The first time we travelled to the Dominican Republic was in January 2018. We literally fell in love with the country, with the colors, the people, their culture and lifestyle: even though most of them do not have much, Dominicans never lose their smile and they live their life always with a stress-free attitude.
Once we got back to London we felt immediately like we could have done something more for this beautiful community, so a few days later we re-booked our flight with the idea of spending a whole month exploring this beautiful island while doing something more meaningful.
We started researching charities and organizations in the country and eventually we came across Terry, a travel agent that promotes Pack for a Purpose. At the same time we also started to work on our own charity project that we called “Live Love Laugh Dominicana” inspired by the values and mission of Pack for a Purpose. We started a fundraising campaign in London to collect goods and money donations to buy school stationery, clothes, sport items, and food.
We created a Facebook page in order to fundraise online and in a few days the project was ready to be presented to the world. For this reason, we organized an event so people could meet us face-to-face and drop off donations themselves. It was a huge success! Our friend offered his club as a venue to host the event, there was a table with typical Dominican food, music, and a beautiful atmosphere. People showed us their support since the very first moment!
That night we managed to collect 20Kg of donations and about £200 of funds. We were ready to transport a total of 50kg of school supplies and £700 to spend there. We were extremely happy and surprised at the results of this first project after only 3 months of fundraising.
In the month of May we travelled to DR. Terry put us in contact with Heidy, a lovely lady that helped us organize all the donations. She took us to the local supermarket to buy food for 13 families, then took us to visit a few schools where we brought school stationery for 300 kids.
There are not enough words to describe how we felt when we saw for the first time those big eyes all around us at the schools. After all our efforts it was just so emotional to see all the donations we collected in the hands of these amazing kids, and for us this is the best thing we could receive in return.
We will never get tired of saying that we have learned a lot from this experience… the key to happiness is always in our hands, but the more we have in our hands, the harder it becomes to find the key.