This post is also available in:
Spanish
In August this year, Naomi Biden, the granddaughter of the Vice-President of the United States, Joseph Biden, spent a week volunteering at the Hogar del Niño, in La Romana.
For more information on Hogar del Niño visit their lovely website: http://hogardelnino.com/ designed and maintained by Silgon, Inc., the Dominican Republic’s best web design and management company.
Here Naomi shares with us her first impressions of the Hogar del Niño on her first day as a volunteer:
The first thing I noticed when I got there was that it exceeded all of my expectations. Earlier this summer I went to an orphanage that served as a school as well, and it did not even begin to compare to El Hogar. On our tour the children seemed happy, and excited, but not surprised to see visitors, and they shouted “visita, visita” whenever we walked by.
There is a good amount of space so that none of the children had to be crowded into the classrooms, and El Hogar seems very flexible to all of the children’s needs. For example I think it is amazing that they are creating a new special program for the deaf and mute – one that not only provides them an education, but also practical job skills, by having a program which teaches them how to become hair stylists etc.
After our tour we went into the room with all of the babies and were awed by what we saw. The babies are all kept in one huge room with over a hundred cribs as well as a separate playground, playpens, and washing room. There were more than enough nurses to give each baby the special care and attention it needs. Seen as it was our first times working with the babies we just rocked them and played with them – we mostly stayed with the younger babies.
Naomi spent her time at the Hogar del Niño with a friend, Sophia Cantizano, who has also written a special diary of her experience, for us to publish here, on Casa de Campo Living. We will continue this series of posts with the rest of Naomi’s diary as well as her friend Sophia’s diary.