CLASS TRIP a life-changer
Loyola students helped villagers with projects
Students from Loyola see life differently after a week in the Dominican Republic.
As a parent, you want to instil empathy in your kids, and you want to make sure they appreciate things they might take for granted. Reminding them about those who struggle is one thing, but having them see those struggles first-hand takes learning to a whole other level.
Last month, the parents of 70 Secondary 4 students at Loyola High School sent their sons to live for a week with families in the Dominican Republic, where they helped in development projects.
It marked the fifth year that Loyola students have gone to the Dominican, but it was the first for a group of this size. The Notre-Dame-de-Grâce high school works in partnership with the Pasos Esperanza Republica Dominicana organization.
That the visit took place after the school’s two-week spring break was deliberate. Many of the boys had recently come back from enviable vacations. In fact, six of them had just arrived with the Loyola hockey team after visiting Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
My son was one of those boys. Because of flight delays, we had only one hour to replace his hockey bag from Europe with a suitcase of donations and a bag of clothes and send him off to the Dominican.
The 15- and 16-year-old students were billeted with 35 families in two communities. Accommodations were meagre, but despite limited electricity, cold-water-bucket showers and cockroaches, the inhouse experience was as significant as their daytime work.
The families they stayed with gave up their beds for the boys. Laundry was washed by hand, they slept under mosquito nets and ate whatever their house mother prepared for them. My son was staying in a house with another boy, and on their second night they were so exhausted they fell asleep with a small fan running. When the power came back on in the morning, so did the fan.
“The mother was so upset,” my son, Brandan, recounted. “It was an accident, but it was pure waste and I didn’t know how to fix it or make her understand how bad I felt.”
In the province of San Pedro de Macoris, the Loyola students paint- ed and laid concrete in three homes in the city of Consuelo, and built a home from the ground up in the city of San Pedro. Locals went out of their way to offer tools and labour, arriving on-site to help the group in whatever ways they could.
The boys also spent time working with Haitians in a sugar-cane field pulling, hauling and loading canes on a truck. Neighbouring Haitians cross the border into the Dominican Republic as seasonal workers and work long days in sweltering heat, pulling raw canes with their bare hands, earning about 120 pesos ($3.10 Canadian) a day.
The Loyola boys gave the Haitians their gloves and, after visiting where they lived, wished they could have given more.
Student Jack Legler said not being able to make instant change was frustrating — he wanted to stay longer and do more. Though the experience made him grateful for everything he has at home, he was surprised that people there are so happy with so little.
“In a materialistic world, people are driven to make themselves better. But in a simple world, everyone works together.”
A reality check came when the boys visited a food market. Loyola gave groups of boys 100 pesos ($2.60) to buy food for the Haitians living in deplorable conditions near the cane fields. Beans, rice, salami, cooking oil — they learned how hard someone has to work to buy food for one day.
The students agreed that seeing communities of people so happy despite their impoverished living conditions was a humbling experience. As student, Kevin St-Amour explained, “the kids were always holding our hands and jumping on our backs, we played basketball and baseball in the streets with them.”
Brian Traynor, a teacher at Loyola and the organizer of the experience, said the Dominican people had as many positive experiences as the students and 22 adults who travelled with them. Reflections were held at the end of every day. Students, parents, teachers, priests and animators gathered together to share the moments that touched them.
Traynor spoke of a police officer who took time off to help the students that week. He spent a day in the hot sun hammering a corrugated steel roof on the house in San Pedro and during their reflections that afternoon, he couldn’t hold back his tears. “You could have picked any country, but you picked ours. Thank you for picking ours.”
One of the most heart-tugging moments for the Loyola group came on the last full day of the trip. All of the host families had prepared special dishes to be served at a celebration fiesta on the beach.
As a surprise, the Dominican program director arranged to bus to the beach the 150 Haitian kids the boys had seen on the sugar plantation.
“Seeing the group of those kids from the distance, making their way toward us, was so powerful and moving,” he said.
The boys who came back from the Dominican are not the same boys who left a week before. As they walked through the gates at Dorval airport a few at a time, to rounds of applause from the families gathered there, they looked older and you could feel a wiser spirit.
I keep seeing changes in my son, changes that make me proud. They’re teenagers who have the makings of great men.
But it’s something else to consider how you can coach them their whole lives, and all it takes is a week in a village to change them forever.