Marianny Essay on Global Potential Experience, December 2011

Written by Marianny Martinez, Global Potential Youth Ambassador, Boston Fellow 2010-2011

“Interested in a cultural exchange? … Want to travel to the Dominican Republic and Haiti and do community service? … Want to make difference? … Are you a leader?”

These were the questions that the flyer that changed my life asked. It was a recreating flyer from Global Potential, a non-profit organization that takes at risk urban kids from Boston and New York to do community service in third world countries, looking to find its first cohort in Boston.

In the summer of 2010, I arrived in Batey 7 in the Dominican Republic, a village where Haitians and Dominicans work the sugar cane fields. Batey 7 is a small community where everyone knows each other. With dirt roads and homes constructed of wood, mud and tin and no in-door plumbing. The only businesses in the Batey were a few small corner stores, a clinic, a person who panted nails, two home bakeries, two fried food sellers, and one elementary school. The night I arrived to the Batey, all I could say to myself was, “What did I get myself into? I have to be here seven whole weeks?!”

After the second week, however, that whole mentality had changed as I became engaged in the tasks at hand. In the seven weeks I was there, I helped in the construction of a water canal, interned at the clinic shadowing the only doctor, instructed an English class for kids between the ages of five and eighteen in the elementary school, gave sex education classes, participated in community clean ups, and a Dengue campaign. Out of all the tasks I had that summer what had the greatest impact on me was the English class. Working with the kids of that community gave me such a sense of accomplishment. When I walked down the roads and heard one of my students ask me in English “Hi, how are you today?” the smile on my face reached ear to ear. Through these activities, I not only became closer to my team from Boston and New York, but I created beautiful bonds with the community members. The people I was living with were no longer my host family; they became my mother, father, and sisters.

Part of my cultural exchange was also a five day visit to Haiti. In Haiti I saw not only, the damages that the earthquake produced, countless homes, businesses and churches destroyed and made into rubble, and huge numbers of people living in refugee camps. But what surprised me more than all the destruction and poverty was the fact that all the stereotypes that I had heard growing up and during the time that I was staying in the Batey were all false. There was this belief and way of life in the Batey like the rest of the Dominican Republic that Dominicans were better even superior than Haitians. I saw for myself the atrocities of these stereotypes. The people of Bas Gromand, Haiti were the most welcoming people I had ever met. Despite the language barrier there was not one moment in which I felt misplaced or uncomfortable. Their food, culture, and way of life were so similar to my Dominican culture, especially that of the Bateyero, that I just could not perceive why there would be tension between the two.

The time I spent in the Batey and Haiti left a lasting impact on me. I learned about the racism problem in my native country*, and became interested in making a change through continuing to be a part of Global Potential. Upon my return from the Dominican Republic three students and I cofounded a social entrepreneurship project where we collected donation to ship off to villages we visited, while spreading social awareness in Boston. As well as the following summer I travel to El Hatillo, Nicaragua and took my experience and the skills I had acquired to help both the community and the new cohort of students that were traveling for the first time.

Travel, cultural exchange, leader… All words that I can still picture from the flyer. Words that introduced me to a world that my parents fought against letting me know, words that changed me that allowed me to see what was beyond the borders of Boston and made me understand that I have the power to make a lasting impact on not only my life but in the lives of others. But finally words that made me who I am today a young women striving for excellence in her education to change her own personal life, the life of her family and ultimately the lives of the patients who will be sitting in her exam room five years from now.