Santo Domingo

We took a field trip to Santo Domingo from Monday Feb 18 to Thursday the 21.  Since Heyddy has left us, Colleen came with us.  She knows about the city and she is fluent in spanish.  SHe was our personal translator.  We would have been lost without her.  Our hotel was in the colonial district near the Parque Colon and Alcazar Colon, once the house of Diego Colon, Christopher Columbus' s son.  

On our way to Santo Domingo we stopped at a sugar cane plantation near Higuey.  It was massive, going on for miles in every direction.  We pulled up to a cluster of workers in the field. They were using machetes to cut the sugar cane and filling up a huge cart with oxen hitched to the front.  We drove through the plantation to the small communities where the workers live.  Most of the workers are Haitian who are very uneducated and will most likely spend their whole life working the fields.  They spend their life indebted to the company and basically become indentured servants.  There were 5 workers filling up the cart and they said they receive about 400 pesos to split for the whole cart.  In US dollars they end up making about $2.35 per day.

On Tuesday morning we met with several union leaders and Kathy Fiengold the director of AFL-CIO in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.  It was very personal, just us and the union leaders.  We asked them questions about their work and the conditions of worker in the DOminican Republic.  I was very impressed with their passion.  We actually all were having such an enthralling exchange, we decided to skip going to lunch and order in to the meeting.  We talked a lot about globalization of the world economy and its affects on workers around the world, specifically in the Dominican Republic.  I was loved talking about developing countries and the effects of development on laborers.

After the meeting with union workers, we went to a Macadamia Nut factory called La Loma.  There was an adorable little man from Costa Rico who owned the factory and showed us around.  La Loma makes packaged macadamia nuts, chocolate wafers with macadamia nuts, and their nuts go into the macadamia ice cream flavors in BON! ice cream, a Dominican company.  It is a very small company with only 8 employees and one small machine.  He showed us the process of separating the big ones for packaging and the small ones to make into ice cream or cakes.  The most amazing part of the factory was its environmentally friendly techniques.  The macadamia nut trees are grown in local communities and they are grown organically.  All of the waste products from the nuts are sold for things like mulch and pig food.  Nothing is wasted.  And macadamia nuts contain omega 3 and omega 9! The cute little man gave us all samples.  The amaretto cookie was sooo delicious.  At the end he said he wanted to show us his little tree but he was embarrassed because it was really small.  It was really small but it was adorable, he was the cutest little guy ever.