Ambassador Byrd Nichols
 | Byrd lives in Raleigh, NC where she attends North Carolina State University and is pursuing a degree in Human Biology with minors in Nutrition and Spanish. She loves riding her horse, volunteering with Outreach 360, and traveling. She has joined us several times in the Dominican Republic and looks forward to sharing Outreach 360 with others. |
My Outreach360 Story
I am not perfect. I try to be and am extremely hard on
myself. When I get an A- all I can see
is the minus not the A that I worked so hard for. So when challenged by my mom to volunteer
with Outreach360 I hesitantly accepted.
I was still afraid I’d fail, going so far away from everything I knew to
a tiny town, Montecristi, in the NW corner of the Dominican Republic. What if I didn’t have anything to give? What if I wasn’t enough? Even though no one close to me knew
Outreach360, I was certain that somehow my potential failure would reach
home. However, after much deliberation
and postponing my trip, I went. I got
off the plane in Santiago to unknown sounds of bachata and merengue, unknown
smells of street vendors food, and the humidity was comparable to North
Carolina but the lobby where I waited wasn’t air conditioned! This, as I’m sure
many of you all know, is unheard of here.
We headed
to Montecristi and I spent my first week and a half missing my comforts of
home. There was nothing wrong with the
food, lodging, or people; I just wanted my normal. However, I began to realize there was a
considerable amount of time in my stay.
So, I slowly opened up to the Dominican, and as I’ve come to find, it
has a funny way of making people fall in love with it. As I opened up with the kids they opened up
with me. I began to see each kid’s
personality and it struck me how happy they were even though they weren’t
longing for the comforts I deeply missed.
They just wanted to connect to me, learn from me, and relate to me
simply because I was there. They were
living in the moment, and slowly I saw how beneficial this attitude was to
their happiness. This idea was evident
to me when I did return home and realized how little my routine, that I’d
missed so much, meant to me; I craved the relationships I’d developed in the
Dominican and even the traditional food and culture. So I returned.
It was a little after Christmas,
and fortunately I experienced “noche especial” or special night where we hosted
exiting events with the children. After
a superb pillow fight with all the girls, we ate candy, did make-up and nails;
things that I had done when I was younger.
Then, to celebrate Christmas, presents were passed out; stockings from a
church that children had put together and sent down to each of the kids with a
letter. One of the girls I am close
with, Nena, asked me to read hers in Spanish since she couldn’t read the
English. I eagerly obliged. “Hi, I’m eight years old and I have a mom and
a dad, one brother, and a dog. Do you have a dog? I like to read. I also like
to swim. Do you like to swim?” Gradually I realized that this was why I was
here. Nena doesn’t have two parents that
could provide her Christmas, and I was there to bring this gift to her and to show
her love. Both of these were simple for
me to give; it was not about failing or being perfect but doing what I could.
Providing these girls a “Christmas” was important. And that is why I’ve continued to return
through Outreach360, because the countries have so much to offer, yet they lack
in resources and educational opportunities.
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