I’ve always heard that
parents have a tough time when their kids go off to college. I never understood that until last month when 4 of our girls
graduated from our VC Revolution program. To be apart of our volleyball ministry, girls can start
at any age and as they get better, they can move up to become a “varsity”
player. Throughout their years in
our program, there are pretty high expectations of achieving certain grades,
being a good role model in the community, as well as intense volleyball
training. We have had the
opportunity to coach and disciple many girls for multiple years. However, this past year was the first
time that we actually had to “graduate” 4 Dominican girls from our varsity
team. Mabelis Acevedo and Loreidy Hernandez have been a part
of VC Revolution for 4 years, Dianny Moronta-3 years, and Caroly Trinidad-2
years.
I wish these girls
could have stayed on varsity forever, but I knew we had to push them out of the
nest. However, many of them come
from extremely poor homes and do not have money to attend college. Thankfully, we were able to find sponsors
for all of the girls to attend a great college about 25 minutes away. We hope to find more sponsors to
help cover transportation and books, but we are so thankful to have come this
far. In return for their
scholarships, the girls will volunteer 15 hours a week as assistant coaches within
VC Revolution or help at other ministry sites. So not only will they be attending college, but they will
continue to pour back to girls from their community. For most of
these girls, they were the first in their family to even graduate high school!
Now, they are really going above and beyond to attend college.
Caroly and Rachel
One neat story of how
God has already starting using these girls is through our community health
site. Rachel Snider, who is in
charge of that site, asked if I had anyone charismatic and organized who could
be an assistant at her site.
Immediately, Caroly popped into my mind since she is great with people,
and because of our training for our states trip last summer, is pretty fluent
in English. So for the past two
months, she has been going out into communities, ministering to the Dominicans,
translating for the Americans, and being a great help to Rachel and her site. I
am so proud to see these girls, who have been a part of our ministry for so
long, start to really give back and serve alongside Students
International. Even though we have
had some girls leave our nest, God continues to bless us with tons of new
girls. I am so thankful to be a
part of this ministry which allows us to disciple girls and then equip them
with the tools they need so that they can go out and FLY!
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