Batey Monte Coca - Day 1

First, a wifi update: it’s very spotty, and when it works, it is very slow. Obviously, since you’re reading this now, we are back in touch, but service is so sluggish. With that said…

We spent the first half of Tuesday beginning to understand the sugarcane industry in the Dominican Republic, both the nuts-and-bolts of growing, harvesting, and processing as well as the economic and political realities of sugar. Sugarcane cutters, all of whom are Haitian or of Haitian descent, begin their workdays by 4:00 a.m. and usually work well over twelve hours. They return to their homes after dark for a dinner consisting only of a pound of beans, then rise again the next day by 4:00 a.m., and this cycle continues seven days a week. The cutters we met and talked to--they didn’t mind taking a break and talking because one of our guides was formerly a cutter in the very fields we were looking at--explained that they work in pairs, and for their efforts they get paid $3 each for 1000 pounds of cut cane. If they don’t finish 1000 pounds in a single day, they get paid nothing. One of the men we met said everything, even the clothing on his back, was taken from him when he entered the Dominican, and he had to find a way to pull together the essentials for cutting in order to get a job: a machete, rubber boots, gloves, long pants, long sleeved clothing, and a hat. Another cutter said he left Haiti looking for a better life, higher wages, and more opportunities, and those hopes landed him in a foreign-owned sugar cane field in the daytime, and in a 12′ x 12′ room with nine other workers at night.

The politics of sugar is complex, but it boils down to this: cane cutting is brutal work and for a century Dominicans have been unwilling to do the job. Plantation owners began bringing in Haitians for their labor force, promising money and a chance to move up the economic ladder. The reality was very different, however. Haitians were stripped of their documents, loaded into trucks and driven through the darkness to plantations that were guarded by armed men whose job was to keep workers in. Without rights, money, or a voice, they were brutally worked to the verge of death. For the most part, this same system exists today: the workers usually lack any documentation and many are legally neither Dominican or Haitian; they are a people without a country and, therefore, without legal rights or protections. They are ineligible for even the meager public health care that is available in the DR, their children may not enroll in Dominican schools, and they have absolutely no voice in governmental or legal decisions. Although most of the armed guards are gone now, and while some workers are able to move from one batey to another, and though even a select few are able to visit family back in Haiti, most of the day-to-day existence of sugar plantation workers hasn’t changed in decades.

These realities seemed to really hit home with everybody in our group, and after lunch back at ASCALA, we began our service work in Batey Monte Coca. (A batey—pronounced buh-TAY—is a community of Haitian sugar cane workers.) Two-thirds of our group went to work on a foundation of a new home, digging trenches, cutting rebar, and wiring supports for cement floors and concrete block walls. The other third picked up where an earlier Rustic Pathways group left off, building walls for an outdoor latrine behind a group of homes constructed of stray bits of wood, corrugated tin, and other random scavenged materials. In short order kids, chaperones, and community members were working together mixing and spreading cement, hoisting cinderblocks, and cutting through steel bars.

Tired but feeling good about our work, we returned to our home away from home for a dinner of rice, chicken, and fresh fruits and vegetables. After a watching a powerful documentary about the work of Father Christopher Hartley in the bateyes near San Jose de Los Llanos, a city about an hour from where we are working and staying, students spent a little time reflecting in their journals before showering, catching up on whatever their phones could tell them, and turning in for the night.

Tomorrow: back to work in Batey Monte Coca!