Flying into Santo Domingo that first day and the eight hour bus ride the next day to get to Barahona, showed me more raw beauty than I have encountered in a lifetime. Looking down from my window seat at the bright blue ocean and rolling mountain side, lush with greenery, gave me my first glimpse at the gorgeous Dominican Republic. Little did I know that even through this beautiful country, there would be places that made me question the actions of people living there.     

The service I did there worked alongside the Global Health Initiative. This means I learned about all aspects that relate to the health of a community and did my best to work on solutions, long and short term.

The Dominican Republic is known for their beaches. The beautiful, clear water with waves crashing on the white sand is what one may picture when thinking about the Dominican Republic. While many of the beaches in the DR do fulfill these images, the beaches I saw were covered in trash. The significant thing was that most of the trash was plastic that could have easily been recycled.

Digging to the bottom of this issue, I learned that many individual problems all stem from this problem and all of them relate to each other. First of all, drinkable water. In the Dominican Republic, I experienced the difficulties of brushing my teeth with filtered water out of my water bottle or even being careful while I shower to not get any water in my mouth or nose. These daily struggles are intensified for the majority of the population without any running water at all. Water systems and pipes in the Dominican Republic force civilians to buy huge water jugs, boil water, or resort to rainwater because any sources of water that hasn’t been properly filtered can be very harmful. Therefore, the people have to buy water and if they are unable to afford it, they have to rely on the rain.

One day my group of 24 other students and I went to one of the local beaches to collect the water bottles. Driving up to the beach everyone was in awe of the beauty. It looked like a postcard! However, once we were there and looked down at our feet, we were all taken back a little when we realized there was garbage everywhere. My initial feelings were of shock and anger because I felt like I had to blame the people living here for littering. Yet, after learning more about the Dominican Republic, I realized that the people living here are not only accountable. This is where I realized all of the issues like garbage disposal services and the government's job to provide clean tap water to limit plastic bottle uses all contributed to the trash on the beach. So obviously, the work we did on the beach by collecting as many bottles as we could, would not make a larger impact overall. I learned that to approach this problem, you have to take a step back and look at the smaller issues that contribute to this overall disastrous effect of littered water bottles.

Even though we weren’t able to pick up every piece of trash, our goal was to pick up plastic bottles that we could reuse in one of our projects. After collecting about 30 large bags of plastic bottles we traveled to a Haitian Dominican Refugee Community Center. There, we used the bottles to insulate walls in a new section of the building they were constructing. Not only did we get to make use out of this “garbage,” I also learned how to build a wall using wood, nails, wire netting and water bottles!

This day taught me a lot about how to approach and find a sustainable way to solve a problem. Not only does water contamination force civilians to use many plastic water bottles, it is also a source of many waterborne illnesses that I was able to see first hand while working in a clinic a few days later in a small rural town in the mountains.

Don’t get me wrong, the Dominican Republic is a beautiful place with spectacular beaches, but there is a lot of “damage” to those beaches that motivates me to learn more and help the Dominican Republic find systems to better regulate water.