Five students and three teachers from the Waldorf High School in Stockbridge will travel to Cienfuegos, Cuba, where they will stay with Cuban families, the first U.S. high school students to do this since at least 1959. After a week in Cienfuegos, they will travel to La Habana (Havana). They leave for Cuba on April 6 and return on April 22, 2014.
Students traveling are Sergei Carty of Lenox; Kosta Koufis, Great Barrington; Takoda Nordoff, Monterey; and Annabell O’Neill and Raphaela Seward-Mayer, both from Philmont, NY. Accompanying them are Sonia Cintron, Spanish teacher at Waldorf, and Ann Marie Genco and Guy Nordoff, also teachers at the school.
Andrea Panaritis, Waldorf High School parent and Executive Director of the Christopher Reynolds Foundation, first suggested the possibility of travel to Cuba. In past years, Waldorf Spanish students have traveled to Peru and to Colombia. The Reynolds Foundation “supports work to strengthen contacts and understanding between citizens and institutions in the US and citizens and institutions in Cuba,” according to its website.
Stephen Sagarin, Faculty Chair at the Waldorf High School, says, “This trip is unique in that we are taking advantage of a small opening in U.S. regulations that the Obama administration has made at the very time that deep social and economic changes are underway in Cuba.”
Sonia Cintron says, “Everyone is looking forward to an amazing cultural exchange. For community service, we will take part in projects such as trash collection, a visit to a local orphanage to play with children, and making art with artists with Down syndrome. Students will attend school with their Cuban families, study Spanish, and help teach English. We will stop at Playa Giron, the site where the famous Bay of Pigs invasion took place in 1961. We will visit the Museum of the Revolution and the Museum of Cuban Art. We will have a discussion with Magia Lopez and Alexey Rodrigues of ‘Grupo Obsesion’ who visited us in Stockbridge in October 2013 and performed in our first fundraiser for our trip. We will visit La Finca Vigia, home of Ernest Hemingway. It was here that he wrote two of his most celebrated novels, For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.”
The Waldorf High School trip has been arranged through Cuban Educational Travel and is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Alice and Richard Henriquez Memorial Fund/Youth World Awareness Program through the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. Arizona Pizza in Pittsfield also donated money for this trip, and students raised money by selling soup and baked goods.
While this group is in Cuba, German language students at the Waldorf High School will visit their sister school in Munich, as they have done every 2 to 3 years, with their teacher, Ursula Wirth. In Munich, they will live with German families and attend classes at the Munich-Schwabing Rudolf Steiner School. The group will also travel to Vienna before returning on April 25.
“These trips encourage real, practical foreign language learning,” says Sagarin. “Our slogan is, ‘Small School, Big World,’ and travel every other year broadens our students’ experience of the world we all share. There is no substitute for working and learning side-by-side with those who speak different languages and live in a different culture.”
The Waldorf High School, founded in 2002, provides an education for adolescents that seeks truth, develops imagination, nurtures growth, fosters responsibility, and honors inner freedom in an atmosphere of academic excellence, artistic fulfillment, openness, and mutual respect. This work stems from the pedagogical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner and seeks to meet the educational, artistic, and social needs of students, that they may engage in life with intelligence, wisdom, and moral commitment.