• Submitted by: admin
• Travel and Tourism
• United States
• 04 / 13 / 2010

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On a five-day trip to Cuba, nine eighth-graders from the Tower School got a rare glimpse of the seldom-visited country and its people who will likely never leave.

Tower School Spanish teacher Victoria Dosch and her husband Steve Dosch led the trip. Knowing that Cuba is a country to which Americans are usually not allowed to travel, Victoria Dosch had to gain permission to bring her group there.

Dosch pledged to bring medical supplies and toys to the Cuban hospitals and received clearance on humanitarian grounds.

The students, all from Marblehead, Swampscott and Nahant, were Ben Clark, Harry Cohen, Eliot Gregory, Caroline Hooper, Drew Jacobs, Emma Kahn, Grace Polk, Grace Murray and Emily Willis.

To raise money for the supplies to be donated on the trip, the Tower School students ran a bake sale and organized a “jeans and T-shirt day,” where students who could buy relief from the school dress code with a small donation. In total, the kids and Dosch raised $1,028. The kids spent the weeks before their trip shopping for supplies and packing.

When the exhausted travelers reached the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, native musicians were playing the Beatles “Yesterday.”

Dosch recognized the poignant ballad immediately and realized what a perfect welcome to Cuba it was.

“I couldn’t have scripted it better,” she said.

With only a few short days in Cuba, the group got started immediately on its humanitarian work in the country.

While visiting a Cuban school, the Tower School students tried to engage the kids in a game of world trivia, but after the first question, in which the students were asked who the American president is, the principal of the Cuban school put a stop to the game.

“We were told that the kids wouldn’t know about things other than Cuba,” Dosch said.

Instead, the kids talked to the Cuban children, played volleyball with them and helped them make cards for those back at the Tower School.

“[Cuban President Fidel Castro] values sports and education,” Emily Willis said. “When the [Cuban] students wrote cards for the students at Tower, they wrote drafts and drafts to make sure their writing was perfect.”

The Tower School kids also participated in a scavenger hunt that required them to ask strangers questions about Cuba. They soon found that the Cuban people would literally drop everything to help them and often would walk them all the way to their destinations.

“They lacked a sense of urgency,” said Dosch. “They were very relaxed, and we found it refreshing.”

The scavenger hunt was also a perfect way for the kids to test their Spanish, but they quickly found that the Cubans wanted to test their English as well.

“We were talking Spanish, and they were talking English,” Gregory said. “As soon as they found out we were from America, they just wanted to talk to us in English.”

Added Dosch, “[The Tower students] did a really good job with the Spanish and reading social cues. The kids were very mindful of the atmosphere.”

Taking advice from Dosch, the students also learned not to discuss politics.

“It is more despondent there than it was,” Dosch said.

Gregory added, “They didn’t want to talk about Fidel. They didn’t want to put a damper on their day.”

During their time in Cuba, the students noticed that things are rarely what they seem. The smiling faces of the Cuban people were often covering the hopelessness of their living conditions.

“I was struck by how poor Cuba is,” Gregory said. “The buildings were all run down and hadn’t been painted in years. It was like they were trapped in a bubble.”

Dosch added, “They are so close to us [geographically]. But they seem so far and so foreign. There are two very different worlds, and they are not supposed to meet.”

The kids were especially surprised to realize that they weren’t allowed into the hospital to give their donations. They were told that Fidel Castro is extremely proud of Cuba’s medical system, so he does not accept donations. Also, because one Cuban is not allowed to have more than another, they cannot even accept medical supplies or medicines that could save their lives.

In order to make sure their donations did not go to waste, the students had patients come out and get the supplies to sneak them into the hospital. Castro’s reign has brought hard times on many of the Cuban people, but as Dosch told her students, “Most of the people in Cuba have no idea what existed before him.”

“The waiting list for Cubans to come to America is two years,” Dosch said. “Jonathan Farrar’s goal was to lower the wait time by offering visas in the mornings and afternoons.”

Farrar’s plan backfired when Cubans took the afternoon opening to mean that the United States was offering more visas. Hundreds more Cubans applied, and now the wait is two years and four months, but Farrar is still working to bring the wait time down to one year.

To insure the students had a little break from their humanitarian efforts before they left Cuba, Dosch took the kids to a museum dedicated to every supposed assassination attempt on Castro. The kids saw everything from an exploding Quaker Oats box, to a camera implanted in a highlighter, to a bomb hidden in a rock.

The Cuban government assures tourists and the Cuban people that Castro’s life is threatened every 20 seconds, and portraits hang in the museum of every “known” person to have made an attempt to murder Castro.

After five short days in Cuba, the students and the Doschs flew home.

Three weeks after the trip, on March 9, Dosch gathered eight of the nine students to discuss their trip at Tower School. Their presentations included Cuban music, a slideshow of photographs from the trip and the students’ own explanations about life in Cuba.

Source: www.wickedlocal.com