thoughts on my trip to the D.R.

so as I've mentioned, my trip to the D.R. was incredible. I had an awesome time with stefanie and really loved the island. the Lord really used that trip in an incredible way, I was immersed in a different culture, immersed in Christ-centered community, wrecked by God in beautiful, loving, but tough discipline, and by the end of my trip (after I got spun out 5 times by some jerk on I-40 while going 70mph in the pouring rain, driving doug's borrowed car...) I realized that I was carried through the entirety of the trip by my loving Father. The island of Hispaniola has been showing up an awful lot in my life lately, (besides my girlfriend moving there to teach art for a semester) I did a fair amount of undergraduate research on Haitian/Dominican relations and life in bateys. bateys are essentially Haitian "immigrant" worker camps (in reality most of them are ex-slave labor camps in the Dominican, where kidnapped Haitians were brought to cut sugar cane for large corporations. generations of displaced Haitians are now essentially stuck there, tied to the land and without any sort of national identity and face an incredible amount of red tape, fines, and paper work if they are to escape batey life) stef and I had the opportunity to visit one while I was there because the 5th and 12th graders did their service week projects there. for me, the experience was a extremely challenging one. Its one thing to study the depravity of batey life and it is another thing entirely to see it first hand, I even met a kid my age (freaking 20 years old) who was struggling to find a job since his old one (driving cane trucks) now required a license which he could not acquire without citizenship (very few Haitians in bateys have any sort of national citizenship.) it was so hard for stef and I to leave, we both felt God pulling on our heart strings for these people. the thought has crossed my mind multiple times, to move down there after I graduate next spring and do something. that, to me, sounds like God and if thats what he has for me, I will certainly follow him down to the Dominican.


for some pictures stef took of the batey check out her blog:
http://stefstuever.blogspot.com/