by Margaret Galiardi, OP

I arrived in the Dominican Republic about 10:30 P.M. on the evening of May 23rd. By the time I retrieved my baggage which was filled with all sorts of goodies, and cleared customs, it was almost midnight. The warmth of Zaida and Provi's greeting made it seem more like mid-day.

No sooner had we gotten into their blue truck, than Zaida and Provi proudly opened the glove compartment and waved before me the list of all of our loved ones in whose memory we had made contributions to support its purchase. "You see," they said, "we remember and pray for all those who helped purchase this truck." We stayed overnight in the Capital, Santo Domingo, not wanting to make the three hour drive to San Jan de la Maguana in the darkness.

Ten o'clock the following morning found us departing for our first formal common project with the Sisters in Puerto Rico. Villa Esperanza. Before leaving the city, however, the sisters treated me to one of my favorite sites i all the world. It is the 15 foot statue of the Dominican Friar, Antonio Montesinos. Mounte on a huge pedestal, the statue of this 16th century figure towers over the blue-gree Caribbean Sea, immortalizing for all of us the question Montesinos originally addressed to the Spanish conquistadores, "With what right and by what justice do you hold these people in such servitude?"

Some three hours later and after a quick lunch stop at "Pollo Rey" (Chicken King) we arrived in the city of San Juan de la Maguana. The turn-off f rom the paved highway onto the dirt road of Villa Esperanza signaled for me an entrance into the kind of absolute poverty one finds in the developing world where some 1.2 billion people subsist on less than $1 a day, with an additional 1.6 billion getting by on $2 a day. Wooden shacks and simple cement-like structures are interspersed, with both serving as people's homes. The wood shacks or barracks -- know in Spanish as "Barracones" were constructed as temporary emergency housing after Hurricane Georges devasted the Dominican Republic leaving many a family homeless. Now three years later they have become hovels, testing people's patience and mocking their belief in a provident God.

Our sisters' home, one of the simple cement-like structures, sits strategically between those people "lucky enough" to have been moved out of the barracones, and those still confined to what one man termed, "el inferno." Their house is simple with a small sitting area, one wall of which is adorned by a golden-framed Dominic which onece belonged to Frances Maureen. The remainder of the house (which is considerably larger but just as simple as the others) has three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a kitchen. The sisters told me during our drive about the final room, the chapel (which originally was to have been a bedroom.) As the story goes, Sr. Ida said to them one day, "I would really love for something of Amityville to be in this house." So Ida took one of her photos of the steeple of the old chapel in Amityville and brought it to a wood-carver in Puerto Rico. "I want this," Ida said pointing to the photo. She continued, "I want you to carve this and make it into a tabernacle." So on a pedestal in the chapel at San Juan de la Maguana, sits a replica of our Amityville steeple which houses the Blessed Sacrament!