossing the street, some peddling wares. As I mentioned earlier, stop lights may or may not be obeyed. (Click on the below pic to enlarge…)
The cars here are an interesting mix of cars we have at home and a vast assortment of old Toyota Corollas. The oldest and most dilapidated models seem to be reserved for taxis. They don’t look fit to make it to the next corner, let alone wherever the passenger’s destination might be.
Anyway, eventually we made it to our destination, which seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t much around it at all, but it was a decently big church complex. The shoe distribution would be taking place in an open air pavilion in the middle of the complex.
There are several difference “jobs” during a shoe distribution. Some people wash the children’s feet and put their new shoes on them. Some people are runners who go back and forth between the foot washers and the “shoe store.” Some people organize and distribute the shoes in the “shoe store.” There is lots of work to be done!
I volunteered to help organize the “shoe store”, which is an easy way to say we dumped out 10 military bags of shoes onto a wooden stage and grouped them into semi-neat piles sorted by size. The bags contained 1-2 sizes each, so it wasn’t difficult but we had to work fast to get set up quickly.
The man in the orange shirt above is Manny, who founded Samaritan’s Feet.
It was kind of overwhelming at first. So many shoes, so many kids! But there was no time to be overwhelmed. It was go, go, go from the first minute to the last. We didn’t stop for a minute! One of the first hurdles that we encountered was that the kids’ shoe size may or may not be listed in American sizes. The runners just started bringing shoes up to the stage and I learned very quickly how to estimate shoe size based on the shoe presented to me.
The drive back to the hotel was far more eventful than the drive to the distribution, and not in a good way. First the bus came to a stop because someone was standing in the road trying to get traffic to stop completely. No small task here, even though the road was only two lanes. The bus driver stopped reluctantly and that’s when we saw a shoe in the middle of the road. Our eyes started searching and found a man lying in the gutter. It was raining and he was slumped in a muddy gutter on the side of the road. He had, best as we can guess, been hit by a car. The man trying to stop traffic was doing so because they were trying to get a truck to help the man. A pickup truck quickly backed up and several people loaded the injured man into the bed of the pickup truck. He cried out in pain and we could see his leg was badly injured. There was a lot of blood on his pants and his leg was in a makeshift splint of cardboard and twine. It was pouring rain at this point. They covered him with some more cardboard and a bit of plastic sheeting, and the truck took off.
Just think about that for a minute. Read that section again. It was very sad and very sobering to watch.
Now, we did learn some potentially good news about the situation the next day. We asked our tour guide about it – what would happen to the man? Why didn’t they call an ambulance? He told us that the government provides healthcare in the D.R. and that there is a good hospital system here. The man would be able to receive the care he needs regardless of his socioeconomic status. He also told us that the 911 system is new in the D.R. It’s not yet reliably fast. So the people helping the man probably put him in the truck because that was the fastest way to get him to the hospital. He said that maybe they had called an ambulance but one didn’t come. It’s hard to say.
After that experience, which fortunately only the staff sitting at the very front of the bus had witnessed, we continued on our way. We were stopped again about 20 minutes later, but this time because our bus clipped a car. It knocked the car’s mirror off, but didn’t cause much else in the way of damage. Our tour guide got back on the bus a short while later and was very pleased with how the exchange went. Apparently the car driver was “very nice and polite” and he and the bus driver both took responsibility (it was bus driver’s fault, if you’re curious). Information was exchanged and I have no idea what happens next. But apparently that nice, polite exchange is a bit of a rarity when two cars collide.
We made it back to the hotel without further incident. After a quick change, we went to “lunch” – in quotes because it was 4 p.m. – at a restaurant right up the street. It took forever, which was somewhat to be expected with a group our size but also somewhat to do with Caribbean “island time.” The food was very good and a lot of people ordered smoothies, which everyone said were very good. Fresh fruit drinks/smoothies/etc. are very popular here.
We had some time off after that to shower and decompress before an evening team meeting. The team meeting recapped the day and it was nice to hear everyone share their favorite part of the day and how it had impacted them.
I am so impressed with the team as a whole. They are humble, friendly and down-to-earth. They are not at all cocky like people often presume college athletes to be. Here was a baker’s dozen of guys talking sincerely about how humbling the experience was, what they took away from it compared to their own experience and taking the time to point out others who they noticed going above and beyond. They called out the players – two actually – who gave away the shoes off their own feet when we didn’t have a size large enough. They called out the nervous, quiet freshman who dove in to help without hesitation. Some of them talked about having it hard growing up, yet it was nothing like what they saw that day. It was interesting, encouraging and at times inspiring to hear what each of them had to say.
After the meeting, KFC was called in for the players and the staff ate in the hotel restaurant. It was more organic than planned, but it was a lot of fun getting to know some of the staff better.
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