Photo exhibit delves into child poverty in Dominican Republic

Chip Hoffman had never seen such staggering poverty in his life: Poor Dominican kids wandering the garbage heaps, barefoot, digging for metal scraps to sell. Their hands wrinkled and scarred from who knows what chemicals in the trash.

"Seeing this, you begin to realize how privileged you are," the North Fort Myers photographer says. "You stand there in absolute shock.

"Tears start running down your face."

Once the tears dried, Hoffman set to work photographing those 8- and 10-year-old kids called Divers. As in diving in the trash heaps.

The result - along with other photos he shot in Santiago, Dominican Republic - will be shown for the next two weeks at Arts for Act Gallery. The show benefits FGCU Spanish/German professor Ingrid Martinez-Rico, who was injured in a February car crash.

Martinez-Rico and her husband, Craig Heller, started the yearly trips to the Dominican Republic as a way for Spanish students to immerse themselves in the language - and also to gain an appreciation for how many people live.

"Most of those students have never been out of the United States, let alone gone to the Third World," Heller says.

Heller and Martinez-Rico have organized the spring break trips for eight years. They work with Accion Callejera, a Dominican nonprofit group that helps children living and working in the streets.

In March 2007, their friend Hoffman came along and brought his Nikon digital camera. He taught the street kids how to take photos, and later documented the poverty he saw there. Shoe shine boys working the streets. A river polluted with feces and chemicals. Families living atop a landfill in "La Mosca" - loosely translated, "The City of Flies."

"There's a smell there I can't even begin to describe," Hoffman says. "You can't get it out of your clothes."

Hoffman hopes those photos help Heller and Martinez-Rico. They're being sold for $500 each, and $200 of that goes to their medical bills. Mixed-media artist Yunia Pavon will also sell her art and donate part of it to Martinez-Rico.

People can also donate directly to the cause.

It costs $700 a day for Martinez-Rico's treatment at The Florida Institute of Neurological Rehabilitation in Wauchula, Heller says. And insurance won't cover any of it.

Until a month ago, his wife didn't even recognize the people around her hospital bed. Now she knows them and talks a little bit, but she still gets confused sometimes, Heller says.

She'll be at the Institute at least another three months, Heller says.

"It's a long road," he says. "She's improving, though. She's making progress."

Hoffman hopes the photos help his friends, but also that they open people's eyes about the world beyond our borders.

"I think what Ingrid and Craig do is really amazing," he says. "I know I'm forever changed, in some ways. It's life-shifting."