One aspect about me is that I’ve always wanted to travel, explore the world and visit some of the greatest places known to man. I haven’t really been anywhere outside of the area of where I lived in my whole life on long island and my grandmother’s house in Dominican Republic, for the sole purpose of traveling there is to visit my family who normally gather there. Last year my best friend had a strong desire to go to Italy, she studied the language all throughout high school and now she wanted to put her skills to the test by living there for a month, she found this great study abroad program online and convinced me to do it as well. Instead of just choosing a home stay program, where I would simply stay with a host family for a month to get a better look at the culture and become more fluent in speaking the language, I decided to choose a community service program to do something hands-on, meet a great group of teenagers and hopefully make a difference in the process. I decided to go to Costa Rica, the main reason being that I was already fluent in Spanish so it wouldn’t be much of a struggle to manage living there. As we arrived to Costa Rica, our group bonded very quickly and we got along very well, it was an experience I will never forget and even though I felt we could’ve done something more useful with our time and made more of a difference somehow even if that meant focusing on one project for the month, I didn’t regret anything about the experience and our journey. The program was set up so that each week we would be able to perform a different project, the first week we stayed at a farm and tended to the crops and animals there, then the second and third weeks we stayed with two different host families while repairing two different high schools. In the first school we re-tiled the bathrooms and in the second school we painted the school rooms, it actually looked much better when it was finished so that was something I was proud of. During the last week of our stay we helped repair trails at a National Park in the rainforest, which actually got to be very messy at one point when we were covered in mud while working in the rain. I had no regrets coming out of the program, I even formed a great friendship with one of my peers and we still talk today. I didn’t know what to expect coming into this and I’ve always been skeptical when it came to new experiences, but now I know that great outcomes could result in the process. Here is a picture of all of us in the very beginning of our adventure! 🙂
