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Westminster Christian School senior Ryan Ramos has created his own community service organization that he hopes will turn into a school club. It’s called Pages for Progress and its main goal is to collect books for kids in both English and Spanish. The books are for a library at school and orphanage in Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic.
“They didn’t have any books in their library,” he says.
Ramos collected the books in May. Last month he took them to the Dominican Republic. He was at the orphanage/school for three days. During that time, he built bookshelves to create the school library.
“The trip was funded through donations through a Go Fund Me drive,” he says.
In conjunction with the fundraiser, he wrote Peter Learns a Lesson, a picture book that he self-published on Amazon.
“The illustrator is a fellow classmate in my grade, Nina Valdes,” he says.
He donated 40 copies of the book to the school. While in the Dominican Republic he read the book to the kids.
One of the factors in deciding to create Pages for Progress was the realization that his family had a huge library of children’s books that were no longer useful to him.
“I’m never going to read these books again in my life,” he says. “I was thinking about how many families have these books in a house. They should be going toward people who could use them instead of collecting dust in the house.”
He chose the orphanage/school that already has a history with Westminster. The Miami school partnered with them earlier that year through the student run organization With Smiles for All. He plans to go back this school year with more books.
Another factor in the creation of Pages for Progress was what he learned on a Blue Missions trip to the Dominican Republic. He was there on International Women’s Day when women in the community came and told the story of their lives.
“Access to water makes a difference in their lives,” he says. ”It creates more opportunities than just something to drink or showers.”
Because of a lack of education, they get married at 13, have babies and stay.
“One of the things that gets them out of that cycle is education,” he says. “That made me want to start the book drive. To help people like that, who don’t have any options. By promoting English literacy, it can give them the option to move out of their small town and get a better job than what they would have in their community.”
On his trip, the teens did trench work and they also carried the pipes, then they built the water tank.
At Westminster, Ramos is a member of the varsity tennis team, playing both singles and doubles.
He’s an active member of the Be the Light Club. He’s been in the club since freshman year.
“I was the class representative and I sent out reminders of any active service opportunities and notified them of things going on,” he says.
He’s participated in collection drives for Hurricane Ian victims.
“We collected clothes, toiletries, shoes, almost anything you can think of to help the families that lost almost everything,” he says.
His community service includes volunteering for the PBA. His father is on the PBA board.
Ramos plans to apply to Florida State University, the University of Florida, Ohio State University, Indiana and Wake Forest. He wants to major in finance and pre-law. His goal is to work in criminal law.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
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