Miami Palmetto High School senior Oliva Rodrigue loves to work with children. During the summers of 2017 and 2018 she was a volunteer counselor at the Deering Estate summer camp.
Rodrigue worked with children aged five to twelve. It was an interesting time, as she was 15 when she started so some of the kids were not much younger than her. But she loved the experience.
“We did kayak trips to and island three miles away,” she says. “I would teach them how to kayak and we’d go to the islands and clean up trash.”
She loves being outdoors and already knew some of the skills needed for the job. She also attended a week’s worth of training to learn new skills or brush of their skills.
“It’s like summer camp for you,” Rodrigue says. “They take you through the trails. You become first aid certified. It’s really cool.”
As a volunteer counselor, she’d go trail hiking around the estate with the kids. They’d go through the mangroves.
“You show them it’s okay and they get excited about it because you’re excited,” she says. “I would teach them about the Indian burial ground.”
She also volunteered to go on a mission trip to Jamaica with her church.
“We mostly helped with less fortunate neighborhoods in Jamaica,” she says.
They went to a small, rundown building that cramped with kids.
“There were babies to 16-year-olds,” she says. “They all hung out there. We did Vacation Bible School, set up study times and rotated with games.”
After a few days, they went to an orphanage in the mountains where they helped the nurses care for the people who lived there. She says the time there was hard but it was also humbling and rewarding.
Last summer, Rodrigue tried something different. She volunteered at the NICU at Mercy Hospital.
“There were little babies the size of baby dolls” she says. “It gave me appreciation for the nurses.”
While there, she helped feed babies and change diapers.
“I loved it,” she says. “I did that for about a month and a half. It was almost an hour commute from my house. I became friends of the nurses.”
She loved seeing the babies when they thrived and were able to go home.
“You get to see their little lives begin,” she says.
Surprisingly, while she loved the experience, it made her realize that being a NICU nurse would not be the right career for her.
Instead, she plans on going with her other passion – the environment. She and a friend participate in beach clean-ups here and in the Bahamas and often report what they find to the Ocean Conservancy.
“I want to be an environmental engineer,” she says. “I think the environment and trying to better it is very important for the future.”
She’s already been accepted to University of Alabama, University of South Florida and University of Central Florida. She’s waiting to hear from Florida State University and the University of Florida.
At Palmetto, Rodrigue is secretary of the Health Information Project, so she goes to ninth grade classrooms to educate students on health-related issues from good hygiene to information about HIV/AIDS.
She’s been on the volleyball team all four years of high school.
“We have won districts twice during those years,” she says.
Rodrigue played soccer her freshman year but switched to lacrosse her junior year.
“I like to do a lot of sports,” she says.
Her other clubs include the Science National Honor Society and the Italian National Honor Society.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
