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Fields of Dreams
Valle wanted to introduce me to the faces behind the statistics. We entered Hoyo de Bartola, a barrio on the outskirts of Santiago, heading down steep steps leading to narrow alleys of one-room houses with cinder block walls and corrugated tin roofs. Fresh litter and old litter had been dropped into a partly exposed gutter in the middle of the alley running the length of the community."How is your Spanish?" I asked Valle.
"About 60 percent."
Philip, who was spending the year here working for Esperanza, noted his father's language weakness. "He says everything in the present tense."
Take it as a sign of a man living in the moment.
At 48, Valle has been blessed. In addition to Philip, he and Vicky have two other children, Natalia, 19, and Alina, 15. He has stayed connected to baseball by doing color commentary for the Mariners, the team with which he spent most of his 13-year big-league career. When he's off the Mariners' clock, he spends almost all his work time on behalf of Esperanza, which began paying him a salary last year.
"You start out and you want to be successful," he told me over a traditional Dominican lunch of roasted chicken, fried plantains, and rice and beans. "But once you do that, you want to do something that matters."
His own success wasn't anything he took for granted. The seventh of eight children from a family in Bayside, Queens, he was eight years old when his father died suddenly of a heart attack while taking a shower. His mother went back to work as a nurse, taking the graveyard shift so that she'd be home for her kids before and after school. Having seen the challenge of raising three kids in a solid marriage and with financial security, Valle, a devout Christian since he was 19, is all the more astonished that his mother managed to make a stable home.
"She always told us everything would be okay," he recalled. "And it was. I don't know how she did it."
He sees glimmers of his mother's strength in the women he has encountered through Esperanza, among them Miguelina Suera, 59, who runs a tiendacito, a little food shop, from a cinder block home with a poured concrete floor near the entrance to Hoyo de Bartola. The storefront is her kitchen window, with a display of purple eggplant, red and green peppers, and big fresh bunches of parsley--an inventory afforded by her Esperanza loan.
She stays in business even if the circumstances are not ideal. During our visit, a blind man sat outside his home with a radio on his lap. His eyes were milky and fixed skyward. As we talked to Suera, people peeked out at us, and barefoot toddlers milled about. At one point, armed men in bulletproof vests charged past. There is a gang problem here, and we were warned to leave before dark.
We drove to another Santiago neighborhood bordered by a dry riverbed that had become a repository of trash and stray dogs. Anna Mercedes Martes, 39, makes clothes and coconut candies that she supplies to four restaurants, though she's aware that to grow, she'll need to work out how to make more and find other distribution outlets, such as sundries stores.
"I would like to give you a sample, but sadly, I am sold out," she said.
"Not sadly," Pimentel exclaimed. "That's good!"
Martes was channeling earnings into a house she was building in the countryside. "I'd like to have a store," she said. "I love business! It's something I'm accomplishing with my own intelligence. All of this is the fruit of my own labor."
Big-League Help
Baseball was Valle's life's labor, and he is reliably entertaining on the topic as he describes the challenges of catching for flamethrowers like Randy Johnson. It has also furnished him with great connections and access, with a lineup of partners that includes Major League Baseball, the MLB Players Association, and Dominican major-league players including Cubs left fielder Alfonso Soriano and Mets shortstop José Reyes. Mets general manager Omar Minaya is on the Esperanza board of directors.
Back in Santo Domingo, Valle and Pimentel emerged from a talk with Dominican Pedro Martínez, delighted by the future Hall of Famer's--and the Mets organization's--commitment to getting involved.
Other players have gotten on board through an initiative Esperanza has spearheaded to fund and build baseball fields in poor communities. So far, four are complete, and a fifth is under construction. They're great fields, but baseball is really a means to the end of community development. "The idea isn't to make better baseball players," Valle said. "It's to use this great passion and energy and mobilize people."
Esperanza secures land through long-term leases with the government, and it provides the expertise and project management skills to construct the fields. The community donates labor to build and, later, maintain them. Any child who participates in leagues and tournaments has to be enrolled in school. The vision is for fields to be part of larger complexes that would include, say, vocational training schools. One of the Dominican kids who made it big is Soriano, whose grant helped build a field in his home province of San Pedro de Macorís. After the dedication ceremony, Valle turned to the perennial all-star and said, "I'm starved."
"I'll take you to get the best chicken you've ever tasted," Soriano said.
When they arrived at the tiny corner restaurant called Sazón de Mama, Valle learned that the owner, Bienvenida Nina Santo, 33, was an Esperanza client. She'd gone to school with Soriano and invited them to her home in the barrio behind the street-side restaurant. Compared with the clapboard shacks in the rest of the barrio, Santo's house looked like a palace, a two-story whimsical design with pink tile in the entrance and framed by red trim. Her husband had built it, but she paid it off with money earned from her business.
"You must support Esperanza," Santo told Soriano. "It is saving people's lives."
The comment, though, was more than a courteous plug for the organization, as Valle learned when Santo's youngest daughter came in and put her head sadly on her mother's shoulder. She was about the age he was when his father died.
"It's okay, it's okay," she said. "Everything is going to be okay."
Valle was reminded of his own mother and felt a reverberation through time on hearing that Santo's husband had died, leaving four children and a pile of high-interest debt. The loan from Esperanza kept her going.
Today, Santo's restaurant generates as much as $300 a week in profits, an impressive income in the Dominican Republic, and her three brothers have followed her example by opening their own branches of Sazón de Mama. Santo's daughters are articulate and ambitious. Fifteen-year-old Carina wants to be a child psychologist; 14-year-old Daniela, a lawyer; and nine-year-old Clara, a physician. Given their mother's example, it's not hard to imagine they'll achieve their dreams.
"I know we're going to be okay," she told Valle, "because I have the business. Without the help we received from you, I don't know where we would have been."
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