JOB DESCRIPTION

NUESTROS PEQUENOS HERMANOS

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 time 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 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. They received volunteers worldwide for three reasons: 

• Play

• Teach

• Love

NPH built this little village so 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 with whom I developed a special bond, so I would go back to play with her every afternoon. I felt like a brother to her, and that feeling is amazing. 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

I worked in different ways but I feel like there were three main activities: 

• Construction 

• Farming 

• Butchering

To ensure that the kids had enough food to live comfortably and give back to the community, 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

Leisure can take many forms, but I can sum it up like this:

• Team sports

• Social games

Our leisure was their leisure. We would have some free time in the evening, and 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. On 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 run barefoot, wearing only a bathing suit. We ran for half an hour under the tropical rain, eating mangoes from the village’s tree until they yelled at us 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 my life's best and most eye-opening experience.

Readability statistics with Word:

Flesch reading ease score: 74.0

Flesch-Kincaid grade score: 7.2

Passive voice sentences: 0%