With international volunteer group, MV youth finds a new home With international volunteer group, MV youth finds a new home (October 04, 2002)

By Faiza Hasan

About four months ago, sixteen-year-old Julie Trescott was living in a tiny village in Honduras. She would get up early in the morning and milk the cow -- which she says is not as easy as it looks -- then after doing chores around the house, she would head out to work, building water storage tanks and chicken coops.

Trescott, 16, was a volunteer for Amigos de las Americas, an international volunteer organization that brings together young people from different countries. Every summer, the organization takes high school and college students from around the United States to eight Latin American countries where they work with local communities on health and developmental projects.

Julie heard about Amigos as a freshmen in high school, but had to wait till she was sixteen before she could volunteer. Then along with seven other teenagers from Mountain View High School, she went through nine months of training with Amigos.

Katy Stokes, learning coordinator for the Peninsula branch of Amigos, says that the volunteers get a crash course in teamwork and cultural sensitivity during those nine months. "We try to cover everything that is necessary develop youth leadership," she said. "We teach volunteers to look at the community's assets and use them for developmental work, we teach them how to work with different people and cultures."

Stokes and other volunteers from the local chapter of Amigos will give a presentation at Stanford on Oct 8 and 9, from 7:00-9:00 p.m to recruit volunteers for next year. The only requirements are that volunteers be over sixteen and have completed their sophomore year in high school with a minimum of two years of Spanish language.

Though Amigos does not fund the trip, it sets up fundraisers and other self- funding programs to help volunteers cover their expenses.

"Amigos sets up the financing," explained Trescott. "The trip is expensive but with fundraising the volunteers don't have to pay at all." She started a letter-writing campaign and sold grapefruit and oranges to help finance her trip.

After nearly a year of training, Trescott finally headed out of San Francisco in June. On the flight to Honduras, she remembers looking out of the airplane window at a lush, green land and thinking how exciting it was to be there.

"I tried not to go in with any expectations, but it was amazing," she said. After spending a few days getting acclimated and fine tuning her Spanish, she and a partner headed out to a small village of 300 people called Moraico Abajo, where they spent their next six weeks.

"I remember being dropped off and seeing the house and saying 'oh gosh, this is what I have prepared for.' It was overwhelming at first, but everyone was so friendly." Trescott lived with a young married couple, and got so close to them that she calls them "mom" and "dad."

In a village where most houses were made of mud and sticks, her home for the summer had a two rooms with tiled floors. "It was fun getting up with the sun, a totally different lifestyle. I got used to it very quickly," said Trescott. "We would get up in the morning at around six, eat breakfast -- my mom brought cornflakes for us -- and help with the chores and then go out to work with the community at the construction sites."

On a typical day, she would help build concrete floors, water storage tanks or chicken coops. She would head back home at lunch, where she would find the whole village gathered to watch soaps on the village's only television. "That was the big thing, it was fun, very like a family event," she remembered.

In the evenings, Trescott would hang out with friends, help around the house or write about her experiences in her journal. Then at seven in the evening, the village would gather again to watch soaps.

Besides helping with home developmental projects, Trescott and her partner also organized local teens into youth groups. They would hold weekly meetings and talk about how to make a difference in the community. "We planned gardens and did a fundraiser to buy nets for soccer goals," she said. "We cooked food to sell at the soccer games and made enough money to buy the nets and plant trees."

"We were the town celebrities," she laughed. "It was lot of fun interacting with the community. I had good conversations with the people, it was interesting to hear them stereotype Americans as rich, white people."

When the time came to say goodbye to her host family, she felt as if she was leaving her second home. Now back at Mountain View, the teenager is restless and is already planning to go back, as soon as she graduates from high school. "It was so bittersweet because I had to leave home twice that summer," she said. "I developed such a strong relationships with the people that I am planning on doing it again."
E-mail Faiza Hasan at fhasan@mv-voice.com