When the kids are away, the leaders will play

Kent the Kiwi (a New Zealander)., Ricky Martin (Cole), Pipes (Paul), and myself (Ryan) made a quick trip to the centre of DR, to Jarabacoa, after the first group of heroes left and before the second group arrived to partake in some adventure. I am a paraglider pilot so I wanted do some flying in the mountains, and the other guys were planning on getting some tandem flights at the same time. The mountain top was too windy so the guys tried their hand at learning to fly solo at the training hill.

That picture is Pipes on his first flight. As fun as that was, he much more enjoyed watching Cole running full tilt down the hill then abruptly doing a major face plant.

And all of us were quite surprised that a Kiwi bird could actually fly.  We also found a large waterfall to swim in and enjoyed an incredible restaurant called Lena Parillio’s where you get a gourmet meal that should cost $50 for $15.

The Heroes are Home

Hello everyone. Just a quick note for family and friends. I just spoke with Charles and everyone has landed back on Canadian soil safe and sound.

Our Last Work Day

It is so hard to believe Trip One is nearly done. Today was our last day of work on the building projects. Everyone is sad to think about leaving but happy to see how much we accomplished in such a short time. This first picture is the upstairs level at Arroyo Seco. The walls are nearly all smooth-coated and we’ve started the walls which will make four classrooms.

This is the trench that will eventually be a fence surrounding the entire property.

This is the fence going up at the front of the property.

The School at Cangrejo.

And we can’t forget the bano…

And the girls who dug the bano!

Tomorrow is the final day for Trip One. It’s a day to go back to both sites and say good-bye. We are also having a community party at Arroyo Seco. Yesterday we spent hours sorting all of the gifts our students brought. We have 400 gift bags for the kids tomorrow. We’ll be sure to take some pictures. Then it’s a couple of days off for those of us who are here for the next group. I might even get some time to actually write a proper blog with feelings and stories and such!

Participant Blog: 4 pesos a day…

Being thrown into a world of poverty, you slowly begin to realize the significance of what we sometimes take for granted in life. On our fourth day of this exciting and life changing experience, we visited a garbage dump to pass out water to the underprivileged people. From the first minute we arrived, there was an instant feeling of need. Looking around we saw young kids and adults alike rummaging through the garbage looking for cans, bottles or anything that they could potentially use to survive. After meeting Julio, a little Dominican boy, I began to realize just how hard it was and started to help him look for cans within the huge piles of garbage…which was definitely not an easy task! After about 20 minutes I had only successfully found 4 cans for Julio. I’d place one of those cans in the huge sack he was carrying, his face would light up even more, knowing that these cans were filling the sack which he would get 4 pesos for (approximately 25 cents CAD). This struck me hard. Meeting Julio had a huge impact on my life, he taught me how to be grateful for what I have, because after these 10 days are over I am returning to Canada where things go back to normal but kids like Julio are stuck here living and struggling each day to survive the harshness of poverty. I know that seeing that smile on his face was well worth the trip! – Jamie, 17, Student from Newfoundland

*All participants are given the opportunity to blog so many views are represented. These views do not neccesarily reflect the views of LiveDifferent (formerly Absolute) Leadership Development. If you are a Hero Holiday participant that would like to share your experience please email your story (and picture, if possible) to blog@heroholiday.com

I love my team!

So I’m here…scandalous humidity and all…and I’m having a stinkin’ awesome time of it!

I must take this moment to give a shout out to Team 4…an amazing bunch of kids who have been a pleasure to hang with this week…I see how hard they work, each shovel full of dirt or armload of bricks bringing us one step closer to finishing our projects, and I’m reminded of why I do what I do! My team is a great bunch of newfies…and the rest of us who have become adopted newfies…there’s just something about being around Newfoundlanders that makes you feel at home, even when you’re far away.

We’ve done so much this week, it’s hard to recount it all. We’ve been building two schools in separate communities. I was extremely excited, because not only did I get to show a little muscle by wielding a pick-axe, I also got to use a real, bonafide machete for the first time! And…as irony is a major player in my life, I didn’t actually hurt myself with it, but I did get a massive bruise on my leg later on in the week by tripping over a wheelbarrow…seriously, who doesn’t see a wheelbarrow?

We also visited an orphanage where there were around 30 mentally and physically disabled children. We spent the day playing with them and feeding them…each one had such personality, and they were so happy to see us! At first, it was kinda hard on the students…and me…to see their living conditions, and how most of them were confined or restrained in their beds and cribs. But, once we started walking around, saying ‘Ola’, and picking them up, their faces just lit up and none of us wanted to leave at the end of the day.

The one experience that affected me the most, this year as well as last, was visiting the Haitian workers in the local garbage dumps. Because of the poverty and political situations in Haiti, many people immigrate illegally to Dominican Republic…immigrating usually means walking hundreds of miles over the mountains, or saving up enough money to pay someone to smuggle them across the border. But, once they’re in DR, they have no legal status, no access to government health care or education, and because of the racism that exists between Dominicans and Haitians, the only jobs that they can usually get are low wage labour…or if they can’t get that…the garbage dumps.

There were two little boys in the garbage dump that day that changed my life. The first was Roberto. I was walking around with my students, and we found Roberto rummaging through a pile of garbage, away from the rest of the group. Through Spanish and some broken French (thank God for those years of immersion!), he was able to communicate to us that he was looking for aluminum pop cans. The four of us started to help him search for them, in mounds of garbage under sweltering heat…after 20 minutes, I’d found two myself, and the rest of the students had found five or six. Roberto gave us each a huge smile every time we put a can in his sack…and I asked him how much money he’d get once it was full. He said it was 4 pesos, which is around 12 cents CAD…we tried to find as many cans as we could after that. By the time we had to leave, his sack was only half full. I wanted to give him all the pesos I had with me, but I knew that would have started a riot with the other 50 people in the dump…and I also knew that helping him, hugging him before we left, and showing him that some gringos from across the world cared about him, gave him much more dignity that throwing some money at his situation.

The next little boy’s story breaks my heart. I remember seeing him last year, but I didn’t know his story then. He’s taller now, but he is so very skinny, and his hair was turning that reddish colour that shows that he’s been malnourished. Christal was talking to him with our translator, trying to find out where he was from, and who his parents were. We learned that he’d come from Haiti, but his parents had both died when they got here. There was a lady in their village that looked out for him, but he was an orphan, mostly on his own, and had to find a lot of his food from whatever wasn’t rotten in the garbage. When they asked him his name, he got really shy, and we had to ask him again. Finally, he told us that he didn’t remember what his mother had called him. That’s right about where we started to cry. We had to leave right away, so that we wouldn’t disrupt the people’s work anymore that day, but we drove out to buy some food for that little boy and brought it back before going home. We’re also keeping in touch with the bossman at the dump to make sure that that he doesn’t get forgotten anymore.

When you do humanitarian work, it can sometimes be so overwhelming…it can feel like you’re a band-aid on a gaping wound…like you can’t possibly work hard enough or have enough money to really make a difference…or that there’s so much evil in the world that your little efforts at ‘good’ aren’t going to be able to turn the tide.

But then you see the smiles on the children’s faces, the sweat running down the backs of the workers, the tired, but wise eyes of the mothers…you know that they are so grateful for everything we’re trying to do. They are no different from us…they have the same passions, the same hope and dreams and potential…we just happened to be born in Canada, and they in Haiti or Dominican Republic. As the great prophet Bono wrote “Where you live should not decide, whether you live or whether you die.” I believe that with all of my heart, and know that my small contribution…added to that of the rest of our Hero Holiday teams…compounded by the people we go home to influence…will truly effect change in the world…and well…we’re just getting started!

Cindy Stover

Message Zone

We have just made a special page for parents and supporters to leave comments to our participants. It is the messages page. If you want to just leave a note for a holiday Hero, use that page instead of commenting on a random blog post. If you want to make remarks about specific blog posts, please continue to comment directly on those posts.

More Pictures

Here are a couple of pictures for you from the orphanage and school project 1. New pictures can be seen at our photo album.

Glimmer of hope

I lay awake one night a couple of weeks ago thinking about the 27,000 kids who die every day. I was thinking about these kids and how it’s like losing a small city every day. If it happened in North America, wouldn’t it be on the news? Wouldn’t we do something about it? Wouldn’t our government throw billions of dollars at the problem if it affected them personally? You know what is even more heartbreaking? They aren’t dying from some strange incurable disease. They are dying because they don’t have clean water, food, education or immunization programs. As I walk through the villages here this week, it becomes much more than a face on a television screen or a statistic on a website. These are the ones we hold in our arms. We remember their names and talk about them to our friends when we return home. They are real. They are precious. They exist in my world. Tomorrow there will be 27,000 less of them than there are today. And it breaks my heart.

According to a Stats Canada report, retail sales December 2005 rang up at $36.8 billion. Added to that, another $393 million dollars spent on Christmas decorations. I think of Esperanza, my little Compassion Child. $420 supports her for one year. If you do the math, just over $4 billion would have kept those 9.85 million kids alive last year. I feel sick. Poverty isn’t something new. It’s always been there since the beginning of time. However, now we have no excuse because we can Google the stats on the internet. Do you think that we, as a country, might be held accountable someday?

However, in the middle of this seemingly hopeless situation, there is a glimmer of hope. This is why I love Hero Holiday. Every year we expose hundreds of high school students to extreme poverty. They hold these kids in their arms, and try not to think that some of them haven’t eaten in three days and that one day they might not make it to the third day. These high school students are our nation’s future. These are the leaders, the doctors, the nurses, the lawyers, the politicians and the ones who will decide where our money is spent. We are helping to create a generation of heroes. Parents, your kids are amazing. I’ve seen them work very hard this week. I’ve seen them covered from head to toe in dirt and sweat and be proud of it. They are making a difference. Thank you for trusting us with them for this short time. They are the ones who will write history. And it will be good.

Thirsty for some more photos?

In case you haven’t noticed, we have added some photo albums to the site, please check them out; photos will be added continually as the trip progresses. Click the photos link above to see the albums, and a great way to view them is to click the “view as slideshow” link. There are also group albums, for when our participants start uploading their photos to flickr. If you select an individual picture, you will be able to comment on the photo and see more details about it.

We would also like to encourage you to use the “Facebook/Share This” button at the bottom of our posts to help spread the word about the great philanthropic work our participants are doing here. This link is an easy way to email the post to others, or to help it get noticed on social sites such as facebook or digg.

A good way to stay informed, even after Hero Holiday is over, is to click the “stay informed” link and subscribe to our website feeds or email list.

A Hero’s Perspective

Througout the trip we are collecting stories from participants on their perspective and experiences. After all, I’d hate for you all to get bored with my writing! The following blog was written by Justine.

Canada Day in A New York Minute

July 1st. It’s Canada Day. I kinda find it funny that I am leaving this country on a day I should be celebrating it. On a day when most people you ask couldn’t tell you how old Canada is, but could tell you exactly how many beers they had to celebrate it
with, I will find myself cramped, trying to fall asleep on a plane that is heading to Dominican Republic. In fact, right now I am sitting in a terminal in the NYC airport,
sipping coffee, typing out this note as I watch busy people connect with flights that will propel them forward to the next stop in their busy lives. A blur of faces and names that make-up compelling lives and stories. And it’s in this airport that I drink the worst coffee I have ever been stupid enough to spend money on. Never trust a thug with diamond earrings and a Rocaware ball cap to make you a decent hazelnut latte. And even though I can barely choke down this awful cup of java, it’s the very thing that has got me thinking. You see, it is reminding me of why I am in the airport to begin with.

On a day when most people are getting loaded, I’m loading my suitcases onto a plane, then to a bus to visit people I met a year ago in DR. It was a trip called Hero Holiday last year that rocked my world and changed my thinking and is in effect, changing me. It was the place where I actually met people who’s lives could not be ignored, who actually live in extreme poverty. The exploited and the abused. The ones who are trapped into forced labor just so they might be able to feed their children next week. People who have so little and yet are incredibly kind and thankful. People whose lives I realized have dignity. Some, who in the midst of living on nothing, have a faith that puts my own to shame. It was also the place where I joined with other young people who wanted to learn how to make a difference in their lives. Hero Holiday last summer was the time when I was able to finally see past my own hurts and seemingly major issues, and find purpose, passion and even revitalized faith where it was sorely needed.

Those beautiful Dominican people and the amazing Hero Holiday crew where the ones who helped me realize that I had a responsibility and also the ability to change the world. And looking back, I realize that it was not the more ‘glorious moments’ of say a hard day of work on building a school or feeding people who work in a dump, or digging a life giving water trench for the people of a sugar cane plantation that I learned this, but it was in the little things, the mundane and often FRUSTRATING things, like organizing a chaotic mountain of supplies and gifts into some kind of order for people to distribute the next morning at a clinic that I realized that the small steps to change are necessary and effective. A small step like informing and educating yourself on the issues.

So as I sat there with my coffee that I was regretting, I stopped by www.stopthetraffik.org and found an article on the situation in Hati, the neighboring country of DR. It was here that I learned that many Haitians, who are poorest people in the Western hemisphere are so desperate to find work that they will pay a person who will guarantee them safe passage into DR with the promise of a good paying job.  But these poor and desperate people end up being trafficked into DR, robbed by those they trusted and find out no jobs are available to them. These people end up having to find illegal work in city dumps or sugar cane plantations where they will make less than $3 a day just to try and support their families. I was shocked to learn that often, just before sugar cane harvest season is over when they are supposed to be paid, some families are often deported back to Hati without warning. Other spend their entire lives working back breaking labor just so they and their children can survive.

It was then that I realized that the coffee I was drinking was sweetened by the sugar that was harvested by a ‘faceless’ victim of human trafficking and injustice that might very well meet in person tomorrow. A person who I may have helped build a school for last summer so their children could get an education and finally break the cycle of poverty. It was only a cup of coffee but I was starting to see how the world’s economics was playing out in it. And it made me all the more eager to go back to the Dominican to help finish the school we started, to start a new one and befriend those who live and work in the trash of a city that has refused them.

I realize that it’s only small things we are actually doing in DR, but it’s the awareness and actions you can take from home in your everyday life that will also make a difference. It things like choosing to buying ‘fair-trade’ products. It’s supporting and getting involved with groups that work with poor communities to help them become self-sufficient and organizations who are making a difference in legislature that will change government policies on trade and third-world debt. It’s refusing to see the problem of poverty and injustice as so large that it’s no use to try to do anything. I am only one person, but then again, so was Jesus or even Bono. And if there is anything that Jesus and Bono have shown me it’s that God’s heart is for the poor and God is with me if I am with the poor. So, I figure I got some good backing, even if it’s only me.

So here’s to this hideous coffee that I can’t finish and to a week in DR that will no doubt change and break me some more. I can’t wait.