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.

Monique Schmidt directed VISIONS service programs abroad in Guadeloupe and at home in Montana. A poet, teacher and published author (her memoir Last Moon Dancing is the story of her Peace Corps years in Africa), Monique moved to Rwanda last November to be Program Director for the Akilah Institute for Women, the first vocational and leadership training institute for young women in Rwanda. Akilah provides quality education and vocational training to young women who are unable to attend university. The women spend a year getting grounded in English language, computer skills, and introductory hospitality classes. Then they and other young women from around Rwanda begin a two-year diploma program to learn vocational and technical skills for the hospitality and tourism industry.

"Let me introduce myself. My name is Gineen Klein, and I've been brought on as an intern to replace the promotion department here at Propensity Books...and have some excellent ideas for promotion.

To start: Do you blog? If not, get in touch with Kris and Christopher from our online department, although at this point I think only Christopher is left. I'll be out of the office from tomorrow until Monday, but when I get back I'll ask if he spoke to you. We use CopyBuoy via Hoster Boraster, because it streams really easily into a Plaxo/LinkedIn yak-fest meld. When you register, click "Endless," and under "Contacts" just list everyone you've ever met. It would be great if you could post at least 6,000 words every day until further notice...

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they're better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold...."

WHAAT?!!? Okay, it's a joke. These paragraphs open "Subject: Our Marketing Plan," which appeared in the October 19 issue of The New Yorker magazine. The piece is a hilariously tongue-in-cheek spoof on blogging and viral marketing, and the confounding convolution of it all, or at least it seems to me.

The service accomplished by VISIONS participants in two decades is mind-boggling.

VISIONS participants don't just ferry buckets of nails to carpenters or hand off cinder blocks and adobe bricks to maestros to put in place. Our participants do the work.

For construction projects we work with local masons and adobe maestros. Where we build with wood, we employ bona fide carpenters as full-fledged members of the leadership team. In the Caribbean where every home, school, community center and clinic was built to hurricane specifications, to date all structures remain sound, having sustained only minimal damage from hurricanes.

Here are data on VISIONS service projects since 1989. The list starts with construction and ends with the non-construction service that every program offers as well.

We take our service projects seriously, it's true. But we take our play equally (and pretty darned) seriously, too. The places VISIONS groups go offer splendid scenery, geography, wildlife and history. Always there's time, and every opportunity made, to re-charge our batteries by exploring and enjoying the outdoors.

A question we're often asked is, how serious, how authentic, are the service projects VISIONS undertakes? Is it 'real' service? Our archives from 1989 to last summer overflow with stories that tell of the impact VISIONS projects have had on communities and individuals.

Here is one from the archives, an email received in July 2005 from our leaders in the Dominican Republic. Before 2005 and starting in 1991, our first summer in the Dominican Republic, participants had already built 24 houses, 3 schools (2 that serve as hurricane shelters), 2 community centers, a medical clinic, and several cisterns.