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A Summer to Remember
by Kathryn McGrath, 09.17.04
"It was a life-changing and amazing experience." |
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When friends at school ask him what he did this summer, Adam Cole, a senior in White Bear Lake, MN, has a quick answer: "I built fuel-efficient lorena stoves in Nicaragua."
Adam, 18, was one of 52 young adults ages 16 to 21 who traveled from their comfortable American homes to Chinandega, Nicaragua, to spend six weeks living with local families and working with them on health and environmental projects in the community.
Adam's Story
Adam lived with a family of seven in a three-room house in El Madrono, a small village in the hills of 140 people. There was no running water, and for most of the summer, no TV. "A week before we left, one family got a TV, but it was powered by solar electricity," Adam says. He slept on a cot under mosquito netting, carried his own water from a well, and played soccer with the local kids when he wasn't busy constructing stoves out of dirt and horse manure.
Adam and two other teenage volunteers went to El Madrono with the organization Amigos de las Americas. Last summer, 632 volunteers from across the U. S. traveled to seven countries in Latin America to participate in Amigos' various community service programs. Volunteers work with local organizations and residents on construction and education projects, like repairing schools and community centers, building health clinics and latrines, and planting trees and community gardens.
In Brazil, Amigos volunteers gave health presentations, repaired roofs, and constructed health clinics. In Honduras, they planted trees and built latrines, showers, and fences, while in Panama they planted community gardens, created public parks, and painted murals.
To join an Amigos program, you must have completed your sophomore year of high school and taken two years of Spanish or Portuguese. Months before Amigos volunteers buy their airplane tickets, they meet with their local Amigos chapter to prepare for the summer ahead. Past volunteers share their experiences working and living in rural Latin America and everyone practices speaking Spanish. When Amigos volunteers finally arrive, they spend a few days learning more about the country and their projects before heading out in small groups to rural towns and villages.
Alexa's Trip
Two years ago, when Alexa Hudson was 16, she traveled to a small village in Thailand with the group Global Routes. "We built a salla — it's part of a wat, the Buddhist equivalent of a church," she says. "I had never built anything before! The construction was cool — I learned how to lay bricks and mix cement."
Global Routes organizes month-long trips to places as far away as New Zealand, Ghana, and Costa Rica for high school students who have finished the ninth grade. Pairs of students stay with local families for two or three weeks, working on a construction project before traveling with the whole group to do fun activities, like rafting or going on a safari. Alexa's group traveled to Vietnam after she spent three weeks with a mother and her two young daughters in a traditional Thai house on stilts. "By the end, I was bawling because I didn't want to leave them," she says.
Making a Difference
In the six weeks that Adam and his Amigos partners were in El Madrono, they built 18 wood-burning stoves with chimneys, providing a more fuel-efficient and healthy way for families to cook. "They have a lot of problems with respiratory disease there," Adam explains. "The stoves we built had three burners rather than just one, and the glass under the main burner heats it more quickly, so they need to use less wood." Adam and his friends also built a park with a playground for the 23 families in El Madrono.
"The thing I loved the most about it is being able to say I have a second family in Nicaragua," Adam says. "What I'll remember most of all are the wonderful people who welcomed us into their homes and fed us and took care of us." Adam thinks that it might be hard to explain when people casually ask, "How was your summer?" but he's got a short answer: "It was a life-changing and amazing experience."
To learn more about international summer service programs and how to apply, visit Global Routes and Amigos de las Americas. |
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