For Local Student, Haitian Trip Full Of Experiences And Lessons

By Jeff White

Jonathan Jossick remembers it all too clearly: One large room that looked down at a bright courtyard. Forty beds lined the room, each side-by-side. Forty small children, without homes, without families, all waiting to die.

The room was in Mother Teresa’s Orphanage, a facility where homeless children stricken with terminal illnesses spend the last sixth months of their lives. Though he saw much during seven days in Haiti, leaving those children was the toughest part of Jonathan’s trip.

“I’m glad I experienced something like that, because most kids my age wouldn’t. It was tough to witness, but they were all very happy when we came,” Jonathan, 15, recalls. He is back from his Rotary trip to that Caribbean nation, where he accompanied an American delegation of dentists, doctors, priests, nurses and volunteer workers, all of whom were guests of the Haitian Health Foundation.

“In the next 50 years, the thing I’ll probably remember is their faces.” He had no idea what the Haitian children he saw at Mother Teresa’s Orphanage were suffering from, he says, he just knew they were happy to see him.

Jonathan – a member of Interact, a Newtown High School service club – won a spot on the trip through an essay contest reviewed by Newtown Rotary. He beat out more than 40 students from Newtown’s rotary district, which included neighboring towns.

The trip to Haiti marked the first time Jonathan had ever been out of the country, indeed the first time he had ever set foot on an airplane.

For the most part, he was charged with assisting one of two dentists that were on the trip, helping to entertain and comfort Haitian patients before and after their dental procedures. Residents in the villages the delegation visited formed substantial queues for medical check ups, fluoride treatments, and tooth extractions.

“There was always something to do,” Jonathan muses. “The second you wake up, there was something to do. [Until] the second you go to bed, there was something to do.”

“I played ball with kids while they were waiting. I tried communicating with families as best as I could understand them. It wasn’t that difficult to understand them, you could read body language,” he adds.

Throughout his week, Jonathan also busied himself by documenting the journey with the video camera he brought along. In all, he shot more than 90 minutes worth of footage, and now says he intends to edit the recording down to an appropriate length for the presentation he plans to give local Rotary chapters and his classmates next year in school.

That Jonathan thought to record his trip for use as a teaching tool is not all that surprising. Although only starting his junior year at the high school this fall, he already knows the career he wants to pursue: teaching social studies.

Jonathan hopes the time spent in Haiti, coupled with his passion for the “areas studies” courses the high school social studies department offers, will help form a solid foundation of knowledge on which to base a teaching career.

“I’ve always known I wanted to teach, and this was a good step [toward] how I want to teach,” Jonathan says of his trip. “When I teach, I at least have the experience of what I’ve done already, by looking, listening, and learning. The experience [of Haiti] motivated me to want to teach.”

For now, Jonathan will have to settle for presenting his video to adults and classmates and raising awareness for Haitian issues. He hopes to establish fund-raisers, along with food and clothing drives.

Jonathan wants to “raise awareness of poverty and third world countries,” he says. “The United States has nothing to do with Haiti; the Haitian Health Foundation are the only group of people trying to make an effort.”

Besides the desire to bring Haiti into the consciousness of those he interacts with, Jonathan knows that there are lessons learned from his trip that transcends national borders. There are lessons in the faces of the children of Mother Teresa’s Orphanage.

“Always appreciate what you have,” he says. “Something like that makes you appreciate what you have. The message was so strong, it was like when someone almost dies and they survive, they appreciate the life they have.”