In February 2008, my partner Alexi Motta and I, Charles Bergman, will move to the Dominican Republic to enter into what promises to be an exciting near-year of living and working among two impoverished communities near the large city of Santiago. One, Franco Bido, is a rural community of coffee farmers living a traditional agrarian lifestyle. The other, Batey Libertad, is composed of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent, many of whom arrived to work in nearby sugar plantations.