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In 1995, retired major league baseball catcher Dave Valle and his wife Vicky began Esperanza, a nonprofit agency that provides seed money to impoverished citizens of the Dominican Republic wishing to start their own businesses. So far the organization has dispersed almost $15 million through 75,000 loans, and the repayment rate is 98 percent. The following was written by Todd Pitock who visited Valle in the Dominican Republic last spring. "Esperanza" is the Spanish word for hope.
"Build us a school"
When we visited San Pedro de Macorís, a tropical rain fell in ruts in the road, and we ducked into a school to meet its educational director, Milan Tapia, whose story would sound like a fairy tale if she weren’t one of Esperanza’s most cherished successes.
Back in the 1980s, around the time Valle was securing his spot in the big leagues, Milan was spending her 20s gambling away meager paychecks earned from a low-wage factory job. She hit bottom in Aruba, where she hauled bricks on a construction site.
"One day I had a vision," she told me as we toured the school. "I saw myself teaching children."
Her parents had been poor, but they had taught her to read. In 1998, after returning to the Dominican Republic, she went back to a factory job and a ramshackle shanty. She heard about Esperanza and started a business as a seamstress. Almost immediately, she showed a profit. She loved making money but still believed she could teach the one skill she had: reading.
She started with a neighbor’s eight-year-old son. Other people asked her to teach their children, too. When the class outgrew Milan’s tin-roofed shack, a friend helped move her into a house with a poured concrete foundation. "Mr. Valle," she said, "you have to build us a school."
Valle brought in donors from Texas who, along with Esperanza, put up the funds. They proposed building a campus outside San Pedro, but Milan was adamant that it be in the center, where she’d have the chance to attract more children. The space today is two stories, with bright, airy classrooms and a computer lab kitted with desktops. A kitchen provides lunch that for many of the 420 students, from 3 to 15 years old, is the only real meal of the day. The students wore yellow and blue uniforms that Milan makes—her only connection to her seamstress past, since she’s now the educational director. Wherever she walked, children came to hug her.
For all Tapia’s success, her story had still one more layer. She’d never gotten a formal education. So in 2001, at age 41, she went back to eighth grade and graduated high school at 48.
Valle’s and Tapia’s exchanges with each other were warm and bantering. She raised her brows on learning that they were born in the same year. She pulled up a shirtsleeve to show off a bicep, as if to suggest she was in better shape than he was.
Valle laughed. "You’re unbelievable," he said. "Look at you. Look at this place. When we first met, you thought you could do anything. You thought you could fly like an eagle."
Tapia laughed, too, and put her fingertips on a small globe that she keeps on her desk.
"You’re right," she said. "And I did."
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