Photo courtesy of Sr. Lupoli
For the last two years, Northwood has offered an annual educational trip to experienced Spanish students across the county. The destination? La Cumbre – a small village near the northern coast of the Dominican Republic, where students spend over a week living and learning with the locals. The trip was first organized by Spanish teacher Sr. Lupoli.
“I enjoy traveling a lot and I have travelled to many countries in my life and I want to share my passion to travel with my students,” Lupoli said. “Many students who have travelled with me now have that passion and that interest in traveling and discovering the world.”
Lupoli works with a small organization based in La Cumbre called the SOMOS Center, which has helped to organize the annual trips since their start in 2017. Lupoli describes it as a “very small, personal program,” designed to “give the opportunity to students here to experience life in the Dominican Republic and have a cultural exchange.”
“The objective of the program is to live the Dominican life,” Lupoli said. “Every day had different activities. We visited a school, we went to swim in the river, we went to the beach, we cooked with the families, we walked through the community and learned about tropical agriculture. So there were different activities every day, but every day there was a lot of time to be in the community.”
The “families” Lupoli refers to were his and his students hosts, whom they lived with for the duration of their stay, all of which were Spanish-speaking locals. He believes that staying with host families is an “integral part” of the trip, offering many experiences that a hotel never could.
“At the very beginning, it was a little uncomfortable, but it really was not as bad as I thought it would be,” said junior Henry Taylor, a then Spanish III student who went on the trip. “Me and Nuno Aguiar stayed together, became friends with our host mom, and within the first 20 minutes I was, like, doing a dance with her and then she was arm-wrestling Nuno and she beat him.”
Though not all students had introductions as physical as Taylor and Aguiar’s, they all felt welcome soon after their arrival.
“Getting there and going into the village was kind-of scary because we didn’t know what we were expecting,” said senior and Spanish IV student Abby Johnson. “But, as soon as the first people went to get out and go meet their family– as soon as we saw their family greet them–I think everybody on the bus felt a whole lot more comfortable because their family was just so open and so welcoming.”
Johnson describes La Cumbre as “a really close-knit community” where she felt at home, despite being 1300 miles away and the many differences. Among these – the plumbing.
“My house didn’t have a shower, it didn’t have running water, so we took bucket bath showers every night,” Johnson said. “We didn’t have a toilet; we had a concrete bench with a hole in it.”
Some might shiver at the thought of going that long without running water, but Johnson remembers it fondly, though it did make her “a lot more appreciative of what we have here in the United States.” Johnson enjoyed her time with her host family so much, she decided she didn’t want to see the relationship end when she left.
“I still talk to my host family pretty often,” Johnson said. “They’ll call me almost every Saturday and we’ll have a conversation on the phone. It’s really awesome getting to keep up with them, [because] they really were like my mom and dad and brothers and sisters there.”
While they spent a lot of time with the group and with their families, Johnson and her peers really got to know the community as well, sometimes without leaving the house.
“My host dad’s brothers lived up on the hill, and their kids would just come down into our house,” Johnson said. “There was one day when one of those kids came down with a pot of food and stuck it on our stove, turned on the stove, left, and then came back and took the pot of food back to his house.”
The familiarity Johnson describes extended to more than just families.
“There were fields next to my family’s house, and there were workers there throughout the day, and they would come into our home and just, like, come sit down and we’d give them a plate of food and eat with them and talk to them,” Johnson said. “It was pretty cool to see everyone’s openness. The door was always open.”
Taylor described the local attitude similarly.
“In the Dominican, everyone was so friendly that you really didn’t feel that out of place,” Taylor said. “Everyone trusts each other, everyone is very open with each other. People just walk to each other’s houses and have conversations. It’s not like America, where we’re sometimes very private. I think that sense of community is something that’s unique to the Dominican in many ways.”
Taylor saw many improvements to his Spanish abilities during the trip, and didn’t mind to find himself struggling with the language while there.
“I feel like I’m a more confident Spanish-speaker now that I’ve had this experience, and I would definitely do it again, just for more practice with Spanish,” Taylor said. “There were definitely some situations where I had to sit and think about what my response would be, and I think those kinds of situations are the best kinds of situations, because you learn.”
Johnson also recognizes the educational value in the experience, and believes she is “much more fluent in Spanish now,” due mostly to the frequency and necessity of speaking Spanish in her daily life there.
“Immersion helps you learn a lot more than a mix between English and Spanish, just because you’re hearing that language all the time,” Johnson said. “It was really cool to see how the traditional classroom Spanish [compared to] conversational Spanish. Not everything had to be perfect. They could understand what I was saying even if something like my verb conjugations weren’t correct.”
Lupoli, like Johnson, noticed the differences between the type of Spanish spoken in the Dominican and the type he teaches at Northwood.
“Every country has its own accented way of speaking,” Lupoli said. “In the Dominican Republic, they speak very fast and the pronunciation and vocabulary are different. For students, it is much more difficult to understand people, but they all found a way to communicate.”
But for at least a few hours at the end of the day, no one needed to speak each other’s language, because they were instead engaging in two of the Dominican’s national pastimes: playing dominoes and dancing.
“After dinner, we would clean up and change for dancing and dominoes, which was the whole community,” Johnson said. “It was like a party every night while we were there.”
Though it was among her favorite parts of the day, Johnson remembers often being exhausted by the end of it.
“I was one of those people who could never catch a break,” Johnson said. “If I sat down, there was another guy ready to take me back out on the dance floor.”
Aside from dancing and dominos, Johnson said the daily schedule varied quite a bit. The students woke up around 7 a.m., got ready, had breakfast with their host families, then went to do an activity as a group. These could range from trips to the nearby town of Salcido and the beach to visiting local high schools and, Johnson’s favorite, having “field days” for local kids.
“We played games like hot potato and did relay races with them, and that day the kids really bonded with me,” Johnson said. “That was sadly our last day there, [but] it was really awesome to be able to have that time with the kids to just bond with them and get to know them.”
While Taylor also enjoyed his time in the community, some of his favorite moments were in the kitchen.
“The food there – I miss it so much,” Taylor said. “It was incredible. The mom there was such a good cook. I was, like, in awe at how tasty it was. I tried to make rice and beans when I got back, and I literally had to dump it in the trash because it was just not as good.”
The main complaint of those who took the trip wasn’t about the water or the weather, it was having to leave when their ten days were up. Many made close friends and unforgettable memories, and came back with a message for their friends at home.
“I think everybody should experience a different culture at some point in their life, and this is a really easy and fun way to do it now, while you’re still in high school and while you still have summer break,” Johnson said. “So you can take that time to go experience that and just have fun and learn about a different place.”
Taylor agrees.
“The Dominican was definitely the biggest trip I’ve ever gone on,” Taylor said. “Seeing how different it was [and] building connections with people that lived in the village was really eye-opening to me. Traveling there was a great experience. I cannot suggest this trip enough. Even if you’re not that amazing at Spanish, you’ll get better at Spanish just by going.”
Although Lupoli has made the journey multiple times, he still believes it has something special to offer to everyone, and recommends it just as adamantly as his students.
“When you travel to other countries you learn a lot about your own life,” Lupoli said. “It is much more powerful than just learning Spanish.”
— By Chase Miller
