Grace Diers - “Yost Finds Her Passion in Guatemala” [Audrey Yost

Yost Finds Her Passion in Guatemala

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 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.

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 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

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 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

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

By J1 Reporter Grace Diers

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.”

it her long term goal to support and fight for these people who don’t have the help they deserve. So, after returning home from Guatemala she added international business as her major, and then after the pandemic advanced to make it pre-law. Now, she has had some real experience in what she wants to do. This past summer she was an intern for the International Trade Administration, Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs. What Yost did there was work with people that Joe Biden nominated for the senate and then she would listen in on congressional hearings where they talked about resource loss from pandemic work and other current issues.

Yost is now currently applying to Washington D.C. to hopefully be in the legal sector or to work in a firm there. She is also applying all over just in case D.C. doesn’t work out, but she definitely will want to live there. She hopes she will right after college because of the network opportunities she created so recently this summer. She hopes that D.C. will work out and that she will be able to soon be out helping those like the ones she came to know so well while in Guatemala. Yost’s advice for Marian girls is to relax, because you won’t have it all figured out at first, you have to take time and let yourself figure it out and the right path will come to you and show itself, just like it did for her.