Testimonials from Darmouth College Volunteers

Laura Matrka

One of the things that still strikes me about Cabarete is the openness of the kids there. I was unsure about my role coming into the project in Cabarete, but I quickly found that spending time with and listening to the kids must have been the most important one. As in any overburdened school system, some of them simply had no one to listen to them. The teachers there did amazing things with what they had, and the students from Dartmouth filled in the cracks, probably doing more for the kids emotionally than academically.

I remember seeing myself in a different light when the kids in Cabarete asked about my life. When I told them about growing up, moving several states away to go to school, and now living on my own, it was all of the sudden a big deal again. What an incredible thought for them to imagine someday not living here in Cabarete, trying to finish eighth grade and working to help support their families. (High school was an option for the children that did especially well up to that point, and whose families could afford to let them go.) That they might be able to see another part of the country, have their own apartments, be responsible for their own educations – such ideas were too far away for some of them. These children wouldn’t ask me about my college again. But for others, you could almost see the ideas gaining a form as they kept bringing it up every day. How old were you when you went away to school? What did your family do when you left? Do you miss them? Will you move back there when you’re finished? Why do want to keep going to school? My life was a very foreign thing to them. I began to see the immense independence I had, and to appreciate even more what an incredible thing it was that my parents could send me to school, and that college had been a given for me and not something I had to overcome great odds to achieve. For them, just the idea of leaving their families and not bringing in a little extra cash from shoeshining was enough to keep them out of high school. The idea of their parents actually paying their tuition at a university was preposterous.

This, in one sense, is why the Cabarete program cannot fail. Whether the students chosen one term are especially accomplished or not, their background, their good intentions, and their presence are maybe the most important things they can offer. The variations in the way they teach and the programs they implement while there are important, but peripheral to the exposure and time they provide the children.

Having said that, the program is designed so that the ambitions and creativity of individual Dartmouth students can be fully developed, bringing new possibilities to the students with each new term. The program allowed us so much freedom that it would have been difficult not to innovate, to look around and see what needed to be done. We were there with the time and ideas, and people like Tricia Suriel and Michel Zaleski were there with the resources and contacts in the area.

As with most community projects like this one, it was much easier to see how much I had gotten out of it as a volunteer than to be certain about what I had accomplished for the school. But the understanding I gained, which was certainly just scraping the surface, will keep me always involved with the area. I feel the project is generating an ever-growing group of people who feel a special connection with the people of the Dominican Republic. Whether or not we can ever help again in the same way that we did back then, we will certainly be helping with our own resources in the future.