The lady in the teal dress and little white heels turned and beckoned for them to come in. She found them seats and turned on a fan.
The group was underdressed, crazy, sweaty and wet. They were standing out in the street, listening to music.
It was Good Friday.
A team of 14 from Olson Hall with two leaders was in the final days of their trip to the Dominican Republic (DR) in a city on the northern side of the island called Santiago.
“I wish I could have taken a picture of just the lady turning around and waving … that kind of brought me to tears because I was (like) that's how the church should be, and you see people standing outside on the street that don't look like you, and they don't look prepared for church,” sophomore Jada Bayless said.
Bayless is studying exercise science. Her parents work full-time in the DR with Go Ministries, and her mom suggested to Bayless that she should come to serve with a team of her fellow Taylor students for a week during spring break.
A team went down to serve the local churches and support the needs of their pastors. In the end, a local church served them.
Bayless was hesitant about the idea of a spring break trip knowing that it could be hard to ask a group of college students, who likely would rather go to the beach, to give that up.
Nonetheless, Bayless and her friend Betsy Underwood, a junior, wrote an email together to all of Olson to pitch the idea.
The response was so positive that they had to cap the group size. From there, the girls who were interested in going organized under Taylor World Outreach (TWO) decided to do their fundraising and pre-trip training through them.
As part of their training, the team of girls learned about how to serve the poor without presuming what their needs were.
Each spring break team with TWO went through the same curriculum to prepare.
“We are so focused on the physical needs that we forget, like, the social needs of just knowing people and being part of a community… I just hadn't thought about poverty as a social thing,” Bayless said.
Along with the training, each girl shared their testimony with the team.
These conversations helped knit the team together even before they left. Bayless reflected upon how enduring a delay in the Miami airport created an even tighter bond from the start.
Their flight was delayed so long that the entire team had to sleep on the floor of the Miami airport.
“By the time we got there, it was like, ‘Okay, these are my friends now,’” Bayless said.
The team partnered with Go Ministries, which specializes in using sports to reach youth. According to the Go Ministries website, their mission is to empower local leaders to make disciples.
Once in Santiago, a typical day included breakfast at eight, dishwashing and devotions afterward and painting houses until noon, and then the team would return to their lodgings.
They lived in a building owned by Go Ministries that functions somewhat like a hostel.
“We come back, eat lunch, and they have this thing called siesta,” Bayless said.
After the rest, the team went back and helped with vacation Bible school where they would learn Bible verses in Spanish, share them with the children and act out Bible stories.
Particularly, it was how the local pastors conducted their ministry that especially impacted Bayless. She saw how they lived in community with the people they served so as not to use their pastorship to be more prosperous.
The Dominican pastors invited the team into their community and directed them toward meaningful service. These actions and attitudes impacted Bayless, because she knew that their service would actually help.
Despite this, there was still a challenge: the language barrier. It proved to be more impairing than Bayless expected.
The majority of the girls on the trip were in the same boat.
However, one of the team leaders, Brittany Tews (married to Jonah Tews, the apartment hall director of Campbell and Wolgemoth), and one of the other girls on the team were both fluent in Spanish.
They helped breach the language barrier.
Bayless also noticed how much she could actually communicate indirectly and with the little Spanish she knew, even if it was uncomfortable.
“It was cool to just be pushed from my comfort zone … I took two years of Spanish in high school, so I don't know very much, but it ended up being enough to conversate a little bit … because I wasn't expecting to be able to do that,” Bayless said.
The whole trip proved to be an experience of learning and team unity. One of Bayless’ desires for the trip was that it would unite more of the girls across the wings in Olson.
It proved to be more than that.
“It was really encouraging to me just to see so much unity on the team and getting to see the same God that we believe in and … even in different languages and different cultures … just worshiping and serving the same God,” Bayless said.
