Gastrointestinal parasites impose a great and often silent burden of morbidity and mortality on poor populations in developing countries. Veron, Dominican Republic (DR), is a rural city in the southeastern corner of the country where many Dominicans and Haitians migrate to for work in support and expansion of the tourist industry of Punta Cana. Few studies of the prevalence of gastrointestinal (GI) parasitic infections have been published in the DR. Presently, there is a high prevalence of gastrointestinal parasitic infections throughout the poorest areas of the DR and Haiti. This study investigated the prevalence of GI protozoan and helminth parasites from children at the Rural Clinic of Veron during 2008. Participants provided a fecal sample that was examined microscopically for protozoan and helminth parasites using the fecal flotation technique to concentrate and isolate helminth ova and protozoan cysts. Of 108 fecal samples examined, 107 were positive for one or more parasites. Participant ages ranged from 2 to 15 years; 52 were males and 56 were females. Percent infection rates were 48.2% for Ascaris lumbricoides, 13.9% for Enterobius vermicularis, 24.1% for Entamoeba histolytica, and 22.2% for Giardia intestinalis. 9.3% had double infections. A survey of subject characteristics and risk factors was completed by each parent/guardian. Any plan to reduce GI parasites in children of this region will require a determined effort between international, national, and local health authorities combined with improved education of schools, child care providers, food handlers, and agricultural workers. A special effort must be made to reach out to immigrants and those not part of the public education system and to address microbial water quality. / Ph. D.

This thesis illustrates a design process which is dependent upon the investigation of context as a means to establish an order for the integration of a multifaceted urban environment into a cohesive whole. / Master of Architecture

The identity of Latin America is composed of elements inherited from Europe, Asia and Africa. This identity has been defined with a series of images, roles, behaviors and rules created to maintain a particular unification among the citizens of these societies. Cultural ideologies involving marriage, separation and divorce have been subjected to historical changes. Divorce in Latin America typically has had a negative connotation and communities have considered divorced women as outcasts. The purpose of this study is to examine Puerto Rican and Dominican women's perception of divorce with particular emphasis on divorced women's image and experience in these countries. There are similarities and differences between the two countries based on geographical, cultural, historical, economic and legal issues. Due to the cultural presence of the United States in Puerto Rico, many issues now separate the two countries. I consider this "duality" (Traditional/Latin American and Westernized/American) to be an interesting context for exploration particularly as it relates to women's perception of divorce. / Master of Arts

All organizations are concerned with survival and effectiveness, but for third sector and public organizations these issues are acute; they hinge on the organization’s ability to establish and sustain its legitimacy. Legitimacy has been defined as a manifestation of value congruence between an organization’s activities and the social system within which it functions (Dowling and Pfeffer, 1975). This study oxamines the multi-dimensionality of organizational legitirnicy in a comparative case study of nonprofit service organizitions (NSO’s) which provide HIV education and support services for women. Processes of seeking organizational legitirnacy are identified and organizational relationships analyzed within the environmental networks of clientele and the interorganizational network. The study also seeks to identity tte focus and progression of legitimating efforts over tho course of the organization’s existence. Tw. Community based organizations are included; one in the United States and one in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. The organizations studied are directed to women in a variety of circumstances: sex workers, drug users, and women who self-identify as being at risk. The majority of clients were Hispanic, although a few were Caucasian and African-American. The study is intended to generate theory as to how organizations address legitimacy in a multidimensional environment, and how this challenge has been confronted in the case of NSO’s serving women at risk for HIV. The study identifies strategies for preserving the organization’s internally defined objectives and processes and its active relationship with the client community. / Ph. D.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T14:27:18Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Juan Andres Hidalgo Lora.pdf: 1153660 bytes, checksum: 1f4e221bb201508e627e6cdefb1a1df9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-16 / This dissertation is based on the worldwide evident withdrawal of the youths from the catholic churches. The new structures and the unquestionable realities of the post-modern world, mainly the multitechnological world, demand a review of their pastoral regarding the youths, forsaking archaic structures while searching for the new evangelical. First we need to know the world of the youths, their aspirations, dreams and difficulties to reach their goals in life. The youths are innately full of emotions, open-minded and long for comradeship. Here is where religions in general have the mission to make them discover the shining path of the soul. Based on experts who have studied this crisis and supported by researches carried out in a parish of the Dominican Republic as a sample, we propose a brotherly welcome and a subsequent follow-up programme for the youths as a possible solution for this impasse. The awareness of their constituting elements and the deep study of their aggregative psychology can help the youths to ponder upon their dignity as sons of God / Esta dissertação é inspirada na constatação do universal afastamento da juventude das igrejas católicas. Novas estruturas e as incontestáveis realidades do mundo pós-moderno, sobretudo multitecnológico, exigem revisão de sua pastoral em relação ao mundo jovem, o abandono de estruturas arcaicas, em busca do novo evangélico. Para uma possível solução, é preciso conhecer antes o mundo da juventude, com suas aspirações, sonhos e dificuldades para atingir seu ideal de vida. O jovem é por natureza rico em emoções, abertura, busca de companheirismo. Ora aqui cabe a missão das religiões em geral que podem levar os jovens a descobrirem a senda luminosa do espírito. Com base em especialistas no estudo dessa crise e em pesquisa, especialmente montada para este fim, realizada numa paróquia da República Dominicana, como amostragem, são propostos a acolhida fraterna e o posterior acompanhamento dos jovens como possível solução desse impasse. Seus elementos constitutivos, o aprofundamento de sua psicologia agregacional podem ajudar os jovens a refletirem sobre sua dignidade de filhos de Deus

In the last few decades, Dominican female writers have contributed significantly to the literary representation of the city of Santo Domingo and urban life. This dissertation studies how these female writers produce a cultural paradigm for criticizing the urban crisis in the Dominican Republic that at times is at odds with much narrative written by men and with key concepts in Urban Theory that are taken for granted. The authors I study, Ángela Hernández, Emilia Pereyra, Emelda Ramos, Aurora Arias and Rita Indiana Hernández, understand the city and redefine the urban model by expressing their dissatisfaction in the civilizing and modernizing potential of urban space in their texts. I specifically analyze novels and short stories through a reinterpretation of Henri Lefebvre’s concept of “the Right to the City” that considers issues such as gender, race and identity by using an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that includes Geography, Urban Studies, Feminism, Queer Studies and Sociology.

Drawing on recent attempts to reconcile the divergent nations of Hispaniola, I will examine the ways in which fiction by U.S. immigrant writers Danticat and Rosario looks back to the traumatic history of race relations on Hispaniola and the 1937 massacre as a means of approaching reconciliation and healing amongst the inhabitants of Hispaniola. As invested outsiders to their homelands, Danticat and Rosario may work, as Chancy suggests, in the capacity of actors for Hispaniola. Both Danticat and Rosario graciously admit that their writing is largely contingent on the relative freedom from censure that their American citizenship affords them. In this capacity, these immigrant writers are uniquely able to revisit a traumatic cultural past to give voice to its widely arrayed victims and to provide an interrogation of the makings of horrific brutality. Despite the largely U.S. American readership, these authors foster a form of reconciliation through their works by forcing the audience to move past dichotomous thinking about the massacre, but also about the boundaries between the two nations. “…in traumatic times like ours, when reality itself is so distorted as to have become impossible and abnormal, it is the function of all culture, partaking of this abnormality, to be aware of its own sickness. To be aware of the unreality or inauthenticity of the so-called real, is to reinterpret this reality. To reinterpret this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it.” (―We Must Learn to Sit Down and Talk about a Little Culture,‖ Sylvia Wynter 31)

This dissertation examines politics and poetics of food, memory and ‘home’ among Dominican immigrants in New York City. Through a framework of ‘foodmaps’ it traces cultural histories of seven Dominican families from the gendered perspectives of the cooks in each household. Examining translocal food paths reveal the crucial role of migrant food relations in gendered production of home, place-making and community formations. ‘Migrant seasonings’ (the way immigrants season their foods and lives and the way they are ‘seasoned’ into new social relations) could be understood as contested sites of power negotiations, as strategic reclamation of ‘small measures of autonomy’, sociopolitical action, and historical visibility. Dominican foodmaps respond to culturally and historically specific ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ shared with other Afro-diasporic populations in the Americas. Food-place-memory becomes hence a continuum between geopolitical ‘seasonings’ in sending societies and new racializations in the US. Some findings of this project are: 1) food paid-unpaid labor are critical in negotiations of labor-time, places and social relations within households and in relation to the City and US state; 2) food is a key mediation for the way Dominican migrants learn to navigate and orient themselves in new environments; 3) cooking practices are inseparable from the narrative memories that give them meaning, constituting complex memory-work strategies, communicative and expressive means; 3) Food practices are crucial for the way cooks (especially women) claim value and autonomy for their life projects, produce senses of ‘home’, and re-inscribe through food-narratives their migrant history of struggles in Dominican Republic and the U.S. Basic contributions of this work are: 1) filling gaps in critical ethnographic research on food, gender and migration in Dominican and Caribbean studies; 2) development of a ‘foodmaps’ framework (a method-analytic frame to trace boundaries of ‘home’ through food relations); 3) examining food practices beyond ‘ethnic foodways’ tradition and nostalgia, but instead as critical and traumatic place-memory sites of implicit resistance, and as narrative spaces that re-inscribe working-class histories into hegemonic national narratives; 4) problematizing notions of private/public, personal/collective, memory/history in Afro-Caribbean socio-cultural formations; and 5) ‘native’ ethnography usage of interdisciplinary feminist, collaborative and media-based methodologies. / text

The research question of the study asked "In the post 2010 earthquake, what are the conditions faced by Haitian immigrants in accessing primary public education in the Dominican Republic"? Within the context of primary education, the study takes place in the town of Comendador, the capital of the Elías Piña province in the Dominican Republic. Using a mixed methods approach, incorporating ethnographic methods and database analysis, the study documents the voices of Haitian and Dominican parents, Dominican school personnel, non-governmental organization (NGO) officials and community stakeholders. Within the construct of access, there are six areas of focus: educational policy, curriculum and instruction, professional development and resources, parent involvement, intercultural communications, and praxis. Data collection tools included field notes, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, analysis of the Latin American Opinion Project (LAPOP), and analysis of a household composition database. The findings of the study indicate six themes: (1) educational policy, Dominican law provides Haitian children with school registration, yet school officials are allowed the flexibility of adherence; (2) curriculum and instruction, using a national curriculum, teachers are not providing a comprehensible education to Haitian students; (3) professional development and resources, teachers recognized the need to make instruction meaningful for Haitian students; (4) parent involvement, undocumented Haitian parents did not feel safe at school sites; (5) intercultural communications (ICC), educators' behaviors towards Haitian immigrant children and parents demonstrated empathy, yet lacked more advanced levels of ICC and, (6) praxis, there was an absence of advocates for Haitian. In the case of stakeholders and educators in Elías Piña the study suggests that, for the most part, few had the experience and background to understand the complexity of Haitian immigrant students and families who expressed living in fear of the authorities, suspicion of who to trust, and despair with regards to living day to day. While education for their children was seen as a positive need for survival in the Dominican Republic, Haitians' lack of understanding of the Dominican educational system leads to the perception that Haitian immigrant parents were not engaged in the education of their children.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Pennsylvania State University, 2006. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.