Senior interns abroad working with domestic servants

By Olivia Biagi
Collegian Editor
August 28, 2008

While many college students may have spent their summer vacations relaxing at the beach or earning some extra cash for the upcoming semester, senior Spanish major Christa Dominick spent two months interning in Cusco, Peru. Dominick learned about the internship on the Internet and decided to apply. The sponsor, Pro-World Corps, offers internships and study abroad programs in Peru, Mexico, and Thailand, among other countries.

“I just wanted to be abroad, practice my Spanish,” Dominick said.

After she applied for the internship online, Dominick applied for a specific country of interest to work in, and was accepted into the Pro-World, then assigned her an organization to work with, Yannapanaksun. The name, according to Dominick, means “together we help ourselves” in the native Quechua language of Peru. Dominick says the language is common in Peru, “especially in the rural areas.” Yannapanaksun is an organization which works to help young Peruvian women who are basically enslaved in the city of Cusco.

“The main focus is working with girls from outer rural areas who work as domestic servants … [and] pretty much become enslaved,” Dominick said.

According to Dominick, the organization provides “rights, shelter, food and education” to these young girls, mostly between the ages of eight and 15, who have left their rural homes to work in Cusco, hoping to have a better life, only be treated as slaves. Yannapanaksun also operates a tourist agency and hostel in order to raise money to keep the organization solvent. In addition, the organization tries to raise awareness of the situation to the government of Peru, which, according to Dominick, is essentially ignoring the problem. Dominick said that domestic servants are legal in Peru and are protected by government rights. However, there are age restrictions and the girls Dominick worked with were underage, and therefore not protected by the government. During the internship, Dominick was mainly responsible for translating the Yannapanaksun Web site from Spanish to English.

“I would also teach the girls English or human rights, or provide an ear,” she said. “Sometimes they just needed to talk.”

In addition, Dominick also had the opportunity to accompany other interns who worked specifically in the health division of Pro-Peru.

“We’d go to the rural areas and villages and provide health care, general medicine … dentistry, a little bit of everything,” said Dominick.

Dominick, who is working on a minor in leadership and global understanding, is currently applying to 16 different medical schools with hopes of becoming a doctor and working in international medicine.

“You can go in [to medical school] with whatever major you want,” said Dominick, “as long as you take the pre-med requirements. [I found that] a non-science major has higher acceptance rates.”

While Dominick has not decided on a specific area of medicine to study, she has taken an interest in obstetrics and gynecology.

“When I was in Peru and Guatemala [last winter] I got to shadow obstetricians and gynecologists,” Dominick said. “[But] there are so many areas of medicine that I haven’t seen yet.”

Spanish and medicine may seem an odd combination of areas of study, but for Dominick they go uniquely hand-in-hand, a connection she made following a family misfortune.

Dominick says she originally chose Spanish because “so much of the population, especially in the U.S., speaks Spanish … I’ve always loved sciences,” she continues, “and it wasn’t until my nephew was born [in the beginning of my freshman year] with heart problems that I realized that medicine brings science and people together. I started shadowing doctors and studying abroad [after that].”

Dominick began shadowing doctors through a program at La Salle which allowed her to follow doctors at Einstein Medical Center in the pediatrics and orthopedics units. Then, Dominick traveled to Chicago for an internship as part of the Kemper Scholarship. There she worked at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Last winter, however, was Dominick’s opportunity to combine her Spanish major and medical interest. Through an organization call Amerispan, Dominick attended a medical-Spanish course for three weeks in Antigua, Guatemala. For the first week she learned medical Spanish and for two weeks learned Spanish in the afternoons and volunteered at a public clinic in the mornings. Dominick was able to repeat the opportunity in Peru this past June and July.

Dominick’s internship in Peru did much more than simply give her a brief experience in the field of international medicine; it also allowed her to be immersed in a different culture, to see the differences within that culture, and to see the hardships faced by young Peruvian women that most Americans could not even comprehend. During her time at Yannapanakusun Dominick met a young woman who lived at the center in order to escape her abusive family. The woman was 25 years old, the oldest to live at Yannapanakusun. Typically, Yannapanakusun keeps girls until the age of 18, however, it has made an exception for this young woman.

“Her family actually lives in the city but she’s not allowed to see them because they abused her so badly; she has to stay at the center,” said Dominick, adding that she also has mental and physical disabilities.

“Many people [in Peru] still believe that if you’re child is born with mental or physical problems a witch caused it and they try to beat the witch or demon out,” said Dominick, who, along with the other volunteers at Yannapanakusun, think is what happened to this woman.

Another cultural distinction that caught Dominick’s interest was the differences in the use of birth control methods in different areas. According to Dominick, big cities such as Cusco use “more formal medicines. In the old pueblos or villages they use plants and herbs or methods of abortion that are illegal. In the younger villages, men don’t want women on birth control because they’re afraid the women will cheat.”

Dominick also noted that the government of Peru has set up a financial aid program in order to provide assistance for pregnant women. However, there is a problem of “continuous pregnancy” in the country because of it.

“[The government] provide[s] food and health coverage for women until their child is two [years old] then everything stops,” said Dominick, adding that a lot of women are continually getting pregnant on purpose in order to receive the aid. “A lot of children are independent at a really young age [because of it]. My one friend started working when he was eight.”

Dominick was also saddened by how drastically the city life differed from rural life economically.

“In the city you see all these tourists everywhere and money,” Dominick said. “Ten minutes up the mountain and you see people living in houses made of mud and clay. People in the tourist industry are making tons of money. So many people aren’t studying what they want to study because their families need the money and tourism is where the money is.”

Dominick is still in contact with the friends she made in Peru, as well as her host family. She hopes to one day return to Peru.

“I would definitely visit the family,” Dominick said.

biagio1@lasalle.edu