Personal Experience: My Trip To The Dominican Republic

Never being one of those kids that had many friends seemed like a challenge; I have always felt like I had all I needed. For me, it’s special, that the people who I consider my friends, know so much about me. This past summer, I traveled to the place that gave birth to me, the Dominican Republic, where I was put in an environment where I had no prior knowledge of the people who I was going to encounter doing the things that I was interested in doing, like community service and traveling to certain parts of the country that I had never visited before. Being able to bond with the individuals from my trip while working on mountainsides, digging ditches to help install Black Water Treatments that would help a local community, participating in beach cleanups that belonged to a national park, made me feel that I was growing and expanding my horizons on what I could make a reality.

Waking up the day after my arrival, everything was pushed on me. I got ready and headed to breakfast. Sitting alone made me think to myself that some of the individuals there had already known each other from back home. After breakfast, the leaders from my group introduced themselves and all of us students traveling were divided. Education has taught us how bad it is to categorize people based on

I knew that I was capable of making friends, but it just made me feel that sometimes stepping out of our comfort zone is what actually makes us comfortable. There was one night almost halfway through the trip where we ended up having a pow-wow, one of our rooms had a rooftop, where we could see the night sky and the stars above. We decided that we would sit in a circle and those of us who were comfortable enough would share something from our own lives that gave us jot or simply gave us anxiety. In my eyes, I actually thought that this was very precious and that sharing the things we all said brought us