A Call to Action Class Concepts are Realized during a Trip to Haiti
In early April, Sewickley Academy launched its first school-sponsored trip to Deschapelles, Haiti, through the Hópital Albert Schweitzer Foundation (HAS).
The trip was designed based on the concepts covered in Mrs. Peluso’s and Ms. Villalobos’ Global Issues class: A Call to Action. The aim was to give students who are interested in international development an example of what a successful project that is having a positive impact on its community looks like.
While we were there, we had an opportunity to interact with personnel involved in several different divisions of the foundation. During these conversations we learned about the various operations of HAS, including how it maintains its operations and its community outreach programs.
Additionally, our trip featured a service component. We assisted HAS’s agroforestry program by bagging soil to help accomplish the program’s goal of planting one million trees. We also helped the hospital’s transition to digital records by entering paper data in a computer. Finally, we helped sort vitamin supplements into monthly rations, completing approximately 700 months worth of packages in a few hours.
We also had the opportunity to learn about Haitian history and culture. On the way from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, to Deschapelles, we stopped at the Moulin Sur Mer Museum, a former sugar plantation that has been turned into a history museum. The museum was a fantastic learning experience. We saw documents from the pre-colonial era to modern times in Haitian history, which allowed us to better understand the culture of the place we were visiting. We also learned about Haiti’s unique history, introducing us to a country so different from our own. We also took Creole lessons nightly, where we learned basic greetings and phrases for initial conversations with people we met.
