The students have a request for shoppers about to enter the supermarket.
Could you please buy us some bug spray?
Or toothpaste?
Or peanut butter?
Or any number of other items on our shopping list?
Heck, if you want to, just donate the cost of the items directly, that's okay, too.
The purchases aren't for the students. They are for boys and girls living in a Dominican Republic orphanage. Daniel LaGrotta (HS'11) and 14 other Carnegie Mellon students are representing a campus organization called Alternative Spring Break. Every year, Alternative Spring Break plans trips specifically geared toward volunteer opportunities and service. Students looking for both an adventure and a positive way to spend their free week in March come up with the idea for their trip and then have to figure out how to finance it themselves. This leads to some creative fundraising. LaGrotta, besides standing outside supermarkets, also helps organize a 3-on-3 basketball tournament. He solicits local businesses for sponsorship. He tries to get donations from friends and family. He makes connections with a nonprofit called Orphanage Outreach. It takes all winter to pull off, but the payoff comes when he steps off the plane in the Dominican Republic.
He and his group are shuttled to an orphanage in the small town of Jaibon, near the Haiti border, which doubles as a working farm. There, surrounded by goats, roosters, and chickens, they teach the dozens of very interested orphans how to play games like duck-duck-goose and red light-green light. During the day, they trek down to the town's school and teach English to small classes of middle schoolers. After the lessons, the youngsters don't want to leave the school. They swarm the Americans, wanting to know everything; what music they listen to, what movies they watch, what sports they play.
A week later, after leaving their supplies behind, it's back to Pittsburgh for LaGrotta and his classmates. It was all worth it, he says. Lives have been changed forever. And he isn't just talking about the children in Jaibon.
-Bradley A. Porter (HS'08)
