When Lauren Rubenstein read about YogaKids, an organization that sends yoga teachers to Haiti to teach yoga to some of the poorest children in the western hemisphere, she knew right away that it was something she wanted to do.

“Haiti is not that far away,” she says. With her two sons nearly grown up, she was able to “just jump … on it without really thinking about it.”

As a a psychotherapist and yoga therapist who has worked with homeless children in Washington, DC, Rubenstein, a resident of Chevy Chase, was well-suited to the task, but she wasn’t sure how she would react to being immersed in such severe poverty for a whole week.

“The degree of the poverty there was just astounding,” she says. “There’s just no way you can appreciate it without seeing it.”

But the experience proved to be uplifting. The kids with whom she worked were so thrilled to have special activities to do—and snacks to eat—that she’d like to go back.

The kids “totally, totally took to (the yoga),” Rubenstein says. With the help of interpreters and a few other teachers, she taught two groups of kids—mostly bused in from the tent cities in the Port-au-Prince area—for two hours each day.

They’d do some yoga, then have a meal, then do art projects—a special treat for kids who have very few possessions, let alone art supplies.

And “all they wanted to draw were houses … and they would painstakingly color them in,” with psychedelic colors.

“They were the happiest-looking houses you could imagine,” Rubenstein adds.

During the first yoga class, Rubenstein talked with the kids about “yoga being a way of expressing different feelings.”

Some of the yoga poses that the kids learned included the tree pose “for study and focus,” the warrior pose “for feeling powerful,” the volcano pose “for feeling explosive or angry” and the turtle pose “for feeling scared.”

The kids also partnered up for some poses, as a way to foster cooperation.

At the end of each yoga class, the kids would lie down on their backs in the savasana (or 'corpse') pose, and Rubenstein would put Beanie Babies on their stomachs and tell them to “breathe the Beanie Baby up and down,” to help the kids practice deep-breathing techniques.

The yoga program has been so successful that YogaKids is recruiting Haitians interested in yoga to teach classes, “because that’s what makes the program more sustainable.”

Rubenstein needed to raise over $2,000 to make the trip, but “people in the community were incredibly generous,” and she raised over $6,000.

Many community members gave Rubenstein things to take to Haiti with her—tie-dyed towels, CDs of current American music, donated clothes, school supplies, yoga mats, money and even nail polish.

“We did manicures in a couple of the classes,” Rubenstein says.

For those not quite ready to head off to Haiti (or for those whose tree poses aren’t quite up to par), Rubenstein recommends donating to Partners in Development, an organization through which she is hoping to sponsor a child.

For $25 a month, the sponsorship program “enables these kids to have clothes and food and be able to go to school,” and the kids’ parents benefit from classes in small business development and microloans to start up small businesses.

“Child sponsorship starts a whole chain of events … (that) can really make a difference between starving and not going to school,” and having enough to eat and an education to break the cycle of poverty.