Dominican Republic Missions

Two years ago (July 2008)I was raising money to go to Peru with the local hospital. When I felt that God wasn’t calling me to go there I gave all the money I had raised to the others still being lead to go on the trip. Disappointed, I prayed and asked God where he wanted me to go. I loved to travel and had never been on a mission trip. About two weeks later at my local church I was given an application form for a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. Not really knowing where exactly the Dominican Republic was, I was skeptical. I did a little research to locate exactly where it was and asked questions in the meetings to figure out exactly what we would be doing down there. The night before we left the group got together and packed 13 bags +/- (we called them “body bags” because of how big they were), loaded them onto the trailer and went home to finish packing our personal luggage. Not knowing what to expect, I hopped onto the bus the next morning and off I was to something that I had no idea was going to change my life forever. We landed a few hours later in Santo Domingo, Republica Dominicana, to meet out new friends. Dr. Elio and the rest of the MESI team had been living down in the Dominican for only a year. They picked us up from the air port and took us back to their home. Three hours later we arrived to hugs and kissed from random strangers and a table of food for us to eat after our long trip. During the next few days we helped around the house, held a women’s, men, and children gathering and sorted the clothes from the 13 bags we had packed the night before we left. The clothes were to be brought to a village called Los Rieles. When we pulled up to the entrance of the village you could see all the children running down the road towards us. They crowded around each of us so much it was like we were floating down the dirt road. The dirt road that had pot holes everywhere, with a stream of who-knows-what flowing down the middle, to at which, the kids ran and jumped over, bare foot, like it was a game. It was amazing to see that these children found pleasure in jumping over pot holes and streams of what looked to be sewage. It humbled me as I hugged these children and walked hand-in-hand with them down their “playground”. While walking to the hut that had all our clothes we brought to pass out, I saw many children with no clothes, malnourished, and over 75% with no shoes and the ones with shoes mine-as-well have walked bare foot. All the children wanted was to hug us and hold on to us. It hurt to know that many of them never received that from home because either they didn’t have someone to hug them or their parents didn’t care.