Salsa lessons

For my community service project, I adopted ideas from a unique dance program for the blind and visually-impaired. It was called Connecting Through Dance and was founded by Gene Russo and Joan Schubin in the San Francisco Bay Area, California .

Connecting Through Dance website and article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

http://www.freewebs.com/connectingthroughdance/index.htm

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/08/EBGIVDI8K91.DTL

The idea is to teach salsa dancing to students who are blind or visually-impaired, with the help of volunteers. The volunteers serve as guides for the dance lessons, and at the same time, they get the chance to learn about the lives and experiences of the blind or visually-impaired students.

We had volunteers from Interact, from the university -- including foreign exchange students, and from the community. The volunteers all told me that they had a great time getting to know the students of Santa Lucía and the students at Santa Lucía were always excited and persistent about learning how to dance. Personally, salsa dancing has been one of my interests for many years, so it was a lot of fun for me to teach the volunteers and students.

There's a clip of the final class attached with volunteer Natalia handing out music cd's that she made for the students.

Volunteers Tomas and Natalia.

Volunteers Pilar and Natalia with Physical Education teacher, Cesar.

Dance lessons for the school's staff.

School's staff.

Santa Lucía students.

Volunteers from interact, the university, and the community.

Students from Santa Lucía perform amazingly well in a concert with other high schools in Santiago.

Video from the final dance class of the year, and a clip of Natalia distributing salsa music cd's that she made for the students.