My Girl

Digging at the Dump

Sweet Ruth

Christmas Prep
Wow... I can't believe how soon I leave! My school's TAs (tutorial assistants) are on strike, so a few of my classes are cancelled, leaving me with most of the afternoon with nothing to do. I took the opportunity to get some things ready for the DR! I took a picture of the vitamins (see earlier post) and then got Xmas presents ready. I have SO many donations that I am not sure I will be able to bring everything. The most important things are 1) vitamins, 2) Christmas presents, and 3) gifts from sponsors for the kids. I can't bring presents for all the kids I love, but I did get a little something special for my 2 favourite families whom I have become especially close to; Daniela's family; D

Vitamin Update
A huge thank you to everyone who donated Shoppers Drug Mart points to launch a Vitamin program for the Dove Missions kids. I now have 7800 vitamins to bring with me this Christmas, and we plan to launch the program the first week of the New Year. With the amount of vitamins we have, there is enough vitamins for half of the kids (so, around 40 kids) to last about 8 months. We have not decided yet if we will decide which gets are included by gender (either all the girls or all the boys) or by age (all the kids 9 and under). It would be AMAZING if we could pull together even more vitamns... enough, eventually so that ALL of the kids can have a vitamin a day. If you didn't get a cha

DREAM

Melissa, Sam & Nicole
I went to Toronto last Friday to meet up with my "Dominican sisters"! We had such a good time and sat and caught up for almost 8 hours! I met Melissa and Sam there, and then we were also really excited that Nicole could come as well for a few hours. She has made appearances on this blog before as she was my roommate in Hero Holiday 2008, and I first met her in Hero Holiday 2007. It was soooo good to see all three of them and we are going to try to do it again soon. We talked about everything in general, but of course spent a lot of time talking about humanitarian work (not just in the DR- but travel plans, etc.) And we reminisced and laughed about all our funny DR stories. We did lots of ta

Three Cups Of Tea
Right now I am reading a book called "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson, about educating girls in Pakistan. I have read it before, but I am learning more from it now. When I move to the DR in May, my main focus is going to be education. I am willing to spend as much time as I can with the kids... I want them to be excited about learning and I want them to realize the importance of their education, and to go on to teach the next generation. “Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go to search for work in the cities… But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community, and pass on what they’ve l