Beaver experience:
I graduated in 2006 and was a lifer. I played a lot of sports and had a great group of friends. There were challenging times for sure, but what I love about Beaver is its supportive community. I can’t say enough positive things and how influential Beaver is in my life. There are quite a few teachers who have had a lasting impact on me. I really enjoyed Tom Manning and Larry McKinney’s classes and I always felt the teachers were there to help and support the students. At Beaver, I started a club to increase spirit at sports games because I felt the school was missing spirit. Now when I walk on campus everyone is wearing their Beaver gear and cheering on their classmates. It’s been great coming back as a coach to give back to the school and to just feel like I’m home again!

What is #happeningnow in your life:
Just before I graduated from Beaver, I was reunited with my birth family in Central America. A lot of my life after Beaver was really shaped by having this other family in Central America and trying to navigate the dynamic between the two. I traveled down about twice a year throughout high school and college and then even once I got into the working world, I continue to go down a lot which leads me to what I’m doing now. I’m working on a documentary film about a one-week trip I took to El Salvador in 2011. It is about a reunion of people forcibly separated from their families during the country’s Civil War. It was an incredible experience meeting the president of El Salvador at the time and meeting other disappeared children. I am also working on an autobiographical novel that is about meeting my family and juggling between those two different worlds. We’re doing a deep dive into the history of El Salvador which is a very complicated subject. We are now weaving in the history of the U.S. involvement and what the geopolitical scene was at the time. That’s taken a long time because we want to do it justice. I’m about 75% of the way through the book and hope to have it published sometime next year.

“I just can’t say it enough, how wonderful of an experience it has been to have gone to Beaver and then to return to the school years later. It’s been such an honor, it’s hard to put into words, to come back and to coach and to be a part of the school trying to give back what the school has given me.”

– Nelson de Witt ’00

Advice to current Beaver students:
There’s one thing I’ve learned from all this is to expect the unexpected but if that is not the path you’re on that’s okay and it doesn’t mean that you’re a failure or that you’ve done something wrong

You can follow Nelson’s work through his website and get monthly updates by signing up for his monthly newsletter!