Latin American Youth Involvement

Our project this summer is one of the AMIGOS projects at the forefront of Latin American youth involvement. We are including six Dominican volunteers in what has traditionally been a US volunteer-based program, and these six volunteers will be working, living and sharing side-by-side with their US counterparts. Two Dominican youth will be participating as AMIGOS volunteers in the Costa Rica project, and also must be properly prepared for their experiences there.

So far we are in the recruiting and training phases. Here are some of the similarities and differences from my experiences with training and recruiting American youth:

Similar:

• Dominican Youth are very eager to participate in AMIGOS. We had nine people apply for the eight volunteer spots available between the DR and Costa Rica programs, and some have already started asking about supervisor-level opportunities.
• They are very excited for the program and happy to participate in all activities!
• They are familiar with some of the same dinamicas (energizers) as we use in our US training (Human Knot, Captain's Coming, Name Games...)

Differences:

• DR youth appear to be more mature as a whole than the US volunteer participants. Part of this may be due to some of the age differences (16 is the minimum age for US volunteers, whereas our partnering agency put the minimum age of 18 for Dominican volunteers)
• Even with the age differences, Dominican youth have expressed very clear commitment toward our standards of conduct and the working aspects of the program.

We have part 2 of our Dominican volunteer training program on Wednesday, so look for updates then!

Making the Best of Challenges

My time in the Dominican Republic has included quite a lot of time on finding "opportunities," or otherwise working on resolutions to problems that have arisen. One of the most recent challenges has been working through water supply issues to the house I'm living in.

It took about a week to find a staff house in San Juan for my project team, which included several days of looking for houses (low availability) and talking with landlords about the possibility of renting for only 3 months, but we finally found a nice house. It's in a nice neighborhood on the edge of town and is about a 15 minute walk into downtown San Juan. The house has a lot of space for the nine people we have living in the house on weekends, when all of the supervisors have come back from their community visits.

But after the first night of being in the house, we ran out of water.

Not that the water turned off temporarily, but that the water storage tank (fed by the city water supply) went dry. We had firefighters fill the water cistern the next day (Sunday) and thought our problems were over. And it happened again on Monday - dry. (Free water delivered by the municipality solved that problem).

After working with the ingenieros (engineers) on possible leaks within the cistern or other water pump equipment, we thought the problem was fixed. But the day after the project supervisors arrived (completing the D.R. Staff team), the cistern went dry again - and on a weekend.

Weekend + nine people = smelly people. Sunday is a rest day in the Dominican Republic, and most offices are closed (all stores close by 2 pm as well). We made an emergency pit stop at a hotel for some bathing Sunday afternoon.

Monday morning, I started working the phones to get an engineer, landlord, or someone from the water company to understand our problem. It didn't seem like it, but it paid off. Magically, overnight, the water cistern had filled up. A "key" had been turned off previously, preventing water from coming from the city into our house.

Lessons Learned: persistence, don't give up, creative solutions (hotel showers) and working the phones can help to solve problems.

We've now been 5 days without water issues!

Dominican Republic!

Well, I have arrived in the Dominican Republic about 10 days ago, and have been busy since getting acclimated and getting our project this summer off the ground!

I arrived in Santo Domingo a day before my companñeros did, and so I went to our hotel Pension La Quisqueyana and began to get to know Santo Domingo. I´ve been to the D.R. twice before, but I´ve never spent much time in Santo Domingo on my own, so it was nice to walk around and get to know the neighborhood I was in. I waited til the sun cooled a bit, and then walked out to the ocean, and around and around and around! Finally I found a great little sandwich shop and had a nice ham and cheese sandwich.

When Mason and Liz arrived the next day, I had explored some more and showed them around. We stayed in Santo Domingo for the weekend to hang out, eat some pizza on El Conde, and get ready for our first PLAN meeting!

Monday morning we met with the PLAN International office and had a great meeting to plan out the work between Plan and AMIGOS this summer. It was interesting to meet so many people and to learn more about how this international non-profit operates in the capital city and surrounding areas.

After our meeting we went directly to the bus station to head to San Juan de la Maguana, the host city for AMIGOS this summer. We spent most of our time in San Juan looking for a house and beginning to meet with the San Juan PLAN office to start collaborations for our summer.

Project Supervisors arrive tomorrow, so we´ve got a lot to do before they arrive!