The Spanish language immersion program, Amigos de las Americas, will be sending recruiters to Spanish classrooms around Kansas City from now until Sept. 27. The recruiters are actually high schoolers who aim to share
their own Amigos experiences with others.
Because East has been the largest participator in comparison to other area schools in the program for the last three years, many East students will be recruited or are recruiters themselves. The recruiters will show a movie made by the Amigos program, then a powerpoint of pictures from their own country. They explain the fundraising procedure and the mandatory meetings for qualification, as well as some basic rules.
“Then they’ll discuss the individual countries,” recruiting chair Carol Swezy said. “You have different projects in each country, and you do day camps with kids each day. And they’ll just give little snippets of information about that.”
Senior Molly Manske, who has now participated in the Amigos program twice, was recruited through these same recruitment sessions during Spanish classes. She is now one of the recruiters herself.
“My sophomore year I was in Spanish 4 and [Amigos] came to my Spanish class and presented,” Manske said. “I had never heard of this program and I’d been in Spanish forever. [It] made me want to do a program that got outside my comfort zone and experience something different.”
Manske was able to first visit the Dominican Republic two years ago, and she then went to Ecuador this past summer. She’s forever thankful that she has participated in the program.
“They’re just trying to get t
he word out for more high school students to be interested in the program, because it’s so independent once you’re in the country,” Swezy said. “It’s not like any church mission trip when you’re in a big group. Once you get there, you only have probably one, two at most, other partners in your community, so you turn into a very fast leader.”
Photos from Allie Libeer’s Amigos trip