We had a very different Thanksgiving this year. Perhaps you remember our experiences a few years ago on the impact cruise with Fathom, if not, you can read about those experiences here.
When the opportunity came up for my family to engage in similar impact experiences in conjunction with the Thanksgiving holiday we jumped on it immediately. It was the perfect opportunity for us to vacation for good!
Even two nights early in Fort Lauderdale almost wasn’t enough when the winter storm moved through. Our flight from Norfolk was cancelled, we were offered a flight on Friday afternoon, but it would not have gotten us into Fort Lauderdale until very late Friday night. We opted instead on a crack of dawn flight out of Richmond Friday morning that got us into Fort Lauderdale before noon. Good thing we did, ultimately that flight we were offered from Norfolk Friday afternoon was cancelled as well, so we may not have made it to the port in time on Saturday with the number of people who were displaced by the mass cancellations.
Fast forward to Saturday afternoon when we joined our group onboard the Royal Princess. We did a quick activity to get to know each other and find out a little bit more about the impact activities we were doing in San Juan, Puerto Plata and Grand Turk.
This week I’ll share with you our experience at the Arturo Somohano Music school in San Juan. Musica 100×35 brings in at risk youth to teach them music in an after school program. The school was celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday as well, but when we arrived we were greeted with a short performance by their top students. We then split up into two groups and constructed paper violins and gourd maracas for the students. The paper violins are used by the 5 and 6 year old students as they learn proper posture and use of the violin. The real instruments are quite expensive and most families can not afford that investment for children so young. These give them the opportunity to learn more quickly. After the instruments were constructed we moved onto landscaping. Why would we plant trees at a music school, you ask? Most of the trees and plants were destroyed during the hurricanes last year so we wanted to work alongside the local community to make the school look nicer. More important, their stage is outside, so the trees we planted around the stage will improve the acoustics.
While we were planting families started to arrive with their 5 & 6 year olds to give us a concert on their paper instruments followed by the real instruments. They wanted to show us thanks for the time we had spent and were quite impressive given their ages.
All in all it was a very satisfying day of work, when we left the school we felt like we had made a tangible contribution to the organization. This was a theme that would continue throughout the week. With these impact activities we were able to work alongside the communities we visited to help them better their surroundings and ultimately their lives. Some might say that it was our lives that were enriched as well, I would have to agree.
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