MAST Academy in Homestead senior Sarah Jane Rogers spent ten days of summer in the small town of El Jobo in the Dominican Republic.
She was on a mission trip with the Blue Missions Group.
“We put running water in their community. We built a pipeline from the aqueduct and then we would build latrines for the bathrooms,” she says. “It was for 17 families. None of them had bathrooms before.”
Rogers says the families lived in shacks the size of a small bedroom. Before the latrines were built, the people would have to go into the jungle to do their business.
“Or they would have wood toilets, but no one had an actual bathroom,” she says.
Rogers says the situation was not sanitary and she expected that many of the people would get sick because of that.
“The medical care was two hours away. Most people did not have cars,” she says. “It’s crazy. I didn’t realize that there was so much poverty outside. You don’t see that anymore.”
She participated on the mission trip because her best friend had taken part on a Blue Mission trip last year. On the trip, she says she learned to live in the moment.
“It made me really appreciate things and my life, and definitely humbled me,” she says.
In June, Rogers went to the Region 14 Arabian Championship Horse Show held at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington. She and her horse, Connor, won Unanimous Champion in two classes – Arabian Hunter Please and 18 and Under/JTR and JOTR.
She also competed in the Twenty-fourth Annual Arabian Youth National Horse Show in the Arabian Hunter Pleasure JTR Choice class. She and Connor won Top Ten in the nation in three other classes.
“At Nationals we earned national title as a reserve national champion, which is second in the United States in our division,” she says.
The competitions are like dressage in how they carry themselves but the movements are different. The judging is different. Her horse is 12 which is still young. She knows horses that are 24 and still showing.
“Arabians lives to 35,” she says. “They can go pretty long.”
She competes from January to July and then then again in November. Her love or horses has led her to volunteer at a Florida SPCA shelter for the past six years.
“I help clean out stalls, help train the horses, whatever they need me to do,” she says. “There are horses they have found that have been on the highway, that have been tied to trees, starved.”
She also volunteers for Paws4You, a no-kill dog shelter by holding fundraisers called Dog Wash for a Cause. The first year they raised $2,000 and the second year they raised $1,500 for Paws4You. She plans to do the next one in March or April.
Rogers switched to MAST from Westminster because of her interest in medicine.
“I would love to do anesthesiology or dermatology,” she says.
At MAST, she’s secretary of Health Occupational student of America (HOSA). She’s participated in HOSA competitions in the medical photography category. Last year she won third place in the district. She’s also in the Red Cross Club and the Green Club.
Rogers has applied to the University of North Florida, FSU, UF, Stetson and the University of Miami with the idea of majoring in biology or pre-med.
Linda Rodriguez Bernfeld
