where we work.

field journal entries

November 2004

The road leading to the Bateys of Bahoruco province is pocked with sink holes and in desperate need of repair. Passage along the road is best accomplished on mopeds that maneuver sharply to avoid each ditch. On one side of the road runs a set of railroad tracks used to carry cut sugar cane from the expansive sugar cane plantations to a sugar processing plant in Barahona. During six months of annual sugar cane harvest, the train can be seen snaking along the perimeter of the fields, filled to capacity, carrying cane to the waiting boiler rooms of the sugar plant.

Traveling along the pitted road, a speed bump and corresponding wooden sign indicate that you have arrived at "Batey 6", "Batey 5", "Batey Cuchilla", etc. Many Bateys in the Southwest region retain, as their official name, the number assigned them by the Dominican government when federal officials still owned and managed the plantations. It is on these numbered plots that the government built the shanty towns to house the seasonal laborers.

When surveying a Batey, it is immediately evident that proximity to the cane fields was the designer's first priority. Rapid and inexpensive construction seems to be priority two. Habitability, safety, and sanitation clearly did not enter into the equation. From the perspective of Dominican government officials designing the sugar industry, the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican laborers, called braseros - literally translated as "arms" - were precisely that: human chattel to be exploited.

Walking through the Bateys, the human price paid for the novelty of sugar is impossible to ignore. Food insecurity, mosquito borne infectious diseases and poor water quality coalesce to form a noxious environment that wreaks havoc on the bodies of Batey children and continues to portend poor health outcomes throughout the lifespan. Much of what is taken away from Batey children at an early age, in the form of healthy growth, is forever lost. Physiological stunting and neurological damage, when inflicted early enough on a child, simply cannot be reversed. And so these children of the batey are destined to continue the cycle of having too little, and passing onto their children even less.

The etiology of food insecurity in the Bateys is based in simple economics. Braseros are paid U.S. $1.40 per ton of cane cut, and are able to cut, on average, two tons per day. Often times this meager sum represents the only income generated for a given household. And so, the earnings can not feed the mouths. A family of four or five cannot subsist on U.S. $2.80 per day, and it is the children who pay most dearly. Let it be clear that there is no famine or shortage of staple grains in the Dominican Republic. The problem lies in the inability of Batey residents to purchase enough food.

Change is never simple, but often necessary. On behalf of the willfully neglected, marginalized Batey communities of the southwest Dominican Republic, the members of the Health Justice Collaborative are committed to listening to Batey residents and documenting the health needs of the community so that neglect might be replaced with meaningful change.

- Field journal of HJC member, Ben Link