Togetherness Makes Our Work More Successful! -- March 2014 - Month 33 in the D.R.



One thing that missionary and humanitarian workers notice around the world, no matter where they're working, (and this happens in North America too,)  in places where there is a lot of need there also congregate a number of nonprofit and missionary groups trying to make difference there. While trying to make a difference is always a good thing, sometimes the help is not much help at all, if the various nonprofit and missionary groups don't communicate and work together, and they duplicate services, or give the same aid to the same people over and over again, and miss others. 

 Sometimes -- in places like the Dominican Republic -- many, many groups come from other countries, for maybe a week at a time. They want to help, so they hand out food or Tylenol or they try to build a bridge over a river that seems impassible at the time when they arrive. 

 

But if these visiting groups don't collaborate with the pastors and the community leaders, and the organizations that are locally led, and that have staff and volunteers living and working in that community 24 hours a day seven days a week 365 days a year, then the help the visiting groups try to bring often amounts to very little actual "Help" and the funds they donate are often wasted on small projects that were already being handled by a local group -- it's just that nobody in the visiting group stopped to ask.

 

 

I work in one such community here in the Dominican Republic . The community, named Pancho Mateo is home to between 800 and 2000 people, according to local population estimates. It's a very close-knit community of families and relatives, low-income Dominicans and low-income Haitian immigrants, where almost everyone knows almost everyone else, and people help each other out.  

 

But there is a lot of need in Pancho Mateo. There is approximately 90% unemployment due to a general lack of job opportunities in the area.  While most of the young people -- teenagers and those in their 20s -- are now finishing high school and some going on to college, many of their parents and grandparents living with them in Pancho Mateo  had to quit school early to work, when they themselves were kids, and so many of the adults have between a fourth and an eighth-grade education.  As a medical worker serving in Pancho Mateo I occasionally run across patients of ours who don't have enough food to eat in their homes and therefore don't take their medications because they were told to "take this pill with food" -- and there isn't any rice today.

 More than half of the families in the community do not have running water of any sort their homes, and those who do, have dirty water that is not fit for cooking or drinking (as is true for all of us here in this part of the island).  There are many people in Pancho Mateo with medical illnesses who don't have health insurance or access to affordable  quality healthcare --which creates a phenomenon in which people involved in local traffic accidents lose their legs and lives over injuries that in wealthier countries would've been very curable, fixable, or preventable.

 

 So there are many needs in Pancho Mateo.

Unfortunately until recently more than 15 foreign nonprofit groups were working independently there - helping people with everything from education to health to food and financial assistance.  Many of them were doing great work. The bummer is that most of those non-profit and missions groups didn't talk much to each other. Many of them didn't even know that each other existed!

 

 You could walk into Pancho Mateo on a Monday and see a medical group handing out free medicine for hypertension.  Then if you went back to the same community a few days later you might see another medical group that had just stopped by for the afternoon, changing those people's medications to some other free medication they were giving out that day.  The two groups rarely even knew that they were both working in the same community, nor that by giving out medications -- in this example -- they were harming the people who they were trying to help, by frequently changing people's medications, which does not allow for efficacy of treatment for any of the patients. 

There were also at least 3 educational groups working in the community providing services to children and adults - yet they were generally unaware of each other, and of whether they might accidentally be duplicating services in some way.

 

But I'm thrilled to report that we are beginning to see a positive change! 

 

I and the leaders of two of the other non-profit/missionary groups working in Pancho Mateo had the wonderful privilege of pulling together a meeting the other week in which 5 (plus 1 in absentia) of the largest non-profit groups working in Pancho Mateo all finally came together to get to know each other, to network, to give reports on their existing projects, and to talk about ways in which they can perhaps work together and collaborate!

Above are the attenders at the first "Pancho Mateo Non-Profits Networking Meeting" held on March 25th, 2014 at Marua Mai Restaurant in Sosua!

 

Leaders from local non-profits that work in providing health and education services to our local low-income communities attended the meeting today!

 

Health Horizons International (the org I work for)

Dominican Eyes Plus -- run by a local missionary who provides free eye glasses & exams

Project Haiti -- a non-profit from Europe that works in education and health care and that brings social work/sociology student interns to Pancho Mateo D.R. and to Haiti

Makarios International -- a Missionary Run elementary school that serves low-income families with education and health services.

&
The Dream Project -- An organization that runs local schools in low-income neighborhoods, and also provides job training programs, a college scholarship program, and sports/health camps for children and youth in the summer time.

CEPROSH -- an organization that provides HIV and TB prevention and treatment was also reported on "in absentia." 

 

It was a small beginning, but a great first meeting, and I am so happy to see the organizations finally coming together to learn and network, and to see how we can work together alongside the leaders and community members of Pancho Mateo and the surrounding communities.
We've agreed to meet again to begin putting together the final sections of a Resource Guide that will allow us to more knowledgably refer folks in need to local services and non-profit resources available to them!
Resources on everything from medical care, to available college scholarships, to free, church-run summer soccer camps for pre-adolescent boys, will all be at our fingertips at last!

Here are a few highlights from the meeting:

Photo #1: Here are Educational and Health-related Organizations Networking.  "So -- your program is accredited by the Dominican Government. How can we get our program accredited too? What are the steps? Share with us your knowledge."

Photo # 2: Psychologist Mika from "Project Haiti" chats with Medical Director Darren, from Makarios school, While Kakito - pastor and disciplinarian at Makarios school (and soccer camp coordinator in Pancho Mateo) chats with Dream Project staff members who run several schools and a "Sports for life" program that teaches sports and health awareness to teens and kids in communities around the region.

Photo # 3: Here's an impromptu photo of half of the group, including my co-worker -- HHI's Carlos Castillo, Coordinator of the Community Health Worker program that serves Pancho Mateo.

Photo #4: It was a great day consisting of a "great beginning" to better communication and collaboration between the non-profits in the Pancho Mateo area, so that as a united front we can all help Pancho Mateo better, and empower the local leaders even more!

And the on the way home Carlito and I got to see this beautiful sunset over the sugar cane fields in front of our largest local mountain -- Mount Isabel.  It was a great end to a great day in the Dominican Republic!