Mother's Day in the DR

The last Sunday of May is always Mother's Day in the Dominican Republic. Mothers are the backbone of the family in the DR, so Mother's Day is a really big event. This, however, does not address the resulting difficulties of single parenthood. Unfortunately there are 1,400,000 single moms out of a total population of nine million people. I have no ready answers here. Our school in Don Juan has a fiesta on the preceding Friday to honor the moms of our school children. One photo is of the gathering and the other of children doing a folk dance.
The last Saturday of May we celebrated the closing of the Year of the Priesthood in the DR with a large mass in the Palace of Sports in Santo Domingo. All the nation's bishops, the Cardinal, and many priests, myself included, came together for this event which also involved nine ordinations from different dioceses of the DR.