Boca de Mao, Centro de Trabajo Popular (CTP)


Rosa Pye is a twenty-two year-old Haitian immigrant who works
washing clothes by hand, and also as a field laborer on local rice or
tobacco farms. Her husband is twenty-one, Haitian, and
works as a day laborer as well.

"I use the bicycle to take meals to my husband in the fields and also for me
to get to work", she says. The trip to the rice fields takes from 30 minutes to
an hour on foot. Riding the bike, she arrives in 10 to 20 minutes. Before owning the
bike, on days when she didn't walk to the fields, she paid 20 pesos for car fare.
A day in the fields has recently been netting them 80 pesos daily.

In order to buy the bicycle, Rosa and her husband saved their earnings for
two months. They get much usage out of the carrier rack, using it to carry food,
work clothes, as well as plantains and other crops. Their two children
(two and three years-old) love to hitch rides on the rack as well.

Rosa comes from a family of eight children in a small town in northern Haiti
near the Haitian-Dominican border. She has been traveling to and from the
Dominican Republic to work for the past five years. She met her husband in the
D.R. on one of her first trips when she came to work bundling tobacco and
picking tomatoes. She says that life here is a little easier.

"They have nothing n Haiti. Here at least one can work
and earn a hundred pesos by Saturday to buy food".

Centro de Trabajo Popular (CTP) trains Dominican and Haitian youth in bicycle
mechanics and small business skills while supplying affordable transportation to
farmworkers, industrial laborers, and tradespeople in and around Boca de Mao,
north-central Dominican Republic.
Yeni José