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w w w .i n si d eH A LT O N .c o m O A K V IL LE B EA V ER Fr id ay , A ug us t 26 , 2 01 1 1 8 LivingO k ill LIVING EDITOR: ANGELA BLACKBURN Phone: 905-337-5560 e-mail: ablackburn@oakvillebeaver.com By Angela Blackburn OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF If you head into the countryside justbeyond the hotels, malls and Internetcafin Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, youll find poverty on a similar scale as what exists in Africa or any other Third World country. Oakvilles Judy Warrington knows this. When she travels to the Dominican, she can, of late, be found in the northern rural area of the Latin-American country that is less than a century out of a dictatorship regime. Warrington, who was a teacher for 35 years, said she has been visiting the Dominican for more than a decade to offer residents assistance. Over the years, her focus has shifted from orphanages, charities and housing projects to education. Now, after all these years, I learned a lot. Education is the key, said the former teacher last week as she and a handful of local volunteers worked amid humid tem- peratures in a vacant Oakville warehouse loading a container of school supplies des- tined for Puerto Plata. They had volunteer help from AMJ Campbell Moving Company. Actually, its headed to a place called Black Waters, which Warrington describes as a shantytown area. The 40-ft. container is travelling by land to a port in Brooklyn, New York where it will be loaded onto a ship bound for Puerto Plata. It will be unloaded at its destination and housed at a baseball stadium nearby the port. The owner of the stadium is a friend of the cause. Its cargo desks donated by Sheridan College, bicycles, backpacks, school sup- plies, gift bags, filing cabinets and even a few blackboards will be distributed among several schools as well as to Haitians working in the Dominican canefields. The bounty headed into the hands of the Haitians is that which was collected after a similar container was shipped from Oakville, full of donated items, in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti. It is making the ride with goods collected for the Dominican school projects as the goods were donated specifically for Haiti, but difficulty in moving goods into that country has become problematic in the wake of the earthquake and ensuing local politics. Warrington belongs to the Rotary Club of Oakville and took a lead role in the collec- tion of donations destined to Haiti Containers of Hope for Haiti. Delivery, like that of the Dominican- bound container, was facilitated by a network of contacts on the receiving end a net- work that, like its shipping counterpart in Oakville, has a strong Rotarian contingent. The $4,000 price tag for shipping the container that left this week was funded by surplus funds raised by local students who travelled with Warrington last March Break on an aid mission to the same Black Waters area. Students from Interact (Rotary-sponsored high school clubs) at T. A. Blakelock, Iroquois Ridge High School and Milton District High School accompanied by several local teach- ers, businesspersons and Rotarians were among the Ontario contingent of a three- party aid mission to the Dominican last March. Container with goods heading to Dominican ERIC RIEHL / OAKVILLE BEAVER PACKING FOR PUERTO PLATA: Rotary Club of Oakville members/volunteers loaded a container of school furniture and supplies to go to schools in the Dominican Republic last week. Here, Chris Reynolds picks up boxes. See Functional page 19