I went to the Dominican Republic in 1974 to teach. Santiago Christian School (SCS) hired me to teach 5th and 6th grades. The school was an English speaking school that had been started to teach the children of missionaries in the area. However, over time that focus expanded, and the school admitted anyone who wanted instruction in English. It became an international school while maintaining its Christian perspective.
The students at the school came from a number of different backgrounds. As I mentioned, the initial target students were missionary children, but at the time I was there, they represented a very small number of the students. In a class of 24 students, I might have only one or two students from American missionary families.
Children of wealthy families also attended the school. The main reason they came was to learn in English. Their families expected them to go to the United States for college so they came to SCS to have a strong English background. Often times they would go home and have a tutor who would then give them some lessons in Spanish. When I say wealthy, I mean wealthy. My first year I had the daughter of the family that owned the largest rum facility in the country. I asked her one day how many servants worked for her family. She wasn’t sure, but she thought about a dozen. She had a chauffeur who would drive her back and forth to school. I also had the daughter of the largest tomato canning company so yes, there was wealth.
A third category of students was the most challenging. They were students who had been born and raised in New York which has a large Dominican population. Many Dominicans moved to New York when Trujillo was a dictator in the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. People were afraid because he killed his enemies. Some calculate he had 50,000 people killed during his time.
As the children of these immigrants approached 5th and 6th grades, their parents became concerned about what their future teenagers could get involved with in New York City. To head that off they would send their children back to the Dominican Republic to live with grandparents or other family members. Occasionally one of the parents would come as well. Unfortunately these students were usually not the best students. The New York school system seems to have failed them. Many were a year or two behind their peers so they were challenging to teach.
The final category of students were those whose parents worked for international companies and were working in the Dominican Republic. We had some Dutch families in that situation, and I really enjoyed them. They also would have lessons in Dutch at home after attending our school. We had some Americans in this category and others from Spanish speaking countries such as Ecuador. It certainly made for an interesting mix of students.
Most of the classes were comprised of two grades when I started. Kindergarten was separate and high school was combined with all four levels. You might wonder how that would work. Those students worked on correspondence courses through a university in the US. They had a teacher who would keep them on task as well as help them with their work as needed. It was a challenging way to do high school, but the class generally had a good camaraderie, and they did learn.
My class of 5th and 6th graders was always the largest class because of the aforementioned students from New York coming at this grade level. So how did teaching two grades work? I taught the subjects which were very sequential, such as math and reading, separately. Other subjects such as social studies and science we alternated. One year we would do the 5th grade curriculum, and the next year the 6th grade level.
Since the majority of my students spoke Spanish, I felt the need to learn Spanish as quickly as possible. I didn’t like that they could communicate with each other when I didn’t know what they were saying. However, I also didn’t like the idea of banning them from speaking their own language. Therefore, I needed to learn theirs.
The first year I was the only male teacher. After that there was usually at least one other male teacher, some more successful than others. Teachers came and went pretty regularly. That was one of the challenges of the school. Most teachers would come for a couple of years at the most. I had intended to come for two years but ended up staying for four as I developed more friendships and relationships with the Dominicans. However, after four years my sponsoring church agency told me I needed to return home. I couldn’t understand why. Eventually they told me I needed to get married. While being a single woman missionary was OK, being a single man was not. Here was a situation where the double standard worked against me as a man.
Our school was located a little ways outside the main town of Santiago. We were really in a rural neighborhood. We had a caretaker who lived on the property with his family. He was janitor and guard. During the day I could look out my classroom window and see donkeys and other animals. In fact those animals created some of my favorite memories of teaching. For example one time we were having a teacher’s meeting after school, and a donkey wandered into our meeting. It took us a while to get it out of the building.
Probably one of the funniest moments was when a pig ran into my classroom. It grabbed the lunch box of one of the girls and took off. There was immediate chaos and some took after the pig. The pig eventually dropped the lunch bag, and someone brought it to my student. However, she refused to even touch the lunch bag and just had someone throw it away for her. Another time we had a big rat in the room running around the perimeter. That also created chaos as you can imagine.
While my main job was teaching 5th and 6th graders, I also did some things with music. During my final year I worked with a group of high school students. One Saturday we drove the two hours down to Santo Domingo to another English speaking school for a music competition where we were judged. It was a challenging experience for me as I had never done anything like that before. In the end we actually did OK and got better scores than I had anticipated.
Like any school we had parties and programs during the year to celebrate various events and holiday. At SCS the difference was that the whole school , all 12 grades, were often involved making them unique experiences.
Field day is often a big deal at many schools. At SCS we did it a little differently. The whole school was divided into two different teams so that at each grade level the competition was important for that overall team prize. It was a fun day for the kids and an ongoing competition year after year.
When I left the Dominican Republic after four years, I had thoughts that I would return to the school later to teach, but I never did. I did go back with my son the summer before his 6th grade year. The school was celebrating their 25th anniversary. By then the buildings had expanded as well as their programs. They had high school teachers to teach various subjects. The school is still going strong today, and the campus looks very little like the six classroom buildings that were there when I started teaching. In fact as I look at the video online, I can’t even tell where the original buildings are. The difference is incredible, but change is inevitable over nearly 50 years of time.
Are you enjoying reading about my experiences in the Dominican Republic. If you haven’t subscribed to my blog yet, be sure to do so. Next week I’ll share about the other side of my time in the Dominican Republic, working with the church. Until then…
- Note: I apologize for the quality of the photos on this post. Some were taken from slides and others from photos. Time has not always been kind to them, and they are nearly 50 years old. I did my best to edit them to be as clear as possible.