Character Counts

Lisa Mastain was in Puerto Plata in November and spent some time volunteering at the Dove Missions Center. She so generously donated a television, VHS player, and fan to Dove Missions. We have been wanting a television for awhile, and the kids were really excited about it! Here is the Boys Club watching Character Counts; an educational video. This TV will be just another tool we can use to help educate the kids in our programs. Lisa also provided the money for a pizza and ice cream party, so a big thank you to her (pictured below with Yaneli) for all her help to Dove Missions.

Holiday Party for Hope

We would like to take a moment to recognize two of our Dove Missions volunteers, Melissa Bazely and Samantha Short, pictured together below in the Dominican in May. They were working with Dove Missions in the summer, and will be back both over the holidays and next summer for several months. They have seen Dove's huge need, and are fundraising to help cover the costs of some of our programs. They are holding a Spaghetti Dinner on December 2nd in Barrie, Ontario, so if anyone lives in that area, be sure to check it out for a great cause! Or, you could contact either of them to get ideas on how to start your own fundraiser for Dove Missions! You can contact Melissa at mbazely@sympatico.ca for advice on fundraising for Dove. We have so many programs in the works, and just need the funds to get started!

The Holiday Party of Hope will be held at Holly United Church, 211 Marsellus Dr. on Dec. 2 from 6 p. m. to 9 p. m. A spaghetti dinner and desserts will be served. Tickets are $15 dollars in advance at the church, and $20 at the door. Children ages five to 12 are $5 and those under age five are free.

Click HERE to read the full article.

Painting Nails

The girls of the Girls Club love anything typically girly; especially painting their nails! Women and girls in the Dominican Republic are very conscious about the way they look, and you don't often seen them without their hair and nails done. Diane Wolff, Dove Missions's Secretary and Fundraising Director, was in Puerto Plata last week and brought with her, among other things, this nail painting kit. You put the paint in a spinner, and the machine paints the nails, which the girls loved and had a blast playing with. You can see Sindi to the left, and Brittany, below, showing off their new nails!

Christmas Preparations!

Christmas is just one month away and we are planning a big party for the kids. We are going to have a dinner for the 79 kids, currently planned for December 20th. For all the food we will be buying, we will need about $5 per person. If you are interested in sponsoring a Christmas dinner, you can use the paypal button to the right (just specify that it is for Christmas) and for every $5 you donate, we will have the funds for one more dinner. We will also be raising money for transportation to the location we are having the party at, Christmas baskets with gifts for each family, and supplies for our Christmas play (set design, costumes, makeup, etc.) Donating $5 or $10 is a great gift idea for teachers or coaches this Christmas, and something that most people would really value receiving!

The kids are already very excited. Most of the families that they come from do not do anything special for Christmas. If they can afford it, they will have a special dinner. We already have the Center covered in Christmas decorations, complete with a little Charlie Brown Christmas tree! This is going to be a really special time for the kids, and we need your help to make it happen! You can see Cathy and Liz on the picture to the left, and Eddie, Oliver, and Angel below. We would like to thank Todd and Cindy Evans for the donation of all the Christmas decorations!

Music Program

We are definitely going to go ahead with the music program. We have arranged a music teacher from Brazil that has been living here for years. Tadeu will spend the first 2 months constructing instruments from recycled materials, milk cans, PVC tube, water jugs, bamboo, etc. he will help the older boys do this, the next 4 months he will be teaching the boys and some of the bigger kids to play in a band, some will play, some will sing, and some will dance. They will be writing their own songs, and their own music. At the end they will be producing a CD, the music will be that good.

We are starting this music program because music is an important part of these children's lives and they light up dancing and singing when they hear music playing. The program design would include the teacher, instruments, all construction, tools, and buses to hotels to play. It is top of the line instruction at a hefty price of $600.00 a month for a 6 month program. We have others interested in donating, and once we receive enough donations to cover the whole program we will begin.

The children are so excited, and with the recording of the CD, all our sponsors will have an opportunity to hear their donation in action!


This is the main project we are working on fundaising for right now. If you are interested in donating, please click on the paypal button on the right sidebar. In the box, note that it is for the music program. Thank you so much!

Laptops Needed

Last week we had many friends at the Center. Each arrived with their own cameras to capture their experience as a volunteer. We couldn't help but notice the immediate infatuation the older boys had with these cameras. They were allowed to borrow the cameras and our volunteers asked them to take photos of their fellow Dove members, like this picture of Camili. The older boys and girls are natural photographers, and it made us think about pushing up the date of our photography class to the beginning of the new year. We have sufficient donated cameras but the only thing holding us back now are computers. We don't have any that would allow the children to edit, and enjoy the photos they will take in the class. We are asking anyone who may have friends with old laptops to think about donating them to Dove.

Kite Making

The Boys Club spent a class working on kite making. The kids are so creative and love doing projects like this. They went home with their kites, and shortly after, ran back to the Center to show Liz and Cathy their kites. They pointed in the distance, and there, tied to the house of one of the boys, were their kites flying high!

Bites, Cuts, and Infections

As you have probably seen, we have a post outlining a list of items that we need to be donated here at the Center. Some of the most important supplies needed are in the health and medical care area, such as Advil, children's Tylenol, skin cream (polysporin), rash medicine, bandaids, etc. These photos demonstrate why we need these items. Loraina was bit by a bee while she was sleeping, and Kelvin's hand was bit by a dog. We often have kids coming to the Center with infections and cuts and scrapes that we can treat easily if we have these supplies. Loraina spent 2 days like this before she came to the Club and we saw, and gave her Benedryl, and Kelvin had to go to the hospital for an injection.

The Vehicle Fund

We would like to thank everyone who donated towards the Vehicle Fund over the past few months, espcially Todd and Cindy Evans who worked hard to make this happen. Liz was in great need of a vehicle. She spent a lot of time bringing volunteers around Puerto Plata, as well as transporting kids in the Club, and without a vehicle of her own, a lot of money was being spent on hiring a driver. We are very excited to announce that enough money was raised for Liz to purchase a vehicle; in perfect timing as we had lots of volunteers helping out at Dove Missions this week who needed transportation! This will cut down on a lot of costs for hiring drivers, and will make showing our volunteers around a lot easier. Thank you again to everyone who made this possible!!

Baby Steps

The following was written by Cathy Flynn, Dove's Vocational and Recreation Center Program Director: I had some visitors from England this week, and they came along to the Center. While I was at the Center talking to them, Titi came up to me and started tapping my leg saying (permiso) excuse me, so that he could speak to me. I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for weeks now Liz and I have been drilling into them that they have to say excuse me if they want to interrupt a conversation. Well he finally did, and I cried!!

Educating Our Girls

“Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go to search for work in the cities… But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls” (Three Cups of Tea)

Vitamin Program

Dove Missions is going to be launching a new Vitamin Program for the kids in the new year, the first week of January. Many of the kids who attend the Boys and Girls Clubs have very limited diets and don't get all the nutrition their bodies need. Vitamins will help balance their nutrition and keep them healthy.

As of now, we have collected 7800 vitamins!! This is enough to launch an 8 month program for about half of our children! We haven't decided yet which children will take part in the program; we are thinking of possibly doing one gender (either all the girls, or all the boys) or doing it by age (all the kids 9 and under). We will post final details in January when the program launches.

The vitamins will be organized into small bags with 7 vitamins in each bag (see the photo). Every Saturday when the kids are at Club, we will hand out a bag that will have enough vitamins for that week. Before the program launches, we will hold a nutrition classes for the kids and their mothers, teaching them about the importance of vitamins and how and why their kids should take them.

All that said, the long term goal is to have enough vitamins for all the kids in the Dove Missions program. We also hope to extend this program past 8 months. Because of this, we would greatly appreciate donations of vitamins from anyone coming to Puerto Plata to volunteer at the Center. We are using any kind of chewable children's multivitamin. For people wishing to help from Canada, you can donate using Shoppers Drug Mart points. Just go to the Shoppers website and click on Shoppers Optimum, and then Transfer Points (http://www.shoppersdrugmart.ca/english/optimum/transfer_points/index.html) You will have to enter in your card information, and then put in the following card info. You will need the last 9 digits of my card, which are: 893 742 330

Contact Nikki at ncochrane3@hotmail.com if you want more info on how you can support this program.

Busy Saturdays

Saturdays are BUSY at the Center! Throughout the day, we have Club with all of the kids! After the recent additions of some final children, we are at a grand total of 80 children that DOVE welcomes in the Clubs. For now, we are going to add just a few more kids off the wait list for waiting sponsors, and then we are going to stay at that number (around 85) as we work on raising support to grow the program to include more children; fundraising for things like rent payment, snacks for the kids, teachers, craft and educational materials, etc.

We have the kids split into five different groups by age and gender. Here are some photos! The Divas (girls aged 10-13) did not get a group photo, but there is one photo with some of them at work. The jefes (our older boys aged 14-17) also did not get a group picture, but you can check out some recent photos of them at their page.

Here are our dolphins. They are our girls aged 6-9. Top row in the top photo is: Mariely, Yani, Viviana, Camili, Meriledi, Claribel, and Heidy. Bottom row is: Lorani, Erica, Sindi, Stefany, Anamilka, Tania, Erica, Yamali, and Kathiana.



We also have divas, who are our girls aged 10-13. We didn't get a group photo on this particular Saturday, but here are some of the girls hard at work. Left to right is: Alani, Loraina, Vanessa, Patricia, and Yohani.


Here are our liones (lions). They are our boys aged 10-14. In this picture, you can see (left to right for top picture): Almondo, Franciel, Victor Manuel, Andy, Yordi, Leuri, Yeffri, Marcos, Richard, Marcos V., Eddie, Luis Manuel, and Oliver. Three of these boys (Oliver, Yordi, and Franciel) are actually in the jefe group but managed to sneak into this picture!



Here are the lobos (wolves). They are our boys aged 6-9. In this picture you can see (left to right for the top picture): Omar, Jose Antonio, Luis Daniel, Gustavo, Titi, Yoandi, Luis Gusatvo, Yesson, and Antonio.



And a group photo with all the kids (note that we did have several missing- all 80 are not in these photos).

Halloween Party

Saturday was a very special day at the Center. The original plan was to make Halloween masks and throw a party, as Halloween this year conveniently fell on Saturday, our busy day at the Center when we have all the kids come for Club. Just two days before Halloween, Cathy received a call from the Manager of First Choice/Signature. They had donations from one of their Kids Club programs that was ending. They made a generous donation to Dove, including backpacks, t-shirts, water bottles, hats, and.... 16 huge boxes of COSTUMES!! This was in perfect time for the Halloween party and the kids, most of whom had never worn a costume before, were ecstatic. A big thank you to First Choice/Signature from all our kids!




Raysa, the bear


Anamilka and Rosemary


Knights in shining armour


Tatiana, Sindi, and Rosi


The girls had a blast!


Two sets of princess sisters; Lorani and Alani, Loraina and Kathiana


Eddie the pirate