Cecilia and Ivan Boyers, an Alaskan Native Village, and the Caribbean West Indies
Updated at November 16, 2011 14:39
Last summer Cecilia ’14 and Ivan Boyers ’16 spent their summer vacations in Alaska and the Caribbean, respectively. The two teens were participants of VISIONS Service Adventures, an international service learning program.
Cecilia was one of 25 high school students who did community service projects while living in Tetlin Village, an indigenous Athabasca community. The teens renovated a playground and rebuilt an outdoor wooden basketball court. They also constructed a shade pavilion with roof and decking along the river for village elders, and organized a week-long summer camp for the children. The students milled some of the lumber used for construction projects.
The trip wasn’t all work for the youth volunteers. While in Alaska, participants learned firsthand about Athabasca culture through visits with families and elders, working side by side with community members, and also while attending traditional “Culture Camp”. The group backpacked and ice-climbed in the Wrangell-St. Elias Wilderness, viewed all sorts of wildlife, and toured an old mining town.
Ivan traveled as part of a group of middle school students to Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. The middle schoolers lived in a community center on a hill overlooking the Caribbean Sea. They built a school playground and public shade pavilion, dog houses for the Humane Society, helped give swimming lessons to young children, and vaccinated goats with the Department of Agriculture.
In Virgin Gorda, participants immersed in island culture during weekly dinners and in daily visits with locals. On weekends they explored “The Baths”, huge granite boulders that lie in piles on the beach, forming grottoes that open to the sea; they also hiked, snorkeled, explored the numerous beaches, and sailed to a neighboring island.
“Service is a powerful bridge to friendship and learning,” says Katherine Dayton, VISIONS Executive Director. “We give students tangible ways to be of use and to discover their own potential in the process. They live for awhile in a very different world from what they typically know, engaging in activities that build confidence and offer first-hand knowledge. Over the course of a month, they come to know the people whose lives they are impacting.”
VISIONS operates over a dozen high school and middle school programs in North, Central, and South America, the Caribbean West Indies, Southeast Asia, and Ghana. “Our program locations differ dramatically,” said Dayton, “but each offers cultural immersion, ambitious community service, and opportunities to explore places with local people in ways that are usually way off the tourist track.”