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!