Two REAL School students, their teachers volunteer in the Dominican Republic.

REAL School teachers Martin Mackey and Page Nichols and students Nick Fanning and Steven Garrett returned April 3 from an eye-opening week of new experiences in the Dominican Republic.

“It’s was worse than I thought it’d be,” said Garrett, a junior. “It definitely opens your eyes and makes you appreciate different things like electricity, running water, and everyday things we take for granted.”

“I think it was a catalyst for positive change for our students, just seeing people with so little. Yet, they were content,” Mackey said. “It was a pretty profound experience.”

The REAL School, on Mackworth Island in Falmouth but part of the Windham-Raymond school system, takes part in many local service projects as a way to engage its alternative education students, many of whom are facing challenges that have forced them out of the traditional school environment. For the last several years, the REAL School has offered several students the ability to go overseas on an outreach project. This year and last, students have been working at the Good Samaritan Hospital in the city of La Romana, Dominican Republic, said REAL School director Pender Makin.

The trip, for which students had to raise their own financial support, was organized through Seeds of Independence in Freeport. Seeds of Independence is a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to combat juvenile delinquency and positively affect the school drop-out rate in Maine by operating numerous programs aimed at mentoring at-risk youths.

“I’m so proud of our partnership with Seeds of Independence,” Makin said. “Involving these students in these kinds of service projects gets them to realize their power as capable human beings who can make a positive difference in their world.”

Make a positive difference they surely did, to hear teacher Mackey describe the weeklong experience.

Since the Dominican Republic shares a border with Haiti, the students got a chance to help indirectly with earthquake relief, he said.

“We packed 250 boxes of food to send to earthquake victims in Port Au Prince (Haiti),” Mackey said.

Mackey said the students also helped provide medical care in several of the camps set in the sugarcane fields surrounding the city of La Romana, population 150,000. Bateyes, as they’re called, dot the countryside and provide menial living quarters for the migrant farm workers, many of whom are from Haiti.

“These bateyes are mostly villages at a crossroads,” Mackey said. “There was definitely a need there for medical care.”

Mackey said Fanning and Garrett really enjoyed themselves and even “gave the shirts off their backs” to the locals, “shoes, too,” he added.

And that’s saying a lot, Mackey said, because they arrived with little in the way of gear, opting to fill their suitcases with 250,000 multi-vitamin tablets to give locals.

Garrett said the Dominican Republic trip was “one of the greatest times of my life” and that he plans to pursue a medical career based on his experience in the bateyes.

“I really enjoyed doing the clinics, working with the local people,” he said.

Garrett added that he hopes to make a return trip next year with the REAL School, “and I’m planning to bring my mom.”

The other student who went, Fanning, a senior, was likewise blown away by the country’s poverty.

“We were all expecting to see poor people, but it went way beyond what you expected to see,” he said. “But impoverished as they were, they still gave praise. They are a very faithful people.”

Upon departure, Fanning gave up his work clothes, as did Garrett. “We wanted to donate what we could,” Fanning said.

While in country, the students ate primarily beans and rice and slept in the Good Samaritan Mission, adjacent to the hospital. They worked in and around the hospital as well, painting walls, shifting the emergency room from one end of the hospital to the other, gardening, tiling a wall and landscaping. The week was filled with a lot of work, Seeds of Independence program manager Willo Wright said.

“The kids from the REAL School were top performers, just stellar to have on the trip,” she said.

Wright added that the REAL School kids got a “bird’s-eye view of the deprivation” in the Dominican Republic, something their teacher seconded.

“It gives you a new perspective, you’re certainly more humble and more appreciative,” Mackey said.

REAL School student Steve Garrett holds a Dominican girl while her parents receive medical care in a batey. Bateyes are small villages set at crossroads in the sugarcane fields of the Dominican Republic. Locals flock to the clinic, pay their 50 cents, and get rudimentary health care from Dominican and American doctors. The REAL School students helped with such things as taking blood pressure, weighing patients, playing games with kids while their parents were being examined, and operating the pharmacy. (Courtesy photo)