By Aekta Shah & Katerina Stephan
As the early morning fog dissipated into scattered rays of Caribbean sunshine, 16 sleepy-eyed college students devoured their bowls of Haitian-style oatmeal, soaking up the welcomed, unfamiliar warmth, and watching as a slender man herded his cows through the stream below. It was serene. It was paradise. It was Spring Break 2015 in the Dominican Republic. Organized and led by three Northeastern students, Samantha Odreman, Melissa Furci and Estefania Arenas Calderon, the trip was designed to include a mixture of cultural immersion, active volunteer work, and just plain fun.
The Dominican Republic, our destination, has a long and complicated history. After gaining independence from Spain, the DR was occupied by Haiti, its only neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, for 22 years. As a result, tensions have always been high between the two, and in 2013, the Dominican Republic passed legislation that revoked citizenship from all Dominicans who had been born to Haitian parents from 1930 onward, leaving thousands of people stateless, without any papers. The community we stayed with in Muñoz, Puerto Plata, was comprised mainly of people living in this citizenship-less limbo, and although we were in the Dominican Republic, where the national language is Spanish, most of our surrounding neighbors spoke Haitian Creole as their first language. As a group of foreign students, we did not arrive expecting to put all the street children into schools, clean up the massive amounts of litter, find jobs for all the unemployed, and deal with all the other pressing issues facing Muñoz, but we had more than just “break” on our minds. We went to the DR to learn and have a blast, all while doing everything we could to make even the smallest difference in the lives of one or two of those around us.
Our week would not have been possible without the support from our partner organization Project Esperanza, an organization based in Puerto Plata. Co-founded and led by a Virginia Tech graduate Caitlin McHale, or as the locals call her, Catalina, Project Esperanza primarily (but by no means exclusively) serves the surrounding Haitian immigrant population in education, social aid, and community development. They work with the most marginalized people in the DR: those who live in rural communities called bateyes. Originally colonized by Haitian immigrants who were working at sugar plantations, most bateyes are still populated today despite the fact that the companies who once owned the sugar plantations have long disappeared.
One of the trip’s highlights was an enormous community soccer match that was held on our first day. It served as the perfect opportunity for us to say hello to some of the batey residences and bond with the children that we would be working with during the week. As a large group of American students, we were initially concerned that the community might feel as though we were invading their privacy. However, everyone we met welcomed us, and our broken Spanish, with open arms. This positive reinforcement inspired us to interact with as many community members as we could, and by the end of the week, we had made friends, visited different homes, given more than a hundred high fives, and even helped to name someone’s baby. We feel extremely grateful that the community accepted us and allowed us to learn from them about their daily lives and frustrations.
Throughout the week, we worked on a number of tasks that Project Esperanza needed completed. These projects included conducting a street census on working youth on the streets, playing with small groups of preschoolers and helping them with a color learning game, and painting the outside of the new Project Esperanza school. Our largest project, though, was planning and implementing a trash and recycling program for grades K-12. We collectively brainstormed different lesson plans, and then, with our 3 team leaders who were fluent in Spanish and a handful of “know-a-bit-of” Spanish speakers, we brought the lessons to life in one of the public schools as well as in one of the Project Esperanza schools. With the younger classes, we talked with the students about what it means to recycle, why it’s important to not litter, how trash in the fields impacts their health, what the dangers of burning trash are, and what the overall benefits of having less trash in the community would be. For some of the high school students, we proposed a problem Caitlin was having with collecting enough plastic to make a pay-per-pound recycling program cost-effective, and encouraged them to resolve the issue. For other high school students, we proposed the overall problem of trash and recycling in the community, asking them to think of possible solutions to get their community involved with keeping their beautiful homeland clean. They came up with some fascinating ideas, which we passed on to hopefully one day be implemented by Project Esperanza.
In addition to teaching the lessons, we returned to all of the classrooms to do a trash can construction project, where we worked alongside the students in making the trash cans out of recycled plastic bottles. This hands-on activity reiterated our lesson and was an exciting project for the students to start and finish together. The cans will be placed around the community, and when they see the trash cans, not only will they hopefully be able to recycle, they’ll also stand proud because they took part in creating them.
In addition to direct volunteering, we also were given the opportunity to interact with people in the batey and explore the surrounding culture and country. One evening, one of the boys we befriended took us on a horseback riding excursion with the company he worked for. We got to trot through thick mud and fields of sugar cane and gallop along a picture perfect beach. Another night, we learned how to make a traditional Haitian dessert that was essentially a little banana doughnut. On the last night, several of our Haitian/Dominican friends joined us for a dance party, and laughed alongside us as we learned a couple of dance moves from the bachata and salsa. Each day was packed with activities, yet the week still managed to fly by.
During our limited time, it quickly became evident that the true value of our trip would not be in how we could change our surroundings, but rather how our surroundings could change us. We were there to teach a little but learn more, to speak a little but listen more, and ultimately to impact a little but be impacted as much as possible. As our accompanying professor pointed out, each day we had in the Dominican Republic was a gift. Not everyone gets the opportunity to spend a week immersed in a foreign culture, much less eat fresh home-cooked meals, interact with the local community on an intimate level, and witness firsthand a way of life some students have only seen on a screen or read about in a book. It was an incredible experience, as fun as it was inspirational, and each student returned to the United States with a new perspective, a greater appreciation for what we have, and a collection of unforgettable memories. We have also returned inspired to continue our efforts in Muñoz with Project Esperanza and plan to meet again to discuss possible fundraising efforts as well as future projects in the Dominican Republic. Not bad for a weeklong break.
