CANARSIE — Dylan Dufour traveled thousands of miles from Brooklyn to the Central American nation of Belize to grow closer to God and came away from the experience with memories to last a lifetime.
A rising junior at Brooklyn Technical High School, Dylan is a member of the Vicariate Office of Black Catholic Concerns Youth Leadership Ambassador program and was part of a 31-person contingent that went on an eight-day missionary trip to Belize to help children from impoverished families.
“It was a great trip! It made me appreciate the commonality that we all have as people. And I felt that we were building a deeper relationship with God by bringing the charitable spirit that God would really want us to bring to these places,” said Dylan, a parishioner of Holy Family Church, who joined the Youth Ambassador program in 2024.
Led by Father Dwayne Davis, director of the Youth Ambassador program and pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Flatlands, the 25 teenage volunteers, along with their six adult chaperones, stayed in San Antonio, a village in west Belize, from June 28 to July 5 and concentrated their efforts on helping two schools — San Antonio Roman Catholic School and San Antonio United Pentecostal School.
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The volunteers rolled up their sleeves and got to work, building and installing new roofs, repairing appliances in school kitchens, and replenishing soil in the gardens outside the schools so that new crops could be planted.
And, equally important, they connected with local children on a spiritual level by reading Scripture with them.
For fun, they played soccer with the youngsters. That, too, led to a construction project. The youth ambassadors erected barriers in school yards to prevent soccer balls from bouncing onto nearby roadways and endangering the lives of the players.
“I would say the biggest memory for me was the joy and the sense of connectedness of the people,” Dylan said. “I remember on the second day that we were there, we went to a festival. And within that small community, you could see how all of the people living there came together and how everyone was just full of joy and really full of life.”
For Father Davis, the most memorable part of the trip was watching the youth ambassadors grow spiritually as they helped improve the lives of others.
“We’ve gone on these missionary trips before, and there’s always a moment when you can see it in a kid’s eyes. They start to really get it,” he said.
Each night, the teens shared their views on their Catholic faith, an exercise called Faith Sharing. And at the end of the missionary trip, each ambassador wrote a one-page summary of their impressions and what they learned, called a One-Pager.
“The one-pagers moved me to tears. You could see a real transformation in their lives and see how they grew closer to Christ by doing God’s work,” Father Davis added.
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Christelle Couloute, a parishioner of Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Cambria Heights and a rising junior at St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset, New York, called the trip an eye-opening experience.
“On the way to the school each day, I saw the houses where the children live,” she recalled, “Some of the houses looked broken down.”
However, like Dylan, Christelle was impressed by the joy the children had in their lives despite the poverty. “I felt kind of bad for the kids, but they were so happy,” she added.
Christelle, who became a youth ambassador in 2023, said she is grateful for the opportunity the program has given her, “like this trip, which offered me an opportunity to serve God in a way that I probably would have never done without the program.”
The Vicariate Office founded the Youth Leadership Ambassador program in 2009 to encourage teenagers from 14-18 to become more active in their parishes and their communities. The program sponsors a missionary trip to a different country annually and allows the youth ambassadors to select the destination.
Joseph Allen, an alumnus of the program and a parishioner of St. Thomas Aquinas Church, took part in the Belize trip. He enjoyed it, not only because he loved serving as a mentor, but because he had family there and had visited before.
“I really wanted them (the ambassadors) to experience the community of Belize and how we treat each other as family in that country,” said Allen, a rising junior at Boston University who was a youth ambassador from 2019 to 2023.
Throughout the trip, Allen could see signs of growth in the youth ambassadors, and it made him recall his own experience with the program.
“From the program, I definitely got a stronger sense of confidence and leadership ability,” he said. “I think that going through the program definitely helped me build stronger connections with my church and gain a better perspective to what it means to serve the people of God. And I think the ambassadors are gaining confidence in themselves, too.”