A group of Owen Sound residents will be leaving tomorrow to help out a very poor area of the Dominican Republic.
Lynn Hoath says they are going to help build a school they have been working on for a few years.
She says it’s a four-room school house and they’re ready now to put in either a floor or a roof.
Hoath says when they first started travelling to this area, they implemented a breakfast program for the students.
She says the area used to have a sugar cane mill, but it closed and the workers were laid off.
Hoath says the parents aren’t making money, and as a result the children aren’t eating and many of them are scrounging at the dump for food.
Now that the children have a proper breakfast program, more of them are going to school.
Hoath is also a nursing professor at Georgian College in Owen Sound, and she says her group will cross paths with a group of her nursing students travelling to the Dominican.
She says the students will run medical clinics where they will see 150 to 300 people per day.
Hoath says it’s a very eye-opening experience for the students, and they come home very grateful for the medical system we have in Canada.
But she adds a lot of students love the experience and want to do more aid trips like that in the future.
