Participants Blog
Teaching in the Domincan Republic
See video of Cynthia and Daniel who spent the summer of 2009 in Consuelo, Dominican Republic teaching in a small rural school for young children.
Two Months Gone By
Two months have gone by, and like many Canadian summers in the past I find myself asking where the time has gone. Though I do keep busy working in a school for impoverished children called Casa Leandra, there is a lot of sitting around with the lopcals, and a lot of domino playing! The kids in my school program are from local barrios (neighbourhoods) that are basically batey´s inside the city limits. Consuelo is a former ingenio town, built approximately 100 years ago around a sugar factory which closed it´s doors and shut down about 5 years ago, leaving many, many people unemployed. Some of those who were hit the hardest by the abrupt stop in the small, country-side city´s economy were the cane cutters living in bateys, which are small little community´s living just on the outskirts of Consuelo, pocketing the nearby land. Many of the sugarcane cutters were Haitians who made it over the border with their families looking for work, or were brought in by ingenio workers for cheap labour, giving the promise for a better life.
Each One Teach One and Our Culture Will Grow
I’d just sat down on a park bench to begin writing this response, when I saw the skinny legs of a young boy around the age of 5, a nino, run up to me. I lifted my eyes off the page, half-preparing to deny a request for “monies”, when with a timid smile he asked if I would like some food. “Es libre!” he said beaming, nodding his shaved head and ran off to the three women standing in the shade of a little building in the middle of the park, packing up their Sunday morning food sales, and had made a plate of rice, beans, noodles and fried chicken to welcome me to the community, no charge.
Beatboxing for Intercordia
Daniel at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick is working hard to meet his fund raising deadline before he goes overseas with Intercordia this summer. One of Daniel’s more creative projects is putting together an International beatbox CD called Straight From the Mouth Straight From the Heart. For those of us who are out of touch with beatbox culture, Wikipedia defines it this way: “Beatboxing is a form of vocal percussion which primarily involves the art of producing drum beats, rhythm, and musical sounds using one’s mouth, lips, tongue, voice, and more. It may also involve singing, vocal imitation of turntablism, the simulation of horns, strings, and other musical instruments.” Check out this interview with Daniel taken from Future Students, a news publication on the St. Thomas University website.
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