Glimpse of Glimpse

Over the summer of 2016, I was fortunate to be accepted to a program called Global Glimpse. With Global Glimpse I traveled to the Dominican Republic for 18 days with one other student from GCE Lab School; in total there were 20 students and two teachers from different high schools in the Chicago area. The city I traveled to in the Dominican was Bonao, which is in the center of all the mountains The main purpose of this trip was to work with local people teaching children to speak English.

Teaching wasn’t everything, we got to experience the lifestyle of the locals and how one area of the Dominican was different from another. Our experience in the Dominican highlighted differences of living in the United States. There was no hot water for showers, so it was a cold bucket shower everyday; which to me wasn’t so bad, because the weather was so hot. We couldn’t drink the water there so we had special purified water made for us and we couldn’t eat street food, only the food that was made for us, or any place they said is safe. Everyday was different, where we could learn and do different things, for example we had a “Living like a local day” where we actually had to live like a local. This meant less food for the day, no lighting in the place we stayed at and no fans to cool us down. Or “Working like a local day” where we went out to help plant plants. Another example was “Imigration day” this day we got to meet a Dominican village where all the people came from Haitian descent and we got to see how Haitians were viewed by a lot of Dominicans.

Not everyday was like this. On Wednesday we had a fun day and on our first fun day we hiked to a waterfall. We also had Free days, where we got to go out in a group of four people and shop and just walk around Bonao. We did so much in just 18 days, and it was truly amazing. But I want you to walk away with an important lesson that I learned, these people while living in “poor conditions” don’t need our help. They want us working with them, and being a team; not just helping them a little and going away.

The last days were for our Community Action project (CAP), where we were presented with many different ideas of what we could to do by the locals. The one idea that caught our eye was building a playground so they didn’t have to play in the street. We did this by donating money and then we used that money to build the playground. We never got to finish but we did so much that the locals were very happy and couldn’t wait to complete it for us. Not only did we build this playground, but we had enough money to buy a deep freezer for another CAP, so our delegation was able to do two CAPs in the span of two days! Below is a slideshow with pictures of my trip, please enjoy! If you want to see more go to this link of a video I made of the trip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tF4dL-HW3xg.