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Home > What's New > Hope in the Dominican Republic
Hope in the Dominican Republic
Posted: Tuesday, February 15, 2005
By David Savona Carlos Fuente Jr. drove his black SUV up the dirt road, which barely seemed wide enough to fit the car. Creaky dwellings flanked the vehicle on either side. You wouldn't call them houses, but each was a home.
We pulled up to a water station framed in tile, with two spigots and a shelf. A man was washing pants under a stream of water. Children, some of them wearing only a pair of thin underwear, swarmed the car. One held a metal bowl with a little soup. Another held a knife, which he was using to cut something in the brush. Each had a heartfelt smile.
Eric Newman of the J.C. Newman Cigar Co. got out of the back seat, a stack of photographs in his hand. "ˇDame una foto!" the kids said, and Newman happily complied, handing them pictures he had taken on his previous trips. The children, not used to seeing photographs, eagerly took them.
The town is Caribe, an impoverished village in the Bonao province of the Domincian Republic where the Fuentes grow tobacco. Beside the farm, mines are the only major employers here. The Fuente and Newman charity -- the Cigar Family Charitable Foundation -- built the water station. Newman showed me a photograph of what it looked like before its improvement, an open pipe sticking from the mud.
Most people take clean water for granted, but the water in Caribe and the towns around it is anything but. Sometimes there is mercury. Often there are parasites. The charity has provided a simple filtration system that cleans the water.
Not far from the water station, the charity has also built a school, a clean oasis of calm in a land with little hope. There are classrooms, a health center, and plans for a baseball diamond, basketball courts and more. The first classes began in September. Children in new uniforms learn English, math and science, and will soon surf the Internet. They sing. They laugh. They dream.
Sadly, there's only room for so many students. While Fuente and Newman are speaking to a woman near the water station, the children come up to me. "La projecta, la projecta," one repeats. He's a small boy, maybe seven years old, but his eyes have an old look from his hard life. His body is lean, and while I can't understand all of his words, the urgency in his voice is unmistakable. La projecta. The project. He wants me to get him into the school.
He's a tough kid, and he doesn't flinch or cry when I tell him I can't get him into the project, something Carlos repeats when he returns to the car. Perhaps next year, Carlos says, there will be more room for him and the others in his village. For him, for now, there is no school.
"You know what's worse than children not having hope?" says Carlos. "When you give children hope, and they have no place to go." The urgent need for the foundation is to complete a school for the children who are graduating from the eighth grade, and to get more children like the youngster at the water station involved.
I can't imagine the life these children lived before the project, working, wandering, not learning. Now, the school only has room for some students, who were chosen by the community. However democratic the process, the envy among their neighbors who aren't able to attend must be great.
Cigar Family is doing a wonderful thing with this school through the charity of the Fuente and Newman families and cigar smokers from all over the world. For more information, go to www.cf-cf.com.
This is but one example of the charity of cigarmakers and smokers alike, which you'll read much more about in an upcoming issue of Cigar Aficionado.
The cigar industry is a generous, giving industry, as is the community of cigar smokers. I saw some of the evidence of that charity in Caribe. Also in Cigar News:
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