El Arca

Today is a religious holiday here in the Dominican Republic so there’s no school for the kids. As we worked on our projects today it was fun to have the kids randomly join us or play with us as we worked. We really love spending time with the kids!! It’s been cool for our team to get to know the kids by name and use the little Spanish that we know communicating with them. As a Spanish teacher, it makes my heart fill up with joy to hear them using the skills they have learned in my classroom….and I love seeing them get excited when they realize that the kids actually understand them!

Tomorrow we will get to take a tour of the grounds of the orphanage and go inside some of the houses so we can learn a little more about how the kids live. There are eight little houses here at El Arca, each named after a fruit of the spirit. In each little house, 8-10 kids live there with Dominican house parents. In each house they have a living room, dining room, kitchen, girls’ bedroom, boys’ bedroom, parents’ bedroom and bathrooms. One of the goals of the ministry here is to raise the kids in a stable family environment so that they can learn what a godly and healthy family looks like so that they will be prepared when the time comes for them to have families of their own. The house parents have family devotions with them each day, help them with their homework, give them household chores to do, have family activities with them, discipline them, etc….basically all the things that one would think necessary and good for a stable family environment. Two of the important requirements for house parents is that they be a solid Christian and also that they be Dominican…so that the children are raised to understand their Dominican culture and to learn the Word of God.

One of the directors here, Victor Tratwein, met with us this afternoon to tell us about the ministry of Kids Alive here in the Dominican Republic. It made things a little more real to us as he told some of the stories of the kids who live here. It’s sad to think about the situations that some of these kids have been rescued from….abuse, starvation, abandonment, alcoholic or drug addicted parents, etc. As heartbreaking as that it, it’s even more wonderful to see how they are thriving here in a positive, stable and godly environment like El Arca. It definitely makes us want to love and hug on them even more after hearing some of their stories.

In talking with Victor today, we found out that we might get to meet the Haitian orphans on Saturday, our last day here in Jarabacoa. He said that they have already brought around 22 of them into the DR and at the moment they are in the capital, Santo Domingo. They are being hydrated and cared for them right now and may possibly be coming to Jarabacoa tomorrow. The plan is for 10-12 of the Haitian kids to stay here at El Arca in one of the empty houses (the orange one) that they have on the grounds. (It’s actually one of the houses that one of our previous teams worked on a couple of years ago.) The other 10 kids will stay at another location associated with Kids Alive or with some of the Christian families that they know here in town. Victor says that there are actually many Haitians who live here in the community and they will ask some of the Haitian Christians here to come in and help the kids get adjusted and be able to communicate. They aren’t sure yet how long the Haitian kids will stay here in Jarabacoa. First, they will try to find the parents of the kids and reunite them. For the others who can’t find their parents, it’s uncertain at this point what they will do. They may possibly stay here or may possibly be moved to one of the Kids Alive homes that they already have in the northern part of Haiti (it was not affected by the earthquake.) Plans are already in the works for some teams working with Kids Alive to make some tent house campus there in Haiti so that they can provide more housing for those who have lost their homes due to the earthquake. (If you would like to contribute to the relief efforts that Kids Alive is helping with for the children of Haiti, including child sponsorship, you can find information at http://www.kidsalive.org/)

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress.” James 1:27

Special thanks to Mrs. Henkel who walked all over the campus yesterday and today taking pictures so you can take a pictoral tour of the grounds of “El Arca.”