Source: Jweekly.com
The moment Kelsey Swezey-Gleason first set eyes on the schoolhouse construction site high in the mountains of Ecuador, she burst into tears.
Then she and nine fellow Bay Area teens got to work.
“It had been two years of sweat and blood to get there,” recalled the 19-year-old Palo Alto native. “I was so ecstatic that we finally made a difference.”
“We” is Beth Am Temple Youth, a program at Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills. Ten BATY members, ages 14 to 19, recently returned from a 10-day trip to Ecuador. Their mission: help construct the village schoolhouse they paid for.They didn’t do it alone. In addition to fundraising help from family, friends and fellow Beth Am congregants, the BATY teens enlisted several nonprofit organizations to help them find the perfect project to fund.
Two years ago, those organizations — Free the Children, Brick by Brick and Me to We — located the Ecuadorian village of Chismaute, which was in desperate need of a new school. It was a goal Swezey-Gleason, who was a high school senior in 2008, believed she and her fellow BATY teens could accomplish.
“It was time for BATY to do something for the world around them, leave their mark and make a difference,” said Erin Goldstrom, Beth Am’s staff youth adviser, who assisted the teens in fundraising and accompanied them on the trip.
To raise the $8,500 needed to build the school, the teens did everything from weekly bagel sales to a Kiss the Guinea Pig booth at last year’s temple Purim carnival. One of the teens staged a concert and enlisted her friends to perform.
After 18 months of perseverance, the teens had raised the funds needed to build the school. But they weren’t done. They then had the idea to travel to Ecuador and help build the school. Some $10,000 in additional fundraising later, the 10-person delegation, along with Goldstrom, was off to Ecuador late last month for the trip of a lifetime.
After a few days in the capitol of Quito, where they visited a synagogue and Jewish community center, the group headed for Chimborazo province, more than a mile high in the Ecuadorian Andes.Staying at a converted hacienda just outside the village, the teens befriended their Ecuadorian peers, many of whom belong to the indigenous Puruha tribe and who speak Quechua, Ecuador’s second language.
Work projects for the teens included painting, tiling and flood-proofing the one-room schoolhouse.
“You’ve got to get your hands dirty with what you worked so hard to fundraise for,” Swezey-Gleason said. “We got tiles and sanded them, painted one of the halls, we cemented rocks on the sides of buildings because they have bad flooding in winter.”
It wasn’t all work. One day, the teens met up with a busload of their peers from a nearby village. Through smatterings of broken English and Spanish, and plenty of smiles, friendships formed.
“They want to know you and hold your hand,” remembered Swezey-Gleason. “They’re glad you’re there and glad to meet you.”
The aid helps the poor of rural Ecuador, where the poverty rate hovers around 70 percent, according to Free the Children. Because of malnutrition, up to 47 percent of indigenous children in these areas suffer stunted growth, a phenomenon the Bay Area teens noticed right away.
As the trip coincided with Christmas, the Ecuadorian teens inquired about how the Americans celebrated the holiday. The answer surprised them.
“They asked about Christmas,” Goldstrom recalled. “Our kids said most of us are Jewish and we don’t celebrate Christmas. For the most part being Jewish [in Ecuador] is not common.”
After five days in Chismaute, the teens moved on for a few days at a lodge in the Amazon. It gave them a chance to reflect on their experience, and to have a little R&R, rainforest style.
“We did a lot of leadership activities there,” Goldstrom said. “We talked about Maimonides’ ladder, the universe of obligation and prioritizing what is important to you as a person.”
Being in the Amazon, the teens boated down the Napo River, hiked in the jungle and underwent a “spiritual cleanse” from a local shaman.And then there were the weevil larvae.
The teens had a chance to sample that local delicacy, though only two were brave enough to eat live larvae, as is the local custom. The rest noshed on fried larvae.
“As non-kosher as it sounds,” said Goldstrom, “everyone agreed it tasted like bacon.”
Now that they are home, the teens told their BATY leaders they hope to return to Chismaute someday to further help build up the village. Meanwhile Goldstrom believes the experience changed the participants profoundly.
“They all expressed they want to get more involved,” she said. “Some were freshman and sophomores, so they will become [BATY] leaders.”
As for Swezey-Gleason, a sophomore at Chico State University, the trip was revolutionary. Majoring in Latin American studies, she plans to return to Ecuador this year to teach English in the Amazon.
“We were taught valuable lessons,” she said. “The villagers, just by greeting us with their smiles and the welcoming ceremonies they had, taught us more than we could ever teach them about what’s important.”