My First Day of Work

(I wrote this for our intern blog and figured I should probably share it with you guys too!)

As we swerved around the potholes all along the dirt roads I thanked God for seatbelts. For the past several minutes the landscape going past our windows had remained exactly the same: sugar cane plants as far as the eye could see. We were on our way to a batey, a community of sugar cane workers and their families that suffer from the most severe poverty here in the Dominican Republic. As we got closer the images that I had only seen in pictures came alive: piles of trash, stray animals, and tired eyes staring out from their homes.

I walked around to a few houses with a loan officer so that she could survey new people interested in joining the bank of Esperanza in the batey. I had taken my camera along hoping to capture some of the images of life in the batey, but didn’t want to be too conspicuous about it. Finally the moment came where no one seemed to be paying attention to me and I snapped a picture of the street I was standing on. I thought no one was looking, but someone was.

Speaking to me in what I can only assume to be a mix of Spanish and Creole, I couldn’t understand most of what she was saying, but she made one thing clear: she wanted money. I told her honestly that I didn’t have any with me and she asked to have my camera. I proposed that I take a picture of her instead, and she struck an adorable pose in the usual Dominican style. I didn’t interact with her for very long, but in that brief amount of time I realized that even in her innocence she had probably overcome more challenges in her 5 or so years than I would in my entire life.

I didn’t decide to do this internship solely to put more experience on my resume and I didn’t do it solely to have a fun summer (although both of these will likely happen). A quote hanging on the wall of my bedroom at home reminds me that “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” I hope to be affected by the people I encounter here as much as I affect them through Esperanza. It’s only my first day of work, and already a little girl gave me new eyes.