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Electrical and computer engineering major Ben Towne ’09 (Litchfield, N.H.) spent 10 days in July on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic with the organization Foundation For Peace. His trip was funded by Lafayette’s Jeffrey B. Havens ’78 Memorial Fund Award, which provides nontraditional, summer learning experiences with opportunities for education, growth, and personal development outside the classroom.
When you ask most people where they’d like to be on a hot, humid day in mid-July, very few would say “miles away from AC, doing manual labor in the sun while wearing long clothes.” The few who jump at the chance are a very special breed of people. This summer, I had the pleasure of joining some of those people from College Hill Presbyterian Church on a mission trip to the Dominican Republic, building a primary school in La Javilla de la Cruz.
Our host organization was the Foundation For Peace (FFP), which works in impoverished communities to build capacity for constructive use of local abilities, building peace through health and education. FFP’s approach to mission is driven primarily by the community; their motto and purpose focuses on working “mano a mano,” or “hand-in-hand.” Most of our work focused on physical construction of the school’s foundation and supporting walls. Building capacity through education is a critical first step to building peace – especially in an area where basic education and literacy are valuable gems not to be taken for granted. We also met with the local community leaders to hear the hard facts about economic, educational, health, and social conditions where we were working.
One day, we ran a medical clinic, assisted by doctors from the capital city of Santo Domingo. For many of these families, this will be the only medical attention they receive in a year or more. Through donations raised prior to the trip, we were also able to donate more than 1,000 toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, and other essentials as part of hygiene kits that would improve health conditions through the rest of the year. For this clinic, I served as pharmacist.
On Sunday, we provided direct education through vacation bible school programs in two communities. Just before leaving, we had an afternoon to host a “sports clinic” with the La Javilla kids who had been working with us all week. We brought various balls, jump ropes, and Frisbees to leave behind. The streets and an empty lot are the only recreational areas the kids have; once a year, if they’re lucky, they might get a church-sponsored field trip to a park or swimming pool. Offering opportunities for constructive use of kids’ energy and talent is important in building a brighter economic future, as well as in overcoming issues of drugs and violence that plague the community.
We completed the school’s foundation and exterior walls. For our final evening worship, the Dominicans decorated the interior with balloons and streamers. We celebrated the new friends we had worked with, connecting across language and culture. We gave thanks for the wonderful hospitality of those who had little material wealth but a bounty of spirit and community strength. We gained a new appreciation for physical labor and learned, in the words of our group leader, that “peace isn’t always contingent on situations and circumstances but rather on the response and perspective of the people involved in it all.”