Our intern, Deven Curtis, is leaving Yapay Bolivia after more than 2 years to pursue his goal of receiving an MA in English at BYU and attending Med School. We are so grateful for the time that Deven has volunteered at Yapay Bolivia and wish him the best in achieving his dreams. In addition to thanking Deven for his wonderful service, we’d like to highlight his accomplishments here at Yapay Bolivia and share a brief statement from Deven on what his internship experience was like.
Accomplishments at Yapay Bolivia
Deven coordinated, oversaw, and personally delivered donations of medications, hygiene packets, and funds to a remote high-altitude hospital in Bolivia’s most impoverished department two consecutive years in a row. He conducted in-hospital interviews with Bolivian patients and healthcare professionals in multiple hospitals throughout the country. He audited previously donated equipment in hospitals and clinics. He also drafted transparency and marketing documents for the foundation including expenditures reports, donor reports, infographics, data charts, and website content.
Internship Experience at Yapay Bolivia
“It’s not even that I’ve developed new skills and refined old ones. It isn’t the content writing, document design, and international communications that makes my work with Yapay Bolivia so invaluable, though I have loved learning those things.
At Yapay, I have found a miracle: a small group of worker-bees who don’t swoop and start giving orders, who don’t pretend to have all the solutions, who don’t indiscriminately throw handouts into the crowd. In measured steps we at Yapay conduct due diligence and leverage deep relationships to find the change-makers in Bolivia: the lawyer who has worked tirelessly at an obscure orphanage for over a decade and knows the needs and the names of all of the children–many of them call her “mama.” We work with the nurse who has dedicated her life to running a low-cost pharmacy out of a 200 year old stone building for impoverished women and children who can’t afford their medications.
At Yapay we turn to these miraculous people, tug on their sleeve, and ask for instructions. We offer a willing set of hands and an authentic desire to help. It’s seeing the need in the world and doing something about it. It’s rubbing shoulders with change-makers. It’s lifting others and being lifted by them. It’s being offered a meal by orphans who barely have enough to subsist themselves. It’s laughing and crying and working and fighting to make things a little better.”
