Job description draft

Someone once said: “In 2024, everyone should have a job experience.” I felt that. I have never worked, never had an internship, nor have I one lined up for this summer. 

Volunteering is the closest I have ever come to work. I once had an experience in the Dominican Republic for a couple of weeks during which I volunteered at a camp. I am sure that everyone has done some kind of volunteering in their life, but I will tell you about my experience working with Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos and how it changed my life. 

To sum up my experience, I would use these three words:

• Children

• Work

• Leisure

I will make it my goal to convey all of the emotions I felt during those days through those three words.

Children

The camp I worked at is an immense structure created to host orphans or abandoned children. NPH built this little village so that they could have a home, and volunteers like myself come from all over the world to help. Children can arrive there as early as when they are only babies, and they will stay until they graduate from high school. As volunteers, our job was to play with them, teach them basic English, and make them enjoy their time. 

My most rewarding experience was definitely with a little girl to whom I got attached, so I would go back to play with her every afternoon. They told me that she was seven years old, but I believe she was at least three years older than that (let’s keep that between us). 

Work

To make sure that the kids had enough food to live comfortably and to give back to the community around, we would do some manual work such as building houses, working on the farm, or painting walls. Since we were a big group, we would rotate doing these jobs. Depending on the needs, I helped butcher a pork, plant corn on the farm, paint a mural, and make concrete for a house. 

Making concrete was definitely the hardest. I will not complain about it because it was a good workout, but making concrete with a shovel for eight hours under the sun was something. However, the house they were building is now home to twelve children and one woman, and thinking about that fueled me all day long. 

Leisure

Our leisure was their leisure. In the evening we would have some free time, and for as much as I would have loved to sleep, we usually played with the kids. Some nights we would start a soccer game with them. Other nights it would be basketball or baseball. 

The best evening was, unexpectedly, when it poured rain. It was raining so badly that we couldn’t do anything, so we decided to go for a run barefoot, wearing only a bathing suit. We ran for half an hour under the tropical rain eating mango from the village’s tree until we got yelled at for not being inside. 

My description might not be a proper work experience, but it is the closest I could get to it. It felt very rewarding and tiring. I slept for ten hours straight on the flight back to Europe. But I can affirm that this was and is the best and most eye-opening experience of my life.

Readability statistics with Hemingway:

Flesch reading ease score: 75

Flesch-Kincaid grade score: 7.85

Passive voice sentences: 2