On Wednesday morning in Marano Campus Center, a group of students and faculty presented at Quest about their Alternative Spring Break, teaching English in the Dominican Republic and their experience abroad.

As part of the alternative spring break program at Oswego State, a group of students, two alumni and two faculty members traveled to the Monte Cristi in the Dominican Republic through the Outreach 360 program.

“It was so jammed packed, I can’t believe that we did as much as we did in just one week,” senior Evyn Steinberg said. “Saying that we did some work is barely even brushing the top of what we did.”

The Outreach 360 program was founded 21 years ago, starting off as a small orphanage. This year, they had their 20,000th volunteer come through their door. The program is growing and beginning to branch out. The volunteers are beginning to go into schools in the area and teaching English.

The Oswego State volunteers couldn’t go into the schools to teach English due to holy week, Semana Santa, a holiday in which the schools are closed for the entire week.

Instead they spent the week running a four-day camp with activities for the Dominican children and in the process, helped teach them English. Some of the activities they prepared the day before included making bracelets, teaching them American dances and other art activities.

“It was a full English emergent camp, we weren’t allowed to speak to them in Spanish at all,” Steinberg said. “If they were speaking in Spanish to you, you had to tell them they had to speak to you in English.”

Each day was related to a different principle that was displayed on the volunteers T-shirts. Each night the group would discuss what they spent the day doing and how they were able to accomplish the Outreach 360’s 10 principles.

While on their trip, students also visited one of the many banana plantations run by a local family and learned about how a banana plantation is run and how the banana plant typically sprouts.

The students also visited a salt flat which is a huge industry in the Dominican Republic and helps their economy. The students learned that one-third of the world supply of salt is produced in a salt flat such as the one the students saw in Monte Cristi.

“We got to taste the salt crystals when our tour guide put his hand in the water,” librarian Tina Chan said. “Because it was easy to breakup, if we wanted to we could taste a small piece of the salt.”

A few of the students and the faculty presented their experiences at Quest in the hope of catching students’ interest for participation in a future program.

“If you haven’t done a trip like this I strongly encourage it,” Gage Slachciak said. “It was just such a liberating experience.”