Visions Service Adventures

Be Here Now – What We Believe and Why

Thousands of teens travel every summer to far away places and experience things that their parents never imagined when they were teenagers. With our children far away, some parents desire regular updates from the field; some parents have even come to expect daily postings from the program. The Internet brings instant communication and along with it the expectation of real-time news about what our teens are doing in their programs. Why not? We've got the tools, let's use them, right?

These days there are summer programs that post daily updates, video clips and blogs on their websites. Participants may have steady access to e-mail or can call home whenever they wish. VISIONS is not such a program.

I understand the desire to know about your child's far-away life. I am the mother of a daughter just a few years out of her teens who traveled to Australia and Ecuador in the summers between high school years and then, barely a month after graduating high school, to the southernmost region of Chile as a Rotary International Exchange student.

Trinidad. Australia. Virgin Gorda. What do these destinations have in common? For Mindy
Podraza, these are a few of the exotic places she’s worked during her five summers as an employee of Visions Service Adventures.

So how did this Ralston Middle School teacher find such a unique way to spend her summers off? “I Googled cool summer jobs,” Podraza says with a laugh. That simple search led her to the adventure of a lifetime, where she ended up working in some of the most picturesque places on earth. Gotta love the internet.

Relationships Ripen in Thuy An

2010 is Wes Hedden’s third season in VISIONS Vietnam. He’s worked the life of the program so far, and this season will be the program director. We met Wes during one of our earliest planning trips to Vietnam. He was working then for a university and a rural development NGO. From Vietnam Wes moved to Burma in 2008 to teach history and coordinate service learning at a small school in Yangon. This year, while living in rural Cambodia, his work focused on disaster risk reduction. After VISIONS Vietnam ends this summer, Wes returns to Cambodia to a job focused on protecting the rights of ethnic minorities in the eastern part of the country. Simultaneously, and with assistance from Princeton-in-Asia, Wes also will create a volunteer exchange program between Cambodian and Vietnamese university students; a program, Wes tell us, that draws much of its inspiration from VISIONS.

All VISIONS leaders must write evaluations after their programs end, which are framed by a dozen or so questions we ask that typically require more than a cursory answer. Some leaders, though, take exceptional time and care with their evaluations, like Wes has done with his evaluations every season. Here is an excerpt from his 2009 program evaluation; he’s comparing the second season in Vietnam with our first in 2008.

“It was definitely rewarding to be at the Center a second year! Whereas the first year the Center was skeptical about what our high school students could actually accomplish and the kids’ commitment, this year the Center seemed trusting and confident in us. We were frequently reminded that we’re viewed differently from other groups and that we have

The earthquake in Haiti has brought no discernible change to daily life in the DR. Still, as we noted in the January/February 2010 Visionary, the Dominican Republic (DR), so close and yet so removed in many ways from Haiti, may well be experiencing an increase in populations in batey communities as some Haitians make their way across the borders.

Public services in bateys, such as education and health resources, sewage systems, water and other utilities always have been sorely lacking. The earthquake in Haiti may mean even greater stresses on batey neighborhoods that have been coping for decades with the absence of the most basic services and resources.

In February the youth organization of B'nai Jeshurun Synagogue in New York City took a week out of busy academic schedules to construct a long-anticipated water system in the northern Nicaragua community of Chaguite Grande. Before describing the community members’ and teen volunteers’ efforts in Nicaragua, the Western Hemisphere’s second poorest nation behind Haiti, let’s first take a look at issues surrounding water on our planet. According to the nonprofit Water.org and statistics from the World Health Organization:

And more:

• On average, every US dollar invested in water and sanitation provides an economic return of US$ 8 dollars. (UN Health Development Report)
• Other estimated economic benefits of investing in drinking water and sanitation:
• 272 million school attendance days a year
• 1.5 billion healthy days for children under five years of age

For the village of Chaguite Grande potable water, let alone running water, has been as elusive as poverty is pervasive. Roughly 10 miles from VISIONS’ base in Jinotega, Chaguite Grande has faced water issues in various forms for many years. Before completion of the