We have been here only for two and a half weeks and we already have done so much! This week we not only started but finished our classes on Microsoft Word. Initially we were concerned about how long it would take for the students to learn these skills considering some were not even familiar with keys on the keyboard. To our surprise, most caught on to the basics like formatting font relatively quickly. To finish off the class we had our students work on their final project which consisted of creating a professional resume.
This past weekend was full of accomplishments for everyone. A Mother’s Wish has a preschool for 3 and 4 year old’s and their graduation was this past Saturday. To commemorate their achievement I embarked on a project of my own designing a mural for the graduates of this year and those to come. This mural of a “unity tree”,while it’s still a work in progress, was revealed at the graduation. The students got to put up leaves with their names on them to symbolically represent the growth of the Lynn Barta Academy community.
After the graduation, our Nourish team decided to take a bit of a break through a weekend excursion. We traveled to the beautiful beach of Sosua via guagua (a small and crowded kind of bus) and immersed ourselves in sun and waves. It was a nice way to relax and de-stress so we can return and continue working the way we do.
Until next post!
Jackie
About ufchapter
Success, Sosua, and Sunburn
Gringos en la Selva
We have been in the Dominican Republic for about a week now and there are already so many stories to tell and so much work we have started! Our first night here we stayed in a beautiful house in the mountains. You wouldn’t even realize you left home unless you looked outside and saw that you were actually in the middle of nowhere starring blindly at the mountain tops. It wasn’t until the next day that our real third world experience would begin.
The next afternoon we were introduced to El Llano, the small, rural village in the mountain tops where we would spending the majority of our time for the next six weeks. The people of this small, but proud village are extremely humble and don’t have much to offer, but give whatever they can. We were later greeted by our host families in the homes we would be living in for our time here in the Dominican Republic. Jackie and I were greeted at the door of a small wooden house with hot food on the stove by a women named Mercedes. She proudly exclaimed that her house was our house and that she would be our new Dominican mother. Even without our first world conveniences, we have never felt unwelcome in Mercedes’ home which is something Jackie and I are truly grateful for. However, we soon realized that that the real challenges would present themselves the next day when our work with the people of El Llano began.
Our work here consists of two main parts: successfully start a bakery with the women of the community and teach computer literacy skills to all the young people as well as how to operate Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for professional use. On the side we help teach English classes and assist with whatever pre-school activities Rita and Diego (the coordinators of a Mother’s Wish Foundation) need help with. At first we had no idea what to expect from any of the activities, however the challenges we will face presented themselves almost instantly. While extremely motivated to open a bakery, the women of EL Llano have never baked a day in their lives. To make matters even more difficult, none of them have any knowledge of or how to calculate, revenue, profit, and overhead costs. While this may seem discouraging, the five of us are extremely dedicated to properly training everyone involved with the bakery and hopefully we will be able to reach our goal of starting production by week three. The computer classes came with their own set of unique challenges, the main one being that everybody we are attempting to teach are on completely different levels. Some students know how to type and operate the basic functions of Microsoft word, while others did not even know how to use the space bar of a keyboard. We have attempted to solve this problem by splitting the classes up into three levels (advanced, intermediate, and beginner) and assigning different lessons for each level. Hopefully all goes well next week.
Finally, our trip hasn’t been all work and no play. We have had some rather interesting experiences on our Dominican adventure. Alcohol is really big in this country, and when I say big I mean it. There has not been not one recreational event that we have been to where Presidente (the national beer) and Brugal (the national rum) have not been readily available. Cock fighting, baseball games, and parties featuring local tipico music are just a sample of the various activities we have taken part in. On Saturday night we decided to take a night off and go to a party in the woods. We had such a good time dancing to the local music. It was a really good way for us to bond as a team.
Anyways, I’m sure we will have plenty more stories to tell next week. I have uploaded a few photos of Mercedes’ house and the computer classes! Until next week, hasta luego!
-Alexis
T-Minus 24 Hours
Just think: at this same time tomorrow my friends and I will be merely minutes from reaching our destination airport of Santiago, Dominican Republic and starting our adventure.
At the thought of this, my mind flashes back to all the progress we, as a group, have made at UF. This is the project that our Nourish Chapter has been working all year for. Venture after venture, we have fund raised. We have stood in the hot sun raffling off Ultra Tickets, walked all over campus putting up flyers for the valentine’s day carnation sale and now, finally, we are going to see our funds at action.
Initially, our chapter was unsure if we were going to have enough people to go on our project. We have a small chapter and an even smaller amount of people that can go on the trip. So it was surprising to find out that not only did we get enough people to go, we even have a person joining us from another school! Alexis, Carlos, Billy, Jordan and I are all attending this project and are going to have to work together to get things done. Lesson plans have to be made. Activities have to be planned. For some of us, Spanish must be learned. There is a lot to do in 6 weeks but I’m confident that we will manage.
Until next post!
Jackie
Impact and Growth
IMPACT
Nicol, Katie C., Tisa, and I have returned; Back to our towns, back to our jobs, back to our friends, back to our school, back to our lives. We are exposed to the same amenities that we have enjoyed for years-asphalt roads, quality public education, shopping centers, a honest police force, a government accountable for its actions, the high social mobility that comes with living in the United States. Yet the abrupt realization that these things are, indeed, amenities becomes apparent to us. Comprehending that we were born on a pedestal, and were not even aware of it until so recently. I choose the word pedestal to exaggerate the extensive advantage we have on the quest for success than almost everyone else in the world. This fact, to me, brings a burden. A burden that I welcome. A burden that I need. A burden that I will put absolutly everything that I possess into countermanding. I will not only reach my goals, I will smash them and then set new, higher, more ambitious ones. We will change lives, we will provide opportunity. There is absolutly no excuse to not work hard. That would not only be letting myself down, but the endless amount of lives that I have the power to positively affect.
All this makes me wonder why. Why? Why are there more than a billion people in the world living in extreme poverty, yet I was born into the second most wealthy county in the United States of America? We did absolutly nothing different, I am no better than them. We are equal. Did I win some type of random lottery? Was I luckier? I did nothing to earn my spot here, I do not understand why I possess it. It makes no sense to me at all… Needless to say, I am no closer to an answer. I do know that I have a responsibility, down to my core, to improve the world. I have so much power, with hard work I can be part of a growing student movement-Nourish International. Nourish International WILL have a large hand in eradicating extreme global poverty. I, as a student, am at the center of this movement.
GROWTH
Nicol, Katie C., Tisa and I have been shooting around emails ever since we got back. We are working harder than ever to grow Nourish International UF. We will get members. We will take advantage of our wealth of knowledge to come up with the most successful ventures. We will look to see what our campus wants and needs. We will use the money generated from these ventures to fund another project, to impact another community, to change more lives of people now, and of generations to come.
Katie Faughnan
Seeing Results.
Hello everyone!
I haven’t been able to write on this blog because there have been so many other things to keep up with! Not only do I write on this blog, but I also have a personal blog in which I write some personal thoughts on my experiences here in Guatemala. I also recently bought a beautifully hand-crafted journal in Antigua that I am trying to put to use and write down some everyday, random thoughts of my travel experiences. It’s a lot of writing to keep up with and although I don’t write the same things in all blogs it still gets kind of confusing trying to remember whether or not I’m repeating myself! Anyways, today was by far the best day I have had here in Guatemala and I think I can speak for the rest of the girls when I say this. We all woke up a bit tired since we stayed up talking about our plans for Nourish International in the upcoming semester. I have never been so excited to be part of something so meaningful and empowering and I really hope that we can reach a lot more people this upcoming year. We spent exactly SIX hours after dinner discussing our plans and opportunities for the club this upcoming year. We bounced ideas off each other all night, it was like a super intense six hour ping- pong game where we came up with ways in which we can amp up our club meetings and the ventures we conduct around campus. We all got so excited and sent out tons of emails contacting people that would want to be part of the growth process that Nourish International will experience this upcoming year.
So, we got ready for a regular day at work except for the fact that we got stuck in traffic for about 2 hours because of some accident/ student strike that broke out on our way to Potter’s House! It was crazy because there were people running around in the streets and drivers going over sidewalks trying to escape the traffic. So after going over the sidewalk we were on our way to work! Today we got to teach the women from the beauty salon class, and originally we were gonna do a lesson on revision and reiteration of their marketing plans and financial plans but, we decided to change this last minute and talk about how to be an innovator. While on this trip I read Steve Jobs’s biography and I absolutely enjoyed all 600 pages of it (even though most people were sick and tired of me talking about his unusual ways). Either way, reading the biography really opened up my eyes to the importance of innovation so I decided to pass down this knowledge to these women. After a couple of encouraging videos of other women who started micro-enterprises I decided that it would be a great idea for Katie Conner to come up and speak about her experiences when she started Nourish International. She talked about all the many failures she experienced while trying to get Nourish off the ground and how she was able to learn from those failures to create money making ventures that succeeded. I explained that starting a business is all about learning to cope with failures and letting go of the fears that hold you back. I read a quote from Og Mandino, the author of The Greatest Salesman In The World, that spoke about turning your ideas into actions. It talked about the fact that success waits for no one and tomorrow is only in the calendar of fools. We noticed that the women were laughing and enjoyed relating to us while we talked about our failures with trying to raise funds for Nourish and how we learned from those experiences. It’s all true, a lot of the times we feel like idiots and we’re scared of what people are going to think about us when we get out there and try to make something happen, but it always turns out to be a learning experience. At the end of the class one of the women, who we have never heard speak before, stood up and said she spoke on behalf of all the women when she said that they have learned a tremendous amount from our classes and that our lessons have changed the way they think about life and business. At this point Katie F., Tisa, Katie C. and I looked at each other in shock as our jaws dropped. This was the first time we have heard any feedback from them and we could not have been more thankful for the words that came out of her mouth. I told them on behalf of all of us that they have taught us more than we could ever teach them, and that this has been such a unique adventure for all of us. I then dismissed the class, and to my surprise half of the women stayed after class and came up to us to ask us questions about Nourish International, our personal lives and what we have done to overcome the struggles that come our way. I told them about how my parents and I immigrated to the United States when I was seven, how difficult it was for us to adapt to a place where we had no friends or family and how my father started washing cars to support our family while my mom worked as a secretary. I told them about how my parents left our past in Bolivia and forced my brother and I to work hard in and out of school so that we could shape our own paths for the future.
I told them to live a life of adventure and curiosity and fun because the only thing stopping them is death, and hey, we’re all gonna reach that at one point so we might as well continue to live each day as if it were our last, because we never know when we’ll be right. Below are some pictures of our classes!
Much love to all! I’ll be back in just a couple of days!
Nicol.
Some Thoughts
Whether one wants to believe that it happened by chance or that some contributory hand of fate caused it, the influences in my life have specifically (and in my opinion purposefully) tailored me into the individual that I have gown into.
My parents are undoubtedly the most intelligent people I have ever encountered. I say that with the utmost substance, in a way that could not be more genuine. I choose the word intelligent to describe them because in my mind, the word encompasses what it means to be all types of smart. They are the type of clever that includes the ability to succeed in school and trades, to excel with people, to demonstrate inquisitiveness, to be perceptive, and to view life in a holistic way that puts everything into perspective. My dad always taught me the importance of listening to what people have to say, the importance of enjoying all life has to offer. While my mom, the woman with the biggest heart in the entire world, instilled a desire to use what I have been given to challenge the status quo, to make a change for the better.
If you told me two years ago that the random elective that I was placed into was going to even make me think, let alone have a profound impact on my life…I probably would have laughed in your face. However, as life often goes, I was taken by complete surprise. While I was a senior in high school I had the distinct honor of being a student in Dr. David Campbell’s world religions class. Never in my life was I more enthralled by lecture, more determined to allow the insight of a person to penetrate my head and saturate my brain. A particular sentence that he said sticks out above all others. He told us that a person finds his passion when he encounters something for which he is willing to suffer, something for which he is willing to do anything for.
Well Doc C, I’ve found it! I’ve found it, and then some. Casa Del Alfarero deserves to be recognized. Its mission warrants the organization to be put on a pedestal for the world to observe, and hopefully duplicate time and time again. By identifying and targeting the eight forms of poverty, Casa Del Alfarero aims to provide specific programs to empower people to conquer the circumstances in which they’ve been born into. This mission is something that I whole heartily love being a part of, something that encompasses everything that I have been taught and influenced to value, something that I’d do almost anything to see succeed.
Four times a week, we give English classes to five young people who have the opportunity to travel to the United States in June to visit their sponsor families. Each of them has to write a 4-5 page testimony about how Casa Del Alfarero has impacted their lives. We had them first write it in Spanish, then aided them with the translation. Let me tell you…never have I been more moved then while translating these papers. Every so often, I have to fake a cough or quickly turn my head away to get a perplexed frown out of my system, before facing them once again with a smile. The first boy whose testimony I translated is named Jonathan, he grew up with his family relying on the garbage dump. Two f his brothers died of disease before reaching adulthood. I read the sentence in which he was describing the death of his brothers, and was completely taken aback. For one, he used the Spanish verb ‘faltar’ for ‘to die’ and I had never seen that verb used in such a way. So, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant. But then after asking Nicol and reading the context…the truth hit me. I think it physically pained me just translating this sentence. But, I also knew that the world needed to hear his story…
I want to make it clear though, that this boy was not playing on the unfortunate life to get sympathy or charity. His testimony spoke of his unfaltering faith that God’s plan for his life was one that was sure and right. He did not dwell, on or even seem to realize, how many terrible things had happened to him. But instead, wrote page after page about the opportunity for education and love that Casa Del Alfarero and his sponsor parents have presented with him with. Like my good friend Ana Chang told me… “You come to Casa del Alfarero thinking you’re going to help people, but they end up helping you.”
The second testimony I translated was that of the 24 year old girl Susy. This testimony is the one that legitimizes Casa del Alfarero’s mission, the one that proves that success is possible. Susy grew up near the dump, her dad being an alcoholic. Susy studied hard in school and eventually was able to attain a scholarship to a better private school provided by her sponsor parents and Casa. She conveyed to me that her first few years in the private school were very hard for her because everyone else attending had so much money. She was the only poor kid in the entire school, and because of this no one wanted to associate with her. She admitted to me that she came home crying almost everyday, and was ready to quit countless times. She knew though, that if she stayed strong, she would be able to be a model for all the other kids coming out of the dump. So she studied, fought through, and eventually graduated high school with high honors. She earned a place in the University, and was also granted a scholarship. She graduated college, and now works as a teacher… free from the grip of poverty and out of the dump. Education…Opprotunity…Success…Freedom…
I used to think that peace of mind came from ignorance…from not knowing. I used to think that a free mind, a completely satisfied being was only possible if one was unaware of the injustice that exists. Although this isn’t completely wrong, I know now that this mindset is not even close to correct. Peace of mind comes from working as hard as you possibly can, using your talents, to improve the world. I am in no way insinuating that people need to give money or time that they don’t have. I don’t believe people should give easy handouts. I do think that something as simple as being passionate about what you do on a daily basis is good enough to make the change needed.
Many times when I write, I find that I don’t even know what I have sat down to convey until I am finished. Before I start, I just know that I have the desire to share a story with whoever decides to give up the time to read. I believe in the strength of words. I believe that through their complete disregard for boarders of all kind, they have the capability to share thoughts and influence lives throughout humanity.
I hope this post has found you all well!
Katie F.
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A Dog, A Cow, and Llama – Es Una Vida Dificil
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Home Again!
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One Week has Flew By!
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Time dilation in a far away nation
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Pre-Cameroon Musings
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Success, Sosua, and Sunburn
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Getting Ready For the Trip!
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Many thanks to our outgoing Board Members
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Orientated
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Announcing our 2013-14 Student Board Members
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Olivia: Wow that's really incredible! Hope you had an ama...
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Angela Tassone: Great blog, love to hear all the exciting stories ...