Baptists get look at Haitian poverty > Mainers work on hospital in poor Dominican Republic

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In a small church by a sugar-cane field in the Dominican Republic, impoverished Haitians gave 17-year-old Kate Peppard and 16-year-old Becky Scott a lesson in spirituality that they will never forget. “We would sing English hymns to them,” Scott recalled. “One we sang was `Amazing Grace,’ and they sang it back in their native language.”

The teen-agers from Columbia Street Baptist Church in Bangor were part of a 48-person delegation — mostly young people — who journeyed from New England to the Dominican Republic to do missionary work for a week in February.

“The impression it left on me was pretty intense,” Peppard said. “The poverty — it’s real; it exists.”

“It kind of shocked me at first,” Scott said, “how little they had.” But once the Americans got beyond seeing the lack of material things, they realized that the Haitians “had a whole lot more,” she said. “They were just so happy.”

“The kids were happy and friendly,” agreed Dr. Marshall Smith, one of several members of First Baptist Church in Bangor to make the trip the previous week. Even though the Haitian youngsters had so little, “they wanted to take them to `mi casa’ — `my house.’ They were very welcoming, very closeknit families.”

The week that Smith spent in the Dominican Republic, the group included 40 Mainers from about 20 churches — mostly Baptist, but also a Methodist church and a Roman Catholic church. The group that went down another week in February included five people from a church in the Auburn area.

Baptist construction

The effort that drew all these people to the Dominican Republic is a project of the American Baptist Churches USA, explained the Rev. Bob Beaumont, pastor of First Baptist. Also participating from First Baptist were Trish Sanders, Rhonda Gopan, Karen Bailey, Marge Smith and Chuck Swart. Pediatrician Dr. Yeow Tan joined the group from Grace Methodist Church.

Besides Peppard and Scott, Columbia Street sent Ron Hunt, Cynthia Hellman, Amy Morrill, Sara Rexrode, Theresa Hollingsworth and Josh Peppard, Kate’s dad.

Beaumont, his wife, Ruth, and son, John, had made a similar trip to the Haitian section of La Romana a year ago. “It was an event that changed our thinking, our faith, and indeed, our whole lives,” he said then.

There are tens of thousands of Haitians living in squalor in the Dominican Republic, Beaumont said. If they had stayed in their own country, they would have starved or been shot, he said. Cutting sugar cane, they earn about $2 a day. “The Baptists have established a ministry to Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” he said.

The contacts for the mission are the Rev. Jean Luc Phanord, director of Iglesia Bautista Missionera Haitiana, the largest Protestant church in the country; and Rodney Henrickson of Abingdon, Mass.

For five years, work camps have been set up in La Romana, groups of 40 or so people working to build a much-needed hospital. When it is finished, El Buen Samaritano — The Good Samaritan — will be bigger than Eastern Maine Medical Center, but it is many years from completion.

Just getting the groups to the Dominican Republic was an adventure. The delegation from First Baptist left with 19 duffel bags containing about 900 pounds of materials — 600 pounds of that in medical supplies.

Some of the group would spend their time building, but others were on a medical mission — Dr. Smith and Dr. Yeow Tan, and four nurses, including Karen Bailey. Smith and Tan would see close to 1,000 patients in clinics during the week, so they needed all the medical supplies they could obtain.

Miller and Walmart drug stores gave medicines, and Adco Surgical Supply donated other items. Smith recalled asking every pharmaceutical salesman he saw what medicines his company could provide. Dentists gave toothbrushes.

“We ran out of vitamins the first day,” Smith said.

About 75 percent of the problems the doctors diagnosed were from parasites and worms, or other kinds of “nonspecific stomach and intestinal upsets,” Smith said. A lot of the men had arthritis from cutting sugar cane, and the children had infectious diseases.

“We went out to the villages and held clinics in what were really shacks,” Smith said. Medicine just wasn’t available locally.

Customs holdups

So it was important that the duffels with medical supplies get through, but it wasn’t easy. The Customs department admitting people into the Dominican Republic is considered to be quite corrupt, and even confiscated the supplies the next week’s group tried to bring in.

But Beaumont’s group was luckier. “A very nice Dominican man at JFK Airport heard what we were doing and decided we needed a little help getting through,” he said. The man, who was the boss of the Dominican airline, gave the group VIP tags for their duffels, and the materials were let through.

In addition to medical supplies, the group took clothing, shoes, notebooks and paper. “You have to have uniforms to go to school there,” Beaumont said.

Once there, the volunteers worked on building forms for the concrete for the hospital’s superstructure. “We dug a lot of dirt,” Peppard said. When fill had to be hauled in to even out the land, the volunteers first had to dig trash and rubble out of the fill.

Peppard’s dad told the group that the building technology used in La Romana was obsolete in the United States 40 years ago.

Still, the hope is that a portion of the hospital can be used as soon as the first-floor clinic is enclosed. A Baptist church in Kansas has just donated $8,000 for concrete for the area where the Mainers were building the forms.

In addition to the hospital, Smith said, the country needs more of its own physicians trained there. It would do little good to bring them to this country for education, he said, because then they wouldn’t go back. If they were trained in the Dominican Republic, they would know how to make do with what’s available there, but they could have their skills upgraded with training from physicians who go to that country.

Nationally, Baptists are trying to raise funds to continue building the hospital, but the Maine group has a second effort in the works to help the people help themselves: La Romana Scholarship Project. For $300 a month, the group will be able to fund medical school for Ivelisa, a young woman who wants to work as a doctor in the Dominican Republic; and computer training for Gissalina, who also plans to stay in the country.

The Haitians hope for a better life in the Dominican Republic, even though they are seen as lower-class citizens. There is a lot of AIDS in Haiti, but Smith said he thought that wasn’t as true of those who live in the Dominican Republic. “I did not see any patients where HIV was in my differential diagnosis,” he said, and another physician told Smith that he had seen only two or three people that probably had the infection in six trips to the area.

Sanitation continues to be a problem, especially when the villages persist in putting a well too near a septic system. And the poverty is everywhere. “Seven would sleep in one bed,” Smith said, “but they’re very, very clean, and very nice people. They loved having their pictures taken — they would dress the baby up in Sunday finery.

“They were so outgoing and cheerful,” he said. “Part of it, I think, was their faith. It is so much a part of their daily lives.”

Beaumont concurred. “When it comes to religion, they are rich in faith. You should hear them sing; you would think they are the richly blessed people of the world. But you should hear them pray — they do it often and with fervor. What a blessing it is to simply be in their presence when they pray and worship.”

Contributions for the hospital in La Romana may be made out to First Baptist-La Romana and sent to 56 Center St., Bangor 04401. Contributions for the scholarship fund may be made out to ABCOM and sent to Box 667, Augusta 04332-0667.