by Damon Guinn

Three friends embrace in "Three Arms."

We’ve traveled all the way from Children International headquarters to meet sponsored children and families in the city’s most hard-pressed neighborhoods. If the clouds open up now, heavy rains will wash away our only chance to talk with families face-to-face.

Bumping along congested roads, we get a crash course in local history from Rafael, Children International’s chief of programs in Santo Domingo: (1) the area’s called Los Tres Brazos (The Three Arms) because three branches of the Ozama River encircle it, (2) the river is contaminated, floods often and causes parasitic infection, and (3) it’s home to about 900 sponsored children, with plans to reach as many as 4,000.

Our exact destination is El Hoyo de Lito, or “Lito’s Hole,” a neighborhood that Rafael, our guide for the day, sums up as a squatter settlement with “the greatest need among all the nearby communities.” It was nearly wiped out by Hurricane George in 1998.

As we draw near, a young girl carrying a large barrel of water steps from a curb and trips, spilling most of what’s in her container. She grimaces, gets up from the dirty, cobbled street and returns to refill her barrel.

Everyone in the van groans sympathetically – we all know how hard it is for children to fetch water from wells and faucets that are a good hike from their homes.

Families who can afford it have drinking water delivered to their homes, and I spot a water truck, a tiny Japanese model, making deliveries as we enter Lito’s Hole. It bounces along the potholes like a moon rover, rarely stopping.

We park just off the truck’s route, in front of a warped tin shack where a sponsored child named Erqui lives. Erqui is shy and withdrawn. He sports a new cast wrapped by our medical staff after falling and breaking his arm playing baseball.

I ask his mother, Elsa, how she and her husband, Yonny, are able to cover their children’s needs on a monthly income so low it rivals the cost of my phone bill: about $80. The answer is obvious – it’s evident in the presence of her naked baby boy, Elicer, and her mud-splattered, half-dressed daughter, Erika. “Everything I earn is spent on food,” she says. “We really don’t have money for clothes.”

Unable to afford any extra items, she explains that they draw water for cleaning from the community well several streets away but buy drinking water from the water truck when absolutely necessary. “It costs 15 pesos per bottle (about 50¢),” Elsa remarks, so they generally buy only two bottles a week and drink those conservatively.

The only time the family has more water than they need is during the rainy season – May through October. Elsa says their shack fills to the roof when the river floods, so they move to a nearby church or shelter for two weeks at a time.

‘No wonder there are so many children stomping through mud puddles in nothing more than filthy underwear,’ I think to myself. ‘Why should those who can’t afford to live anywhere else worry about clothes when they lose everything they have to floods and hurricanes?’

Fortunately, Erqui is receiving clothes through sponsorship. Plus, he and his family receive medical attention and treatment for parasites, which is a major problem in a flood zone like this. It’s a good thing, too, because the government health clinic happened to be closed due to lack of medicines.

After thanking Elsa and Erqui for sharing their story with us, we stroll back to the van. A woman in hair rollers tosses a bucket of suspicious-looking water at a mound of rubble children are using in place of a jungle gym.

We approach one arm of the river. It has the pallor and heaviness of a bruised limb. Under the polluted surface, Rafael tell us, are dangerous undertows and currents. But children swim and fish in its waters nonetheless. They try their best to feel comfortable in the embrace of Los Tres Brazos…even as it squeezes the life from them.

Photo by Jennifer Spaw