Study Abroad Story 3

Statement of Rachel Stevens

Wilmington College, Wilmington, Ohio

For the past four years, I have gone to the Dominican Republic for two weeks of my winter vacation. I spend half of each January working with orphaned children. I live with a Dominican family, and I work in a small mountain town called Jarabacoa. I’ll describe my typical week.

Three days a week, we do construction work. Then we work with orphans in sort of a “vacation Bible school” setting. The other two days a week, we work with kids from the street who don’t have a place to live. Even though I don’t speak much Spanish and they don’t speak English, their smiles say everything. Their whole faces light up when we come in to talk with them and teach them a little of what we know.

Working in the DR taught me so much about how we take so many things for granted in the US. Walking through the grocery store with my Dominican family, the lights would just go out, and it was no big deal for them. When taking a shower, it was either really hot or really cold, and once I had to shower using only a bucket. Some mornings there was no electricity. We ate whatever we had for breakfast; it was mostly rice and hot dogs.

I realized how different our worlds were when, after returning home from working with the orphans, my Dominican sister said that we were “back to civilization.” That really hit it home for me; the US is so much more modernized than a lot of the world. We take little things for granted all the time, and we need to step back and think about other people in the world and what they consider “civilized” living.