My Independent Study Project

So for SIT programs, every student spends the last month of the semester doing an independent project of their choice that relates to what they have been studying throughout the semester. As of this past week, I have figured out what I'm going to be doing for mine! Here's a little info on what I'm going to be doing.

I'm going back to Santa Cruz (for more information on the city, see "Coa", a post on the blog of Matt Taylor. What? Did he just reference himself? Yes, he did.), where I will spend 3 weeks working with a youth orchestra in an area of the city called Plan 3000. This orchestra is meant to be an outlet for high school kids after school so that they are not on the streets, where they can easily find trouble and possibly find a reason to drop out of school. I will be playing trombone with them, helping teach trombone if they need it, doing whatever other things they need me to do for them and making a video about the orchestra. My video is the way I'm going to present my project - usually, students write 25-page papers in Spanish, but we have the option to make short documentaries, which I thought would be cool.

The reason that Plan 3000 could use this type of outlet for its students - Plan 3000 is one of, if not the, most under-developed and poor areas in Bolivia (one of the 8 poorest countries in the world). Basically, 25 years ago, 3000 families were displaced by a huge flood in Bolivia. The government moved them to an area outside of Santa Cruz which, at the time, was just a jungle, with no roads or way of reaching the outside world for resources and help. After placing them there, the government left them completely on their own - 3000 families who had lost everything in the flood were left to fend for themselves.

Somehow, they managed to build a small city out of what they had, which is now a part of Santa Cruz (with 300,000 inhabitants). However, with a population made up of migrants, they don't possess a lot of money, and still lack running water for the most part.

I leave to start my project on Friday, so I'm getting pretty excited!