Photos by Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times

Project Esperanza volunteer coordinator Cameron Burkholder helps a student with a craft at a community center in a Haitian community just outside Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.

A favorite pastime for the boys in the Project Esperanza boys home is dominoes. Theirs is an animated form in which they violently slap the table with their pieces in a round that leaves a loser with clothes pins pinching his face until he can win again.

A student prays at the close of classes in one of the schools that Project Esperanza supports in a Haitian community outside Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Project Esperanza refers to them as "grass-roots" schools because they want to involve communities in both the Dominican Republic and the United States in the effort.

Project Esperanza volunteers Mike Hage and Larissa Mihalisko play with children living in a Haitian community outside Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic.

Caitlin McHale, director of Project Esperanza, heads toward a soccer game organized between the boys she houses in Project Esperanza boys home and the boys who live and work on the streets of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. McHale graduated from Virginia Tech in 2006 and has spent most of her time in the Dominican Republic since. Her nonprofit organization tries to help Haitian boys escape poverty.

Wendy Joseph, who helps Project Esperanza staff raise the boys at the home just outside Puerto Plata, wrangles a couple of the boys back into the home for their school lessons.

PUERTO PLATA, Dominican Republic -- The Haitian Creole burst from Caitlin McHale's mouth. Her tone grew more urgent. Her voice louder.

Many of the 20 or so barefoot Haitian boys walking off the old basketball court where they practice soccer stopped to watch. Some carried wooden shoeshine boxes.

The Virginia Tech graduate spit out the words. A "je," a "tu" and what sounded like an "allez." She spoke so fast -- the start of the next word stepping on the end of the previous one -- that anyone not fluent in Creole would have a hard time understanding her.

The boys did, though, especially Jireste Floreal. The 17-year-old Haitian was supposed to go to school after soccer practice this June afternoon so he could pass the national exam and attend high school in the fall. But he was thinking of cutting class.

McHale wasn't having it.

High school is not the typical path for Haitians who come to the Dominican Republic to escape violence and poverty. Language barriers, the need to earn money, lack of documentation and the stigma of being Haitian stifle their opportunities.

Boys such as Jireste are the reason McHale, 23, has spent most of her time in the Dominican Republic since she graduated from Tech in December 2006, trading in her middle-class upbringing for a boys home with spotty electricity and no indoor plumbing.

They're the reason she and fellow Tech graduate Kristin Preve persevered through a chaotic 2007 summer -- bruises and bite marks their occasional reward for breaking up fights at the home. The reason they're trilingual, as comfortable arguing in Spanish with neighbors who see the boys as a nuisance as they are in Creole with men who see the boys as a commodity -- cheap labor to sell their eggs and candy.

The boys are the reason for Project Esperanza, the nonprofit organization McHale and Preve started in 2005.

The organization supports four Haitian schools in the Dominican Republic and a volunteer program to teach children and work on construction projects in Haitian villages. But its top priority is educating Haitian street boys in Puerto Plata.

The women spent the past few years establishing relationships in the Dominican Republic and finding a focus for their work. Now that Preve and McHale have done that, they find themselves at another critical juncture, where they need more people and funding to make their small organization realize its potential. It's a tall order for two recent graduates and a handful of student volunteers.

The boys receive education, food and discipline at the home, located in Maimon, a town outside Puerto Plata. A handful of them -- seven this summer -- receive a place to sleep.

Jireste met the women in late 2006. By January 2007, he was a regular visitor to the house.

His mother lives in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, with 13 of Jireste's siblings and cousins. He said his father was the victim of a politically motivated murder.

He came to the house early and stayed late every day. McHale taught him math and English. Two months later, McHale and Preve registered him in a Dominican middle school.

Jireste was moving forward. But on that June afternoon after soccer practice, he wanted to skip school.

"He just needs to get his stupid clothes and go to school," McHale said, her blue eyes filling with tears as she turned to Preve, 22. It began to rain. Preve and McHale had to take the other boys home.

McHale's outburst worked. Jireste did go to school. He passed the exam during the summer and is now attending high school.

A way out of poverty

An estimated 80 percent of Haiti's population lives in poverty. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti is the only country in the Americas on the United Nations list of least-developed countries.

More than 1 million Haitian immigrants live in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Many come in search of work on sugar cane plantations, and they form communities in the country, called bateys. Boys who come over without family work on the streets, shining shoes or selling peanut and coconut sweets. McHale and Preve said some of the boys were sold across the border into a kind of indentured servitude in exchange for room and board.

A dilapidated rehab center, Project Esperanza's boys home is not itself an escape from poverty but a means to that end. Preve and McHale have dealt with problems big and small -- the roof blew off in December, and there was a rat infestation problem. The sickeningly sweet odor of sewage drifts up to the house from a nearby river. The smell of burning garbage, one of the boys' chores, is a welcome departure from the stench. Flies are everywhere.

But the boys seem happy cooking meals, making juice and playing dominoes during the hot summer afternoons. This life is an improvement over their previous circumstances. As Preve and McHale got to know the boys, they opened up about their pasts, showing them scars on their backs made by machetes and telling them about bosses they lived with who made them eat on the floor and barked at them like dogs. The boys who left these situations to live on the streets didn't find the going any easier.

"It's cold on the streets. People can hit you on the streets," said Jonel Meilleur, a smiling boy who says he's 14 but looks much younger.

"People here are my family."

Getting started

McHale didn't originally come to the Dominican Republic to work with Haitians. She came to work with Dominican orphans in Esperanza, south of Puerto Plata, in January 2005. It was winter break of her sophomore year at Tech.

One of the few Haitian orphans, Santos, caught her attention. He was smart but without paperwork, so he couldn't advance past the sixth grade in the Dominican school system, McHale said.

"I just saw his potential being pushed down and a whole group of people whose potential was being pushed down," she said. "It really just kind of took my heart."

When she returned home to Frederick County after the weeklong trip, she couldn't get Santos' face out of her mind. Singing at church one day, she started crying and couldn't stop.

When she came back to school for the 2005 winter term, she told Preve about Esperanza, and the two of them returned that summer to the orphanage. Back in Blacksburg that fall, they decided to start Project Esperanza as a student organization to fund visits by more volunteers to the orphanage. Many of the volunteers were members of Tech's New Life Christian Fellowship, to which they both belonged.

Project Esperanza grew over the next few years and focused more on the plight of the Haitians in the Dominican Republic. In the summer of 2006 they conducted a street census, giving away water to Haitian boys and asking them about their circumstances. The building that they had used to house volunteers became an ad hoc boys home as more children showed up for water, food and education.

Money has been tight at times, and neighbors were unhappy about having Haitian street boys constantly around. They eventually forced Preve and McHale to move with the boys to a smaller house in a more dangerous section of the city as an interim home before they moved to Maimon.

By then, Preve and McHale were in too deep to quit. They became fluent in Creole even though they were living in a Spanish-speaking country because they spent so much time with the boys.

"I never honestly felt completely comfortable until we began Project Esperanza," McHale said. "I felt like God said, 'OK, stop feeling guilty. That's the life I've given you. Stop wondering why, but just do something with it.' "

McHale grew up on a farm just outside of Winchester, the third of four children in a middle-class family. She described her religious upbringing as "a bit of an unorganized faith in Jesus Christ." Her father, whom McHale describes as a "recovered" alcoholic, brought up his Christian faith often. The work he did to help others deal with alcoholism through middle-of-the-night phone calls and car rides made an impression on her.

She loved watching her grandfather tend to chickens and sheep on the family farm and wanted to be a veterinarian like him. McHale said she was a sensitive kid who felt guilty about having more than others. She began studying the Bible and volunteering more when she went to college.

McHale had been on a pre-med track with plans to go to vet school. After Esperanza, she changed her plans and her major to human development. She didn't want the work in the Dominican Republic to be just a college thing.

Deeply religious, Preve is quieter and calmer than McHale. But the Albemarle County native can speak up when it's necessary. She lived in Argentina for five years and speaks fluent Spanish.

When a Dominican bus attendant tried to keep one of the boys off a bus in Puerto Plata because it was "a Dominican bus," she used that Spanish to tell him, in no uncertain terms, that the boy was allowed on. The man didn't say much as the tall, blond, 22-year-old berated him on a crowded city street.

Preve said her experience has taught her that she doesn't always have to be nice.

"I think that's cool because it means that you don't have to be born some superhuman in order to give your life to something like this," she said. "Because I wasn't. And it's not exactly in my nature to be bold and brave for a cause."

Cameron Burkholder, a Tech senior with a Type A personality similar to McHale's, organized the volunteer program last summer. She spent the summer of 2007 with Project Esperanza and quickly developed the same passion for the work as Preve and McHale. She returned this summer to run the program out of the poor Haitian immigrant village of Saman, south of Puerto Plata.

A nutrition major, she helped feed two malnourished Haitian babies brought to her during her first summer in the Dominican Republic. After she returned home, she heard that one of them had died.

Convinced she could have done more, she was overwhelmed by guilt. She stopped tailgating before Hokie football games and refused to ride in a new car her father bought. At her parents' home in Winchester she'd wake up in the middle of the night and put all of her clothes in garbage bags and load them in her car, only to be talked out of giving them away the next morning.

"It was just the oddest things that I would choose not to do," she said. "And not doing them wouldn't make life here [in Saman] any better, but it was almost like I didn't want to forget what I learned and what I'd seen. And so, if I would continue to withhold things from myself then it was like a reminder."

Spread thin

McHale and Preve developed relationships with other members of the community in Puerto Plata. They agreed to work with schools started by Haitian churches in the area, and they hired staff to help the volunteers and the boys home.

Wendy Joseph, a 36-year-old Haitian painter, was visiting the home in June. He brought an insulin kit for one of the boys who has diabetes. He said he does whatever he can to help the group.

"This is the first time I've seen white people taking care of little Haitians," he said. "Their presence is a blessing."

The organization operates on about $5,000 a month, McHale said. Most of the money comes from individual donors and fundraisers, such as T-shirt sales and poetry readings in Blacksburg. The organization's leaders receive only room and board.

Preve recently wrote a $70,000 grant proposal to the Bridgeway Foundation, a Christian charitable organization based in Canada. The funding would support the boys home for a year and allow them to move it to a building with running water and more reliable electricity.

The women admit they've overextended themselves.

"That's one of our big challenges," Preve said. "There's so much need everywhere. But we're learning how to strengthen and focus what we have. ... It's such a big challenge because there's so much potential everywhere."

The home became such a chore to manage in 2007, when as many as 40 boys would come by to be tutored and fed, that they separated it from the volunteer program.

The number of boys living in the home swelled to 18. Overwhelmed by the need, they ran short on funds and stopped providing meals for a time. Preve and McHale struggled to forge discipline as they and a couple of Haitian men they hired dealt with children with violent pasts who had learned to fend for themselves on the street.

Some boys would threaten to kill one another and break bottles to show they were serious about their threats.

The women have experienced other disappointments. In February, Preve's laptop was stolen from the home. She thinks she knows the boy who did it, because he hasn't come by the house since it happened.

"He just made that decision to trade in his relationship with us for that material thing," Preve said. "You realize that it's not all going to be perfect. Some of the kids were in this for what they could get out of us."

To maintain order in the house, Preve and McHale discipline the boys and give them chores. They hold regular Bible studies.

During the hectic 2007 summer, some boys left and others were kicked out for their behavior. The food shortage helped cull the group down to those who really wanted an education, not just a free lunch.

"When I first started out with this, I pictured immediate change," Preve said. "We could find this magic formula, and then things would just snap, like that. But it's not that simple. You get into it and you go with what you think will work and you realize that people are very complex. ... You can provide them with all the opportunities you can, but in the end, it's that person's choice."

McHale and Preve's choice to continue Project Esperanza after college was easy for them, they said, but difficult for their families. They said their parents are proud of them, but the realization that the work wasn't just going to be "a college thing" was difficult to accept.

"You want your child to get the American dream, and they want you to build your wealth and things like that," McHale said. "And then it's, 'Oh, gosh, you don't have any money and you're just going down to live there with all those little boys.' "

The boys home was much calmer this summer. The seven boys finished their home school studies in June and spent the summer living at the house and playing soccer. They started in Dominican schools Aug. 18, attending school in the morning with tutoring lessons given by McHale and hired teachers in the afternoon at the boys home.

Burkholder is back in Blacksburg for her senior year and is considering going to graduate school for public health. She wants to continue to focus on public health issues in the region but is no longer involved with Project Esperanza.

Burkholder said last month that the summer went well overall but there were some problems at the end. She wouldn't elaborate.

"I'm just exploring different options," she said.

Preve is back in Blacksburg to handle the administrative side of the program. Nathaniel Varano, another assistant director who is completing his doctorate, is backing away from his commitment to handle the program's finances.

An English major who graduated in December, Preve also raises funds for the program, works on the Web site and looks for grant opportunities. She'll try to get down to Puerto Plata as often as she can but admits it's going to be difficult to spend as much time on the program as she'd like. She's also considering graduate school and working full time at a local sandwich shop.

While things haven't always gone smoothly, Preve and McHale look to the changes they've made in the lives of boys who regularly give them hugs and are eager to learn. They think about what they can do if they keep at it and know that they can't stop.

"I think it's easy to sometimes get sucked into this mind-set that, 'There's so many injustices so you can't even really do anything about it, so you might as well get on with things,' " Preve said. "But if you really stick with it, you really do, then people can see that you're serious about things and you'll really see change."