Dominican Republic 2011 Highlights from Phillip McArdle on Vimeo.
Montán and his son Heissey: Eleven years ago, Montán and his family started the church in the community of Hato del Yaque. Montán and his wife have eleven children. ELEVEN. Brett had the pleasure of working with one of his sons, Heissey, on the construction site all week. Heissey works at a bakery in Santiago with a few of his siblings, and it seems that almost all of them play some sort of significant role at the church. Whether it’s graveyard-shift guard duty for the church grounds, cook, server for the feeding center, worship leader, etc., you name it, their family is into it. La familia Montán is a wonderful family that serves as a great example of what family should look like in a community that is plagued by broken ones..
Juan and Jose: Last year in La Mosca, Brett spent a lot of my time hanging out with Jose. At 16 years old, he was the oldest male involved in the church in La Mosca. Without a translator, the conversation was very slow, and Brett was only able to take away the fact that most of his family “works” by scavenging in the trash dump adjacent to La Mosca. This year, with Emily’s Spanish skills we were able to learn that Jose’s family of 10 lives in a home of two rooms each about 10’x10’. They all sleep together on two mattresses on the floor. Not everyone fits on the mattresses, so Jose and his twin brother Juan usually sleep on the floor, which is just dirt. A damp floor made of the dirt that soaks up the sludge that runs off of the dump. This year we both spent a lot of time with the two brothers, and we learned more about Juan’s story as well. He told us that while he was scavenging in the dump a few years ago, he was hit in the head by a passing dump truck or bulldozer, and knocked out. When he came to, he stumbled his way back into town to the church. He knew the local pastor (the pastor prior to our friend Luis) through his brother Jose, and knew that the church takes care of people in the community. The pastor drove him to the hospital, got him fixed up, paid for his prescription and helped him recover from the incident. Ever since then Juan has been drawn to the love that the church showed him, and as he learned more about their motives for helping people, he decided to follow Christ as well! Now Juan and Jose are the TWO oldest males that serve the church in La Mosca. They help Luis with the work on the building, they serve children at the feeding center, and they take part in leading worship during the church services. Both of them are continuing their education well beyond the norm for men in their community. Jose is studying to become a child psychologist/therapist, to help the children that he serves at the church/community center with the emotional challenges that they regularly face, and Juan is studying to become a police officer – he hopes to fight the violence that has been escalating in La Mosca over the past few years. They both have interest in traveling to the US or Canada someday
It’s not the construction, medical clinics, and feeding centers that defined our trip. Those were great, and we were humbled by and grateful for the opportunity to help the people in Hato del Yaque and La Mosca in such tangible ways. It was the relationships that we‘ve been privileged to develop with such beautiful and courageous people that we have come to cherish. These little stories certainly don’t do full justice to the love we feel for these people, but we hope they help paint that picture even a little bit. Please ask us more about them and about our trip when you get a chance – we’d love to share! All your support is what made these relationships possible, and you all deserve the blessing of knowing the people we’ve met as well as we do. We can’t thank you all enough for providing this opportunity for us, and for the people in the DR. 
During the first half of the trip, we worked on a construction site in Hato del Yaque, building a residence and dormitories for the local pastor and missionaries that manage the church and feeding center for the community. (More information on Hato del Yaque, and a brief video tour can be found here.) As we worked, swarms of kids from the community surrounded us insisting on “helping” by pushing wheelbarrows and shoveling dirt. When the work day was done, they stayed - to kick a soccer ball around, hop on our shoulders, or play with our hair (Emily’s not Brett’s :-)).
For the second half of the trip, our entire team spent a few days working in La Mosca. Members of the local church gave us a tour of the village, and introduced us to many of their family and friends. We also got to host the feeding center for the children of the community, and spend time playing with the kids, acting out a story and working with them to make a craft to take home. All that we were able to do with the people of La Mosca was made possible by one extraordinary family – the Vargas family. Our church started supporting Luis Vargas and his family a few years ago, and has maintained a very close relationship with him since. Luis, Reina, Yeison (Jason), and Dilson work tirelessly in La Mosca to provide the community with love, support, and whatever resources they can offer. Having seen them in action, we can tell you that love and support are provided in abundance, while the material resources they can offer are seriously limited. Because of Emily’s Spanish skills, we got to know them fairly well over the week we spent down there, and are committed to connecting with them via Skype on a borrowed computer on a regular basis. If you’d like to get to know the Vargas Family a little better, you can see some of these conversations on our blog as well. Through this time together, we’ve been able to share updates and prayer requests with one another, and we’ve been able to hear regularly about specific needs we can help provide for (like a more stable source of electricity). While our actual time in the Dominican Republic is minimal, we love knowing that the support and encouragement we provide to Luis and his family goes a long way all year round.