All roads lead to Bani

All roads lead to Bani....and we traveled them all today.  Nothing seems to happen quickly here and getting to Bani was no exception to that rule.  It is 65 km from Santo Domingo to Bani and it took us over two hours to get there.  Every step of the way was an adventure.

This kind fellow let us take his picture while we were stopped in a huge traffic jam and then soon he came running back with his friends who had lots of different things to sell us.  There are young men on all of the streets where there is traffic.  They have everything from fruit to nuts to cell phone chargers for sale.   We bought the fruit.

And a short 90 minutes later, we were in Bani.  We went to two schools there, one public and one private.  We heard many of the same frustrations from the public school teachers that we have, except their concerns were on a much larger scale.  Some teachers at public schools have classes of 60 or 70 students.  The private school teacher boasted of their reasonable class sizes; only 25 students to a class.

The founder of the private school and a teacher

Uniforms

At the entrance to the private school

We met two teachers from the public school in the center of Bani and then drove many km with them to see their school to meet the headmaster and talk with all of them.

meeting under the tree in the schoolyard

class schedule

The son of one of the teachers.  He picked mangoes from a tree and brought them to us