A Full Circle Moment: The Dream I Thought Was Dead Is Becoming a School in Neyba

I wanted to share a story with you that I think is going to encourage your heart and grow your faith. It's a story about a moment when dreams you had felt like shattered hopes — you thought they were never going to happen. 

And then, out of nowhere, you get this full-circle moment where you begin to see God's faithfulness in the midst of what you thought was basically a dead story.

Where the story begins

Many, many years ago, my friend Korie invited me to come visit a community in the Dominican Republic called Neyba. Neyba sits right on the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and it's just one of these really harsh communities to live in. There's not a lot of economic activity, not a lot of infrastructure. But there are a lot of amazing humans who live there — humans created in God's image, so beautiful and so brilliant, living in a hard place. This isn't an economic powerhouse of a community. It's a community that needs infrastructure and development.

So we began to partner with Korie and Willie and their family, who had already been spending years working in Neyba at a kid's home. I remember the first time I went down there and met those kids — I was so hopeful, because these kids are amazing. They ranged anywhere from about 4 years old up to 16 or 17 at the time, and every single one of them had a really, really hard story. People like us get a chance to walk alongside kids like that and help them overcome the challenges they face in life.

The missing piece

After many years of working in that community, I ran into something that sits at the very core of how we do this work at Help One Now: we only partner with a high-capacity local leader. What I mean by that is this leader has to be the most brilliant person in the room, one way or another. It's not us — it's the local leader. You've met many of them. You've seen them in our videos. You've seen the work they do. Our model only works with a brilliant local leader.

And in Neyba, we couldn't find that person.

An unexpected connection

I remember having some really hard conversations. We had committed to caring for these kids into adulthood, but I just didn't know how we were going to find that leader in that community. Then a friend connected me to another man, Rod, who's been doing amazing work in La Vega — a community about five hours from Neyba. After many, many conversations, something started to emerge.

The folks in La Vega have spent 30 years watching community transformation happen — church plants, water projects, schools, family empowerment, kids graduating high school, going to college, becoming successful adults in business. Story after story of transformation. And one of the things they've always wanted to do is create hearts of generosity. So years ago, they started taking mission trips from their local youth ministry to Neyba.

I remember sitting in a room we call the rotunda — the sacred place where we get to have these amazing conversations — and this idea started to take shape: what would it look like for Rod and his team in La Vega to formally partner with the amazing people of Neyba? What if these two worlds came together?

That's exactly what we've done for the last two years. And it's amazing, because Rod and his organization have so many needs in their own community, but they also want to bless other communities who have even more need. That's Neyba.

Faithful partners, faithful God

Our partners at Tears — Rod, Chelo, Faye, Obed, and all these amazing humans you may have met — have the best stories. You can't imagine what God has done in their lives. They always remind us that God is beautiful and faithful, and that this is a time to be faithful.

Where the story stands today

So this campaign is one of those full-circle moments. I honestly thought Help One Now would never work in Neyba again. We committed to caring for those kids, and I thought that might be the end of it. But now, Help One Now is building a school in Neyba. We're starting family empowerment programs in Neyba. And it's all being led by high-capacity local leaders — the same team we've been partnering with for ten years in La Vega, now building capacity in Neyba too.

This is your moment

This is your moment to help us supercharge this story — to have another full-circle moment where what you've seen in La Vega for 30 years, all that beautiful, amazing development work, is now going to happen in Neyba as well.

So join us. Help us build the school. Help us invest in Neyba. Because now we have a high-capacity local leader who will make sure this work happens at a high level — not just for a year or two, or five, but for many, many decades to come.

Thank you all for being a part of the Help One Now story. Together, we're changing lives, and we believe so much that we're making the world better and brighter.

— Chris Marlow

Ready to be part of this? Click the link here, donate, and join us in helping build the school in Neyba.