First Week of Ministry!

The first two weeks in Santo Domingo have been focused on getting settled into our new apartments. While most of our energy has been put into getting the basics (electricity, air conditioning, gas for the stove, cleaning supplies, food), we had our first staff meeting last Friday to discuss our goal for this week: meet as many students as possible and learn as much as we can about UASD. 

We split our team up in groups and set out to answer these questions about the campus’ geography and social behaviors:

• Where do students go to hang out?
• What time are students on campus and when are they free?
• How do you get to school? How long does it take? When and where do you work on homework?

Our goal is to figure out how available students are to get together for small groups, discipleship, and campus outreach events. Some answers that surprised me:

• The cost per credit hour is 5-25 Dominican Pesos (RD)—the latter if you went to a private high school. This is equivalent to 14 cents-70 cents per credit hour, or about $15 a semester for a full schedule. This explains why there are 180,000 students here! However, it was discouraging to hear that despite having a degree, most students will be unable to find a job after graduation.
• About half of the students I talked to travel up to an hour and a half on the bus to get to school each day! In order to finish their degree quickly, many of them take classes on Saturday too…yuck!

Today one of the key student leaders of Vida Estudantil walked around campus with N and I to help us learn about UASD. It was such a privilege to get to spend this time with her. She has such a passionate heart for sharing the gospel with her peers. She has even shared it with full classrooms! If there’s anyone who will be able to help us learn how to reach students here, it’s her.

On another note…we had an interesting time trying to make Labor Day fun. I bought some break and bake cookie dough and a cookie sheet and brought it over to the boys apartment (the only ones to have a functioning oven) to bake them. As we went to turn on the oven, this is what we saw:We took a guess that 350 degrees was somewhere in between the 3 and 4 mark, and this is what happened: However, we didn’t let it steal our joy! We each got spoons and scooped as much as we could that was edible. But our cookie craving got the best of us; we eventually found ourselves saying, “It’s not that bad if you eat it with the burnt side up!”