Growing Pains.

When Futuro Lleno de Esperanza opened its doors, the neighborhood it is located in what much different than the neighborhood that we see today.

The land Futuro is built on was "tierra invadida," or invaded lands, what was once open and vast fields was taken (mostly by brute force) and parceled out and then sold to people looking for something to own. This process is common in cities in the Dominican Republic, and as long as no one comes forth as the legal owner of the land, there are often very few problems once structures are built on the land. Our foundation has since been legally registered as the owner of the land our school is on.

In the beginning, there were no roads, no sewage system, no sidewalks, no light posts, no running water. The community would work together to connect to existing infrastructure in the closest "formal" neighborhood - piecing together PVC for water, running wires for electricity, building septic tanks for latrines. Slowly, the city services came in and mounted power lines and formalized water distribution and installed sewage lines. The water is still iffy and electric power for our neighbors is unpredictable.

An empty field laid in front of the school which was used as a baseball field for local young people. It has since been transformed into a much needed public school. There are more businesses - small food shops and salons, barber shops, cafeterias - that are needed services for our community. We have (many) paved roads.

We have made physical progress. People have built their houses and now own something worthy of owning in a community that seems to be moving forward.

Except, physical progress doesn't mark actual progress, and a number of events over the past few weeks have shown that we, as a community, still have so much work to do. There have been robberies and fights and children not attending school and.... the list goes on and on. It's not necessarily different than things the community has been experiencing forever, but sometimes the change of appearance leads us into a sense of complacency - that because people are no longer living in wooden shacks with latrines instead of flushing toilets things have changed. When we see the shiny outside of things - especially things that haven't always been shiny - we think that the inside is shiny as well. There is so much work to assure that our children are growing up in a nourishing environment because they are worth the investment - they deserve both a "shiny" outside AND a shiny inside and, we believe, that working together our children will have that.