Fathering A Child In The Dominican Republic (2)

Santo Domingo really is the hub of the Dominican universe. It is where the government rules, where the influential elite live and work, and where the poor congregate on the fringes, struggling to find their way. As one upper-class acquaintance once explained: 'Why everyone seems to move to Santo Domingo (often to live in squalor, when the countryside offers a much more aesthetically pleasing and paradise-like setting) is an easy question to answer. It is where we pay the cheques.'

There are close to 3 million people living in Santo Domingo, the rich and the poor co-existing in about 1,400 square kilometers. The divide between the haves and the have-nots is stunningly apparent; a walled, guarded tropical mansion can be seen right across the street from a wretched barrio (neighborhood) where linked houses and narrow walkways connect, filled with large extended families who, more often than not, sleep many to a bed and share communal outdoor toilets with neighbors. Small children, with little to do, sit hour after hour on meagre crumbling front steps, as the adults scurry about trying to make ends meet in a perpetual cycle of trying to put food on the table.

More often than not, however, the advantaged keep to themselves, separate from the multitude scratching to survive. They live in upscale, exclusive areas, entirely found in the west side of the city.
While Santo Domingo began centuries ago in the Colonial Zone or Old City, the population gradually spread west and, in more recent times, east. Today, the city is split down the middle by the Ozama River, which flows in a north/south direction and meets up with the Caribbean Sea (image of Santo Domingo google).

But the Ozama River is much more than a geographical divide.