A Journey to the Dominican Republic to Build a Home

Sam Kohrman

Sam Kohrman

This summer I spent the month of July in the Dominican Republic as a volunteer with Visions International, a youth service organization that performs construction work for needy communities all over the Americas and the Caribbean. My home for the month was Santa Fe, an old �batey,� a town based around a sugar cane factory. In the mid 1990�s the sugar factory closed leaving the town in dire poverty.

Our group of twenty-two students and six staff lived in the local school. We spent our days building a house for a single family and started construction on a newer and bigger school for the community.

When I first arrived I was startled to see how different Santa Fe was from Miami. When I arrived at the school I noticed the garbage heaps being nibbled on by the many goats, pigs and dogs wandering the town. The air was thick with dust and the smell of burning trash. At night I slept under thick mosquito netting which along with pills protected me from malaria. There was no air conditioning and the electricity would shut off every day.

Margarita and her family lived in a two room tin shack housing nine people. The tin house was very uncomfortable because it would get extremely hot during the day. We replaced her shack with a cinderblock and cement three room house much larger than her original. The new house contains the family�s first indoor bathroom. I cannot describe the sense of utter gratification we experienced on the last day of our trip when we visited Margarita and her family in their completely furnished home. The house looked so different to me from what it had looked like just two days earlier, when I pushed a wheelbarrow over the newly cemented floors to the last room filling it with sand and cement.

We also ran a day camp for the young children in the neighborhood. That camp was the only organized activity in the community that provided fun and productive days for the children. We played games, did art projects and managed to offer a daily English class. I loved spending time with the kids and they loved seeing Americans. Every morning they happily shouted �Americano, Americano.� Those calls would follow us throughout the day.

What I found interesting there was that though the people were so poor and had so little material possessions, they still expressed so much joy in their lives. The kids were always happy and playing, though they had dirty ragged clothes and no toys. The people seemed a lot happier than many of the more comfortable people I know in the United States.

Part of the experience was a two day home stay during which I lived with a family for a weekend. It was a lot of fun because I had already established a friendship with that family before the home stay. Unlike my own family who barely has time to sit down for dinner, this family took life at a slower pace. They spent a lot of time enjoying each other�s company and they welcomed me as part of their family.

When I returned home, I had reverse culture shock. I couldn�t believe how clean everything was and I found myself preferring to be outside than inside my air-conditioned house.

It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

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