The continual questions made me realize I should have a better response than "It was great. I love it!" which had become my typical response to both questions.
What was great about it? Why do I love? Those aren't easy questions to answering. Here's my best attempt to answer that without just giving you a boring outline of what I'm up to. (Thursday I rode the bus. Friday I went to school. That night we had youth group. That doesn't really tell you much and it's definitely boring.)
Visiting the Freedom school gave me a chance to see and participate in a ministry I've been watching grow since 2008. My very first visit to Freedom was after my student teaching in December 2012. It has been nearly a year since then and I enjoyed the chance to see all the precious kiddos again and meet new ones. While waiting for school to start Friday morning, I made it my goal to learn as many names as possible from the PK4 class. Many of them were familiar from Freedom's frequent Facebook posts (alliteration unintended). It made the rest of the morning so much easier since I was able to address nearly all the students by name. I'm definitely going to take the time to do that when I sub in elementary classrooms from now on! On Monday, I did the same with the K5 class. Once I'd finally gotten the names of two or three kids straight I'd mix them up on purpose. That joke was a guaranteed burst of laugher, no matter how many times I pulled it. :D I suppose if I wasn't a teacher, just sitting at a school for half a morning could get really boring, but I loved it. I'd ask students "Do we start making letters at the top or bottom of the line?" I'd show them how to turn their notebooks right side up--more than one of them were tracing letters with their books upside down! I helped with centers, puzzle building (hey, when you're 4 its hard work to put those foam pieces together and even harder to be okay with connecting your pieces to some one else's), read a story, and practiced the months of the year. One girl claimed me as soon as she got on the bus Friday morning and ran straight to me when she saw me on Monday. So precious! I'd have to check my pictures from last year but I think she might have been with me then as well.
One of the things I love about my visits to Freedom is seeing what it would be like to live in San Pedro and work for that ministry. Ever since high school, that possibility has been in my mind. Friday after school, I had a chance to stop by Freedom's land and see how their building project is coming along. It's just a skeleton of a building right now. Digging through coral to pour the footers is slow going. They just recently poured the first few columns for the walls which really gives some shape to the building. One cool fact I learned is that Freedom modeled it's building off Santiago Christian School's layout; that made it really easy to 'see' what the finished building will look like. I even got a few pictures of myself in what might be my future classroom. If that happens those pictures will definitely be hanging on my classroom walls. :) (Before anyone asks, this is just a someday idea. I'm still planning on being at SCS for at least these three years.)
The other half of my weekend was filled with a visit to SCORE. This gave me the chance to see friends from this summer and hear how the different ministries and people I worked with have been doing since I left. I spent Friday and Saturday night with my friend Sarah and her husband Robersy. We managed to pack so much adventure, fun, ministry, and laughter into two days. I started off Friday evening with a short visit to see my Lily House kids. Most of them were gone because of school, but I was able to see one of my special girls, a 4 year old with Cerebral Palsy. I loved visiting her this summer, talking to her, and giving her a chance to get some exercise (she can't walk or even sit up on her own so she's in her wheelchair much of the day). Resources for special needs individuals are almost no existent in this country. It's my dream and prayer that some how she could receive physical therapy daily for an extended period of time. As I was holding this special girl on Friday, her 5th grade sister walks in from school. The instant she sees me she yells, "Kelsey!!" and came over for a hug. It meant so much to me that she remembered me and my name despite the hundreds of Americans she must have meet over this summer and since. Sometimes I wonder how these kids handle the constant wave of visitors.
Friday night it poured just before youth group turning the dirt road between SCORE and the church into sticky, yucky mud. I think I had about 5 pounds of mud on each shoe by the end of the night! The rain meant youth group attendance was low, but that gave us the opportunity break into small groups with the students for a few minutes. Sarah had a women's mission team she was translating for this week so I joined them for Saturday and Sunday morning. A huge blessing from this was being with the group when one of the ladies from Lily House shared her testimony. I'd known this lady all summer and never heard her story. Honestly, it's a horrible story. She's been through things I can't even imagine. Yet, I see her healing revealed in her ability to share now when she didn't this summer. Later on, I went with the group to put up flyers advertising the opening of the Lily House businesses, Leche y Miel Plaza, to the public. I loved being a part of that and seeing these business grow beyond customers from visiting mission teams. I'm not a business major but to me it seems that this salon/spa, gift shop, and bakery will be much more sustainable as public business. On top of that, I made a contact with one of the ladies from the mission team about creating a website for Leche y Miel for tourists and vacationers, a goal Erica and I had talked about way back in August.
Saturday afternoon Sarah and I took their truck to a Dominican car wash to get all the mud from Friday night off and surprise Robersy. It's always a fun adventure to have a new cultural experience--this definitely wasn't what you'd get in American. After that Sarah and I got to crash guys night with Robersy and the only 3 male intern/GAP student/MK around SCORE. We headed up to the Capital for a movie and dinner afterwards. It was so much fun to just hang out with a friend and be on my own (no internship director to get permission from). It really did make the DR seem so much less like a foreign country and make working here seem more like real life. This isn't just a temporary 3 month visit; somehow visiting a friend in another city on the weekend and going to a movie made that more real.
Sunday morning the women's team, Sarah, and I when to Pasitos de Jesus to give the girls a Sunday School type program. Once again I was blessed and surprised by the number of girls that remembered me. What a joy it was to see those girls again, hug them, hear them sing, and take pictures with them! Sunday afternoon Sarah and I spent a couple hours wandering around the shops and beach near her apartment just talking, laughing, and catching up.
This has gotten so long already and I didn't even get around to answering the "How's your school? How do you like Santiago?" questions. That's gonna be Part 2, so keep an eye out for it :)
