Lindsey Henley '07, speaks about her experience in the Dominican Republic.

Spring semester of junior year I decided to go abroad. When I was looking for a place to go, several criteria came into my head. I wanted to go to a Spanish speaking country. I was certainly pointed in the direction of Spain, but I wanted a completely different experience. I had been to Europe before, and though the cultural values differ from country to country, there are similarities between all the developed countries of the Western World. So I turned my attention away from Europe and started looking at developing countries. The Caribbean region caught my eye, and I finally decided to go to the Dominican Republic. Still considered a third world nation, the Dominican Republic shares an island with the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I think it was very important for me, as a student interested in Peace Studies to be able to see life from a very different viewpoint. I wanted to experience life differently.

And I did. Life was different on every level. Students in the Dominican Republic do not live at school, they live with their families, so I was living with a host family. I am an only child, and all of a sudden I had siblings! Being twenty years old and having to learn how to share personal space and belongings with a nine year old is difficult. Doing it in a different language was… well I’m alive and still in one piece, so it wasn’t impossible. But it was certainly challenging. Hot showers were rare, electricity was unpredictable, and internet access was available only at school and a few coffee shops.

Not only was life different, school was different as well. The out-of-class demands were far less than those for American colleges and universities. The concept of community was also very different. Questions started formulating in my mind. Why are education and community perceived so differently from how I perceived them in the US? What role does education have on society in the DR? What role does society have on education? How do social values and education interact? How is it different from the US? All of these questions nagged me endlessly while I was away because at that point, I had no capacity to express them fully. When I returned to the US, I was able to articulate better how different things were between American student lifestyles and Dominican student lifestyles by being able to examine my own culture from a different viewpoint. I started wanting to compare Dominican education and American education and their interaction with cultural norms and social values. By being in a place to view American education and culture from an outsider’s point of view, this became easier.

My first semester back at Goucher, I enrolled in a class called Identity and Conflict. This class examined identity formation through the lenses of ethnicity, nationality and religion, and I spent a lot of time reflecting on my time abroad and examining Dominican identity and its formation. The more questions I was able to answer through this class, the more questions I came up with. More answers led to more questions. Because the Peace Studies program offers the opportunity to do independent research, I decided to explore this with professor Elham Atashi from my Identity and Conflict class. In preparation for my independent study, I returned to the Dominican Republic over winter break to re-experience life there from a more removed and analytical eye with less feeling of culture shock.

I asked more questions this time around, learning interesting tidbits on how societal needs were reflected in the education system. For those graduating college in the Dominican Republic, there is a class on the proper and safe installation of cable and electricity that must be taken as a general education requirement. The number of deaths by electrocution is absurdly high in the DR because people connect their homes to electrical and cable sources illegally because they simply cannot afford electricity. I also looked more at the lives of the students there, because their role is different from the American college student. Whereas the majority of American students live at school with their lives structured mostly around the educational process, Dominican students live at home and still have family obligations and responsibilities. Most American students’ educational experience is a four-year hiatus from the real world, while most Dominican students never leave it.

Upon my second return from the Dominican Republic, I wanted to do a case study of Dominican, Cuban and American education systems and the ways they differ and the manner in which they are similar. I was increasingly interested in the role of community in the educational process. While I was formulating a way to do this, I was also enrolled in two service-learning classes that worked within two Baltimore city schools. The more I became involved in these two schools, the more I saw a difference between them. As I spent more time in these schools, I became more aware of the reasons for their differences and more aware that what I was looking to analyze in the education systems of several different countries was existent between two schools in the same city. My interests were shifting towards a more tangible exploration: I wanted to be able to clearly define what was creating success in one school, and what was lacking in the other that created the absence of statistical success.

In one school, I was involved in conflict resolution training with a group of fourth and fifth graders. Most of these students, by the age of 12, had experienced death as a result of violence, illegal drug use and/or abuse, domestic violence, and had friends or family members in jail. They were not just casual witnesses; for these students, most of these matters were a daily reality.  The conflict resolution program I was involved in was the first step in the direction of changing the lives of these children, but it is only one aspect of a hundred to which attention must be paid. 

In the other school that I spent time in, the entire community is becoming involved in the school. Not only are children are being given increasing amounts of positive attention, the school holds GED classes for adults, after school workshops for students and parents, computer training for adults, parent-child events, nutrition workshops, as well as other programs. The idea is to engage the entire community in its own development, especially the development of the children.

Each of these schools is among the most economically depressed areas of the city of Baltimore. The former puts emphasis on attention to students, while the latter engages its entire community. While the same poverty of resources exists for both schools, the latter is succeeding through successful scores on statewide tests while the other is not. The level of intelligence is not creating the distinction here; it is the idea that it takes a village to raise a child. It is with this mentality that I have begun to foster within myself the idea of the importance holistic education, in which it is not only vital to educate academically, but in terms of humanity as well. The participation of community within one’s educational experience has a profoundly positive effect.

It is with this fascination with community and education that I am able to envision my life after graduating from college. This is a time associated with endless opportunities, but also a feeling of paralysis for fear of the unknown.  By participating in community programs and being able to involve myself in the educational system, I am able to steer myself away from that paralysis, because I have been able to satisfy my curiosity, while simultaneously developing a hunger for community involvement and educational development. The professors I worked with this past semester have advocated for me getting a job at the community based school at which I worked. I have been introduced to some of the community leaders who are involved at the school, and am very excited to pursue the opportunity to work with such inspirational people who are succeeding against such great odds. Without the foundation that Peace Studies gave me, I would not have found myself so intrigued with the process of community and educational development as a means to foster appreciation of humanity at large. This process is pivotal in becoming a global citizen and peace practitioner.