Latrine Project in la Piedra and other site.

Volunteer site program.

La piedra is small community 45 minutes from the City Santo Domingo and 15 minutes to la Caleta, the entrance of the International airport de las America.

LA PIEDRA-background history and most urgent current needs, the project plan in Spanish.

Some of the oldest residents here remember life in La Piedra (its name, appropriately, translates as "The Rock") in the 1940s, around 70 years ago, when all the nearby Ingenio San Luis sugar lands and the undeveloped lands around them were a small part of the vast estates of "El Presidente" Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the fierce dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930-1961. After Trujillo´s assassination in May of 1961, the Dominican government laid claim to all the surrounding land and promptly sold thousands of square meters of it to an international or U.S.

--Latrines that will not allow waste materials to leach into and contaminate the ground water. (The fresh water in the limestone basins below La Piedra is part of a vast aquifer that provides drinking water to the Capital.) Today most residents just dump urine and feces into large pits or holes in the limestone outcroppings around their homes.

Here are the plans (in Spanish) for a dual-chambered fertilizer-making latrine that are specially adapted to tropical regions. This is a kind of latrine that prevents human waste from filtering down into porous surfaces, like the limestone rock underlying the Dominican pueblo of La Piedra, below which are vast deposits of fresh groundwater--an invaluable national resource that is now being polluted! Not only does this style of latrine protect the fragile environment of La Piedra, it also provides a natural source of fertilizer, something that La Piedra´s residents need in order to nourish the little soil that there is among all the rocks that make up the greater part of the land surface around their homes.

Using the abundant natural rock of La Piedra instead of bricks, we can construct these latrines for approximately US$150 each-the cost of the required cement, wood, zinc, and nails for each latrine. Please help us by donating funds to build dual-chambered fertilizer-making latrines for the resource-poor residents of La Piedra.

If you would like come and volunteer your time to help us build these latrines in La Piedra, we´d appreciate that, too.

The cost of the orientation is US $ 350, included pick up at the airport, full day city tour with lunch buffet, and one night at the hotel in Santo Domingo. A one-time payment, that's covers your first days' stay in the country and transportation by bus from Santo Domingo to the project site, 50% of the fee is going to the Guanin Center project..

Payment in full of your internship placement fee is due four (4) weeks prior to the beginning date of the internship. Should you need to cancel, for whatever reason, up to (30) days before the beginning date of your internship, the internship placement fee will be returned in full. Should you cancel within twenty (20) days of the beginning date of your internship, however, 25% of the internship placement fee will be withheld and the balance of 75% returned to you.

Programa de alfabetizacion para adultos

Application Form