VISIONS recently facilitated customized high school travel programs to the Dominican Republic and Dominica. We'll next be in Nicaragua and Mississippi with two other school groups for their spring break teen travel programs.

High school volunteers from the Ross School in Long Island, NY, spent two weeks this month living in the Caribbean West Indies in Dominica's Carib Territory on the northeast coast. Collaborating with the Carib Council and the New Salybia Primary School, the teen group accomplished roughly 40 hours of solid community service. Their projects, to name a few, included: building 6-foot-long lunch tables for the Salybia School; plastering the interior walls of a public rest stop for the Territory; volunteering in schools; landscaping at the new cricket field; and, with Carib teenagers, restoring a deteriorated community basketball court.

The teen service program learned how to make sugar cane juice, cocoa tea and traditional kalabash gourd carvings. They hiked into mountain rainforests, stood at the foot of a towering waterfall, explored relatively untouched beaches, and swam in the ocean and freshwater streams.

In February the B'nai Jeshurun youth group, NY, headed to the Dominican Republic for their second VISIONS Custom Program. (Last year the international service program for high school students went to Nicaragua.) The group worked at a school and community center enclave in the San Luis batey that VISIONS volunteers and San Luis residents have built and been expanding for several seasons. B'nai Jeshurun teen volunteers shared two projects: digging out a 20-foot trench, mixing and pouring the cement, and placing rebar for a wall that will reduce water erosion; teaching English lessons in one-through-eighth grade classrooms at the school.