A team from Florida Tech put in spring crack not on the beaches or sleeping late but toiling in the heat of the Dominican Republic to aid a neighborhood in want.
Father Randall Meissen, chaplain and director of the Catholic Campus Ministry, Claudia Velazquez, executive assistant to COES Dean John Harris, COES learners Julian Herrera, Elias Orellana and Ryan Lapolt and alumna Alexis Hopkins invested March 23-30 in the rural community of La Cucarita.
There, in collaboration with ongoing progress assignments directed by the mission business of the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, they served residents put in a water program to deliver cleanse drinking water from a nearby mountain spring to homes in the city.
“We aided alongside individuals from the nearby group in digging trenches and setting up pipes along the steep route,” Meissen claimed. “It was a excellent working experience of challenging get the job done, service and cultural trade with our brothers and sisters in Dominican Republic – not to mention a testimony to the influence civil engineering awareness can have at fixing the sensible difficulties with uplifting communities.”
For the reason that the journey coincided with Holy Week, the Florida Tech group also participated in celebrations of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday and Excellent Friday with the close by communities of Los Fríos, La Cueva and Las Lajas. Meissen presided at a number of of the Spanish-language solutions for the communities on people days.
As they headed to the airport to fly again to Florida, the group took an excursion to the cathedral of Santo Domingo, which is the oldest cathedral in the Americas.