By Marv Balousek
Don and Marlene Huggins of the Village of Glenbrook returned recently from a five-day trip to the Dominican Republic, where they delivered 805 shoeboxes to children at church-supported schools in Bombita and La Hoya, two villages near the country’s southern coast.
The plastic shoeboxes, filled with gender and age specific items such as pens, baseballs and caps, were filled by members of New Covenant United Methodist Church, where the couple belongs. The congregation also filled another 400 plastic shoeboxes for a local multi-church effort that is part of Samaritan’s Purse, a religious international relief organization that began in 1970.
About 500 students in Bombita and 300 in La Hoya received shoeboxes.
“These are kids that basically have nothing,” Don Huggins said.
For Huggins and his wife, the trip was their 10th to the country since 2004, when the church began its relationship with a school and clinic in each village.
The effort is spearheaded by an organization called COPA, which has branches in the United States and the United Kingdom. COPA stands for Community Partners but means “cup” in Spanish. The first classrooms were built in 1992 in La Hoya and four years later in Bombita.
Huggins said most of the children are of Haitian origin. The border of Haiti, which shares the island with the Dominican Republic, is not far from the two villages.
Bombita and La Hoya were not severely affected by Hurricane Hanna, which devastated Haiti in 2008, but Huggins said they were hit a year earlier by Tropical Storm Noel, which caused massive flooding.
He said their five-day stay in the Dominican countryside was “sort of like camping out” with rolling electricity blackouts and no air conditioning. The slept about 20 feet away from a barnyard filled with farm animals.
Huggins and his wife also operate the Wildwood Food Pantry, which serves about 200 families at each of two distributions per month. The pantry is sponsored by both the New Covenant and Wildwood United Methodist churches.
Since the pantry opened its doors in May 2005, serving about 50 families, Huggins said, it has benefited from a steady stream of donations.
“We haven’t had to cry uncle for food,” he said. “The Villages is a gold mine in terms of resources. The people who come here have time and they want to give time to helping.”
Huggins said he and his wife knew they wanted to help with the Dominican project when they came out of the first church informational meeting about it in 2004.
“She looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know how you feel, but I want to do this,” he said. “I told her I was thinking the same thing.”
