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Miami Palmetto High School senior Miranda Tapia has earned more than 700 community service hours, 400 of which came from participating on two Blue Missions trips to provide water and sanitation to remote communities in the Dominican Republic. She plans to go on a third mission.
“I was like a regular volunteer,” she says. “Last year I was like an ambassador. They wanted me to be an intern for the upcoming year.”
Her first trip was the summer going into her junior year. The 28 students built latrines after a two-hour bus trip from the airport to the village.
The second trip was a five-hour bus ride to the community for the 22 attendees. Again, they built latrines.
“The recent one was the one I helped plan,” she says. “My mom was the chaperone on both trips. We became close with the founder and the staff. I planned with him. Who to invite and what high schools.”
They planned an open trip with students from Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, one person from Cypress Bay High School, Coral Gables High School and one from Palmetto. She was the outreach person to the schools.
“I loved the first mission trip,” she says. “Once you go once, you want to keep going. You get a spark. I think it’s so life changing.”
The teens face hardships on the Blue Mission trips that would have them complaining at home. Not only do they have to deal with no internet most of the time, but they also do backbreaking manual labor and then have to shower with buckets and sleep on the floor or on cots.
And yet they see the village residents having to live with no sanitation until they provide the latrines and no electricity or mosquito nets.
She says the reward they get is the look on the faces of the people who finally have latrines to use.
Tapia is the founder of Cultivating Smiles, an initiative to bring joy to nursing home residents at Mirabelle in the Dadeland area. Two or three times a month she leads activities such as decorating mugs, or creating Fourth of July banners, depending on the month, or she leads the seniors in karaoke.
At school, she’s the social media manager for the Finance Club. She’s a member of the National Honor Society and she’s the social media chair of the Pink Club, a club to help women in Nicaragua who have breast cancer.
She is on the board for Student Council, dealing with recruitment.
“We promote Palmetto for the eighth graders,” she says. “We make videos for them with the teachers. We also run tours. There is one day, Panther for a Day, where students from Palmetto Middle, Carver are in for that day. We show them the school.”
She’s on the board as social media manager for the organization Solution Youth, which collects pillows to donate to homeless shelters.
Tapia’s an athlete. She did travel volleyball for three years and gymnastics for ten. She’s earned 132 medals in gymnastics, being first, second or third which puts the gymnast on the podium.
Her gymnastics career ended during COVID when her gym was shut down. She was at Level Nine. At that point, she decided she wanted to focus more on school.
Her college list includes Florida State, the University of Florida, Indiana, the University of South Florida, the University of Central Florida and the University of Miami. Her major will be Business with a minor in Finance.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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