Hello All,
Todays update is going to be on the lighter side. It will be about how the boys at the foundation spend their money and the evolution of hot sauce at the JRF.
Most of the older boys at the foundation, age 10 and up, occasionally work doing different odd jobs. The most common jobs are shoe shining, picking a little fruit in the “chindola”, herding goats or cows, and working at assorted small manufacturers like a bread maker. When they get paid the first thing they do is give half of their earnings to their mom. They will tell you that everything their mothers have done for them, from food to laundry to birth, entitles them to half of their paycheck for life. From what I have seen, the percentage that mom is entitled to decreases as age increases.
After mom’s half it’s time to spend. As far as the boys are concerned there are two things in life that one should spend his money on- clothes and bikes, with bikes being the bigger priority. They understand that they will probably be hungry soon and want that money for food, but in the end nobody knows if you’re hungry, and everybody knows if you have old ratty clothes or no bike. They rarely buy an entire bike, due to cost. Instead they usually buy the parts individually as they get their hands on money and put the bike together themselves. When they become adults they will start to sink all of their money into their motorcycle or moped, but as kids the bike is king. Here is a story to illustrate this.
Before I started the Joan Rose Foundation or moved to Esperanza I lived in a ghetto in Santiago, Dominican Republic. Its a long story, but the essentials are that while living in this ghetto I accidentally adopted two extremely poor Haitian boys. When I moved to Esperanza I took them with me, and when I go back to Detroit for fund raising or Christmas I leave them some money to buy food and other essentials. After the second time doing this I got back and they were of course starving. They had been living off of fruit they found in trees and lunch at the foundation for the last week and a half or so. I asked them “What happened? We went over how much you had for each meal and there was plenty.” One of the boys looked at me and said, “Well, it was enough for food for me and Yobany, but, my friend (that’s what they called me), the bike eats a lot.” I laughed and figured that they know what hunger is, so if they think a cool bike is worth being hungry, who am I to stand in their way. I did supplement their money with some rice the next time I left.
Despite what many people think, Caribbean people don’t actually eat much hot food or hot sauce. The general theory around here is that hot sauce is quite bad for your health. I personally love hot sauce and all condiments. So when I started the foundation, I would have my bottle of hot sauce and would be the only one using it. One of the downsides of having a bunch of kids look up to you and try to emulate you is that they start to take all your stuff. As time went by a few kids started to use hot sauce, but just a drop or two, a real token effort. Pretty soon those few kids became all of the kids. While most still just use a few drops, more and more have gone from a few drops to a couple shakes, which has grown to a light smathering, which has now grown to close to the amount I use- an overpowering coating. We now go through a bottle of hot sauce a day, and I easily personally spend 150 dollars a year on hot sauce for the foundation.
As Always thank you all for your support, none of this would be possible without you.
