From vacation idea, a Dominican school
It began eight years ago, on a white-sand beach in the Dominican Republic, not far from the hotel where Anne Post and her teenage daughter were lazing through their first vacation outside Massachusetts. One thing about this country puzzled Post. The schools were open, but everywhere she went, she saw children: on the beaches, in the streets, outside the shops.
Post struggled through a conversation in halting Spanish and English with a group of boys selling jewelry on the beach and learned why. Many families could not afford the incidental costs -- uniforms, backpacks, notebooks -- of sending their children to public school. Post flew home to East Boston, but she couldn't stop thinking about the children.
Next month, after years of planning, several false starts, dozens of trips to the Dominican Republic, and an urgent plea to family and friends for money, the single mother and a young lawyer from a Boston firm are about to celebrate the end of the first year of the school they founded for poor children in that country. The school, named Colegio Los Ninos de Leonardo y Meredith, after two Massachusetts students -- one killed in a shooting, the other in a car accident -- provided everything the children needed, from uniforms to books to daily rides to school.
"I just felt this obligation," said Post, 46, who hired a few employees for her one-woman medical data company so she could spend more time in the country.
In 1999, after that first trip to the Dominican Republic, Post had the idea of helping families buy uniforms for their children. Later, she tried to fund a classroom at an existing private school. But just turning over money wasn't working -- Post wasn't around enough to monitor her efforts. Meanwhile, she knew she needed to create a nonprofit organization in Massachusetts, but struggled to find a lawyer willing to donate time.
Post had no background in this kind of work. She grew up in Brockton and went back to school as a single mother to learn how to interpret electroencephalograms (EEGs). She went on to manage a center that studied sleep disorders and then started her own business interpreting data from the studies.
In late 2005, desperate for legal help for the Dominican school project, she made a plea to the Lawyers Clearinghouse on Affordable Housing and Homelessness, based in Boston. The group sent an e-mail about her project to lawyers who did pro bono work. A young lawyer named Philip Jordan, who had begun working at Bingham McCutchen just two months earlier, was intrigued. He had just graduated from law school and passed the bar.
"I was a little bit nervous because I was so junior," he said.
But Jordan, 28, had spent some time in Caracas, spoke Spanish fluently, and knew he wanted to help children in Latin America. If he needed help, he figured, he could turn to one of the other 1,000 lawyers at his firm.
In August 2006, the nonprofit Los Ninos de Leonardo y Meredith Inc. was formed, and within two months, Post and Jordan had raised enough money to lease and renovate a modest building in Las Terrenas, a small town on the north shore of the Dominican Republic. Although the area's beaches and sultry weather draw international tourists, many of the area's children live in deep poverty.
Post and Jordan hired two teachers and a cook. The teachers headed to the barrios and found 14 children, most between the ages of 6 and 8, for the first two classes at the school, which costs $25,000 a year to run. Most of the children had no schooling; none of them could read.
But when Post and Jordan visited recently, the children showed off their reading skills and asked Jordan to correct their math problems. The two Americans noticed another change: The children, fed two meals a day at school, were no longer gaunt.
Now, Jordan and Post must concentrate on raising money for the school. They plan to teach the same children next year and then, starting in the fall of 2008, they hope to add one grade each year for five years.
One of the students is a boy named Adrian, whom Post met working outside a supermarket, where he was earning a few pesos by carrying bags for customers. The boy lives with his grandmother in a tin-roofed shack with a dirt floor; Post and Jordan had seen him eating discarded food from garbage cans.
His family doesn't know how old he is -- like many of the children in the school, he has no birth certificate -- but Post guesses he's about 10.
"He told me over and over again, his father really doesn't want him and his mother lives somewhere else," Post said. "He feels really obligated to help his grandmother."
When Post flies into the Dominican Republic, no matter the time of day, Adrian is always there.
Next month, Post and Jordan will fly to the school and host a birthday party for Adrian. Since he doesn't know his date of birth, they chose a day for him: July 14, Jordan's birthday.
Los Ninos de Leonardo y Meredith Inc. can be contacted at PO Box 196, East Boston, MA 02128.
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com. 
