Gateway Christian School students working on developing a new playground at a school in San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic.

By Sheldon Spackman

Helping Hands

Gateway students earn life experience in Dominican Republic

Apr 6, 2019 | 8:00 AM

A group of high school students from Gateway Christian School in Red Deer continue to bask in the glow of a life-changing experience to the Dominican Republic recently.

Described as a Helping Hands Service Trip, Vice Principal Chris Kooman says 16 grade 11 and 12 students visited the Caribbean nation from Mar. 22 – Apr. 1 and together with a handful of chaperones, spent their time sharing, learning and building relationships with their Caribbean peers.

(Chris Kooman)

Kooman, an Inter-Cultural Studies teacher says the trip is a culmination of the course he teaches.

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“We went with an organization called EduDeo, which is a non-profit Canadian organization that works in developing countries around the world to foster Christian education and to help local communities in developing the infrastructure for their schools,” he explains. “So physically building projects to make schools better in these nations and we have a partner school. Our partner school was a school in a town called San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic.”

(Chris Kooman)

Kooman says students took part in classroom discussions and activities and learned about their cultural differences as well.

“We also led some lessons and activities for younger students, so craft kind of lessons that we taught for kindergartens to grade 6 in the classrooms,” adds Kooman. “Then we worked together on a building project and in this case, it was to pave a courtyard. When we went, we heard we were working on a playground, so we had an image of what we thought a playground looked like but when we got there, it was actually the ground that they play on in the courtyard of their school.”

Kooman says the ground was uneven and floods during the country’s rainy season.

“It’s just a place where kids couldn’t even play soccer or baseball or basketball,” recalls Kooman. “So we tore out a whole bunch of old cement and tile and dirt, levelled it off and poured a lot of concrete to create a better play area.”

Kooman says Gateway students also had the opportunity to go out into the community and put street signs up as an outreach project that the school organized, in order to help make the streets more visible, as there were none in place.

“To do that, they actually had to petition the government to get some of the streets named because a couple of the streets didn’t even have names,” explains Kooman. “Then they had signs made on these metal poles that we went and dug holes for and cemented in, so that was kind of a neat way for their school to be seen in their own community having an impact and making it a better place too.”

Kooman describes the trip as a great character-building experience for the students.

“Many of the students we took have never been on a plane or out of our country or to the Caribbean or Central America, so to see what another culture is like and how people are living, that’s hugely eye-opening,” he exclaims. “Then to realize the joy that these people have in welcoming us and into their homes, we got to tour homes and visit with people in their homes. That was a real formational experience too because students see just the pride people have in what little they have and the contentment they have in their life and the joy they derive I think from being in a tight-knit community there.”

Kooman says if the kids took anything away from the trip, it was the attitude of how do we develop stronger ties with our own communities and to be open with our neighbours.

“In our culture, sometimes you don’t even know your neighbor because you can park in your garage and never see them,” he admits. “But in the Dominican it’s different, you’re out on the street visiting or you’re helping each other out or you’re playing a baseball game out on the street. Those were neat things that the students recognized and wanted to carry forward.”

Kooman says a lot of the talk amongst students initially is if they plan to get rid of possessions they don’t necessarily need when they get home.

“Then it kind of turns to as the time we spend there goes on, to how am I happy with what I have and how do I make decisions going forward about what I purchase or where I end up or what I’m going to do next in life after school,” explains Kooman. “I think they also have a real sense of just being content with what they have. You kind of have to live it in order for it to have an impact on you, so I think they’re going to become advocates for people to have cultural experiences.”