Yost Finds Her Passion in Guatemala By J1 Reporter Grace Diers Marian Alumni from 2018, Audrey Yost loves to travel and seems to always be off on an adventure somewhere beautiful and exotic throughout the world. Yost explained that her love for traveling began when she was young. This was when she travelled for the first time and it opened her eyes to just how big the world is and how she only sees a small portion of it in her everyday life. “We live in such a small part of this world and day to day we forget how big that world is and how different other parts of the world are. People don’t realize how much a difference they can make in different parts of the world, and what they can see,” Yost says. She especially loves to travel abroad because she can experience the different cultures and learn about their different ways and upbringings, but also teach them about hers. Yost has taken two mission trips, one to the Dominican Republic and one to Guatemala. She loves them because of the people she meets, and says that it shocks her every time she goes how much different their lives are from hers, and seeing this is what helped her finally decide on a major in college. Going
go on to volunteer at the Association for Creativity and Development of Guatemala. While she volunteered there, she would work with kids who may be prone to gangs because of difficult
into college she wasn’t one-hundred percent sure on what she was going to do, but she originally had communication as a major only to change it a few weeks later to international studies.
them about how numerous families tried to migrate to the United States but couldn’t fully make it. They explained that some dads would say to their kids see you in America, but end up never seeing them again, because the rest of the family couldn’t make it there. This is what truly inspired Yost and made her want to try and help them because she had gotten
We live in such a small part of this world and day to day we forget how big that world is and how different other parts of the world are. People don’t realize how much a difference they can make in different parts of the world, and what they can see.” backgrounds, or kids who didn’t get easily accessible opportunities for education and were further behind. She explains how eye opening it was to see that so many people there struggled with those issues and had no one to help them. Yost says that they would sometimes talk to the moms while volunteering there and had conversations with
Although, after her second mission trip, this seemed to change again. The summer after Yost’s freshman year, she took a trip to Guatemala when she was 19. On this trip she learned so much about the people who lived there because while there she was constantly helping them and learning about their culture. Everyday in Guatemala that Yost spent there varied, but a typical day for her would include one-on-one Spanish lessons with the kids, and then she would 14
to know and even love some of these people, and their stories hit a certain spot in her heart. Soon after she got back from Guatemala, Yost made
