Reflections on my La Romana Experience

I was blessed while in the DR to do a little bit of everything available to us. I helped install water filters in one Batey; I took blood pressures in another, and learned a hand-clapping and counting game from a group of children in a La Romana Barrio. (I remember that it had to do with skipping 8's.) I sifted sand for finish cement and painted walls at the hospital.

I was blessed with small tasks that had beginnings and endings but were part of a larger whole. I was blessed to experience a very few of the inconveniences that the locals experience every day, such as too little hot water or no water at all and abrupt power outages.

I will remember entering the two-room cement row-homes in one Batey to install water filters. There was a neat and clean home with mosquito netting over the bed and a corner china cabinet with china in it. There was a one-room home where an old woman lived with very little of anything. There were many children, many chickens, and lots of trash in the rocky dirt lanes.

I will remember being swamped by children yelling "photographia!" when I produced a digital camera. Everyone wanted to see themselves. They posed, then came back to see. They knew what to expect—this is a better-off Batey with a school and a church with an ancient radio and a pair of large speakers.

I remember one old man who told me his blood pressure would be high. I remember one young woman in a wheelchair with leg braces. (I heard that there was a polio outbreak here several years ago.) Many of the women start having babies at the age of 16 and don't stop until nature stops them. I saw pregnant women who could have been in their forties but might be ten years younger than that.

On Ash Wednesday I felt a need to have ashes imposed on my forehead for the first time. I have kept a prayer or a hymn singing in the background of my thoughts, and bring it to the foreground often.

I have been praying for the people I met and heard about and for the missionary team members. I have been blessing my friends in the Acton Congregational Church and those in the Naugatuck Church who gave us dinner Sunday night.

It will take me a while longer to really return home.

--Ruth