MERLIN Ñ “When I got there, I opened my suitcase and there was a little stuffed animal,” Marshall Jones says. “When I was child, I went through some traumatic stuff, and my little teddy bear was my buddy. He got me through a lot of strife.”

A victim of hepatitis C from his Navy days in the Vietnam War, the retired used-car dealer from Merlin had gone looking for a warm, affordable place to winter, and landed in the Dominican Republic in 2011. The potentially life-threatening disease had forced him to sell Marshall Motors in 2009, after 12 years in Grants Pass.

But in the balmy Dominican Republic, Jones discovered that life isn’t all that balmy for immigrant Haitian children who populate the area of Montellano, where he lives as a snowbird part of the year. Haiti, one of the poorest countries on Earth, shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic.

“I was lying in bed thinking about Haitian children, how tough it is for them,” Jones says. “I was thinking, well, maybe I should give them a teddy bear to comfort them a little bit. I tried it once. I said, ‘Here, this for your daughter,’ and they went crazy.

“I found out they’re so poor that nobody can ever have a stuffed animal. So, I bought all these stuffed animals and started handing them out. The kids started getting happier, and then I found out they were starving and I started feeding them.”

His pantry was a cement-block building with no electricity. “Children were coming in and getting a handful of chicken and a handful of rice and going out the door,” he says. “It kept going on for quite some time. I looked out the door and the whole neighborhood was eating.”

He retreated into the shade for a much-needed rest, but just then, a woman appeared. “She was backlit. I couldn’t see her face,” he says. “She said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I just fed all these people.’ She says, ‘What else are you doing?’ I immediately got ticked off.

“This was running through my head as I’m driving back to my little apartment: What’s going to happen when I leave?”

In the typical, desperately impoverished Haitian household, says Jones, the mother is a prostitute, the grandmother takes care of the offspring, and the mother puts the children on the street when she gets too old to work. “I mean, you have 12-year-old mothers.”

He also discovered illiteracy was rampant among Haitians Ñ had been for generations. “They can’t go to school (in the Dominican Republic) because you have to have a birth certificate,” he says, “and in 1962 Haitians were stripped of their citizenship.

“Well, I mean, God got involved, and he says, ‘Build a school!’ And I’m going, ‘Yeah, right, I’m an idiot. I can’t do that. So he broke it down. He says, ‘You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.’ Or, I broke it down, whatever your religious beliefs are. I felt this power that I could do it.”

In 17 breathless days, Jones says he found a small house, organized the Montellano Sunshine School and opened it on June 1, 2011, with 13 students and one teacher. Today, the school is in a bigger building and has 30 students and two teachers.

He also feeds the children. “It’s not steaks and eggs, but it’s food,” he says. “I can see physical differences. They’re bigger. They’re happier. They’re not, like, gimme-gimme-gimme. I say, ‘No gimme.’ I teach them work ethics. If they do something, I give them a few pesos.”

Jones raises money for Montellano when he’s back home in Merlin. It costs about $13,500 annually to run the school.

“Basically, I beg,” he says, “or people see what I’m doing and walk up and hand me money. I’ve had garage sales.”

The public is invited to a bingo fundraiser scheduled for March 15 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the Moose Lodge at 330 Merlin Ave. in Merlin. For more about Montellano School, call Jones at 541-660-5938.

Meanwhile, the hepatitis is a “little time bomb waiting to happen,” says the 62-year-old Jones. “I’m basically sick every day, weak” and pinning his hopes on a newly-developed drug.