When Brisa De Angulo was seven years old, she decided to start a school. Growing up in Cochabamba, Bolivia, she realized how badly children were treated in the public schools and told her parents that she wanted to start a different school.
When she was fourteen, she started to make that dream come true.
“My parents realized I was serious, and they helped out,” she said.
She received a stipend from the government, and, with help, started a school called Comunidad Educativa Para La Vida (Education Community for Life). In the summer of 2004, she also started a center for sexually abused children called Una Brisa De Esperanza (A Breeze of Hope). When she lived in Bolivia, De Angulo taught pre-school through second grade at the school and worked from eight a.m. to five p.m. daily.
Now a sophomore at Eastern, De Angulo hopes to take a group of students down to Cochabamba during Spring Break next year. She is working to organize the trip through MAP International, a Christian non-profit organization based in Georgia.
The students who go to Bolivia will have three basic tasks, according to De Angulo. They will be working as teachers’ assistants in the school, helping poor families build homes and playing games with the girls in the center for abused children.
Between food, plane tickets and shelter, the trip will cost about $1,800 to $2,000 per student.
First-year student Jenny Comer is interested in going on the trip, but she added that she will go as finances allow.
“I think I have a call to missions, and I love working with children,” Comer said. “If God wants this trip to happen, it will.”
De Angulo hopes to know by the end of the semester how many students are willing to commit to the trip to Bolivia.
“[This trip] is a way of knowing that people here can have a touch to other cultures,” she said.