8/15/2008 - Community service in Costa Rica fulfills student's hopes
Written by Justin Reynolds
The Wilton Bulletin
While spending four weeks during the summer in Costa Rica might sound like quite the vacation, it doesn’t always have to be just that. Greg Oliveras, who will be a senior at Wilton High when the school opens its doors in a few weeks, volunteered a month of his summer, performing community service in the Central American country.
Instead of lounging on the beach and enjoying the weather, Greg painted two high schools, performed maintenance work at Manuel Antonio National Park and worked at an organic farm.
“I’d never been involved in a major community service project before,” said Greg, who will turn 17 in September. “The whole experience is new to me, and I gained a lot from it.”
The trip was arranged by the American Field Service, a nonprofit organization that calls itself “the world’s most experienced international student exchange organization with programs in over 50 countries and over 30,000 volunteers,” according to its Web site.
“It’s basically a foreign exchange program that exists for the purpose of increasing cultural awareness,” Greg said of American Field Service, adding the organization offers community service trips and homestays, where students simply go live in another country and get a feel for everyday life.
Greg said his father learned about the program a few years ago. His older brother, Matt, who’s entering his sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania, spent the summer of 2005 on a homestay program in Spain.
“He came back with lots of good things to say,” Greg said. “I thought I’d go this year.”
Though American Field Service offers community service trips to various locations throughout the world, Greg said he chose Costa Rica because he wanted to refine his foreign language abilities.
“There were a bunch of options in terms of where to go, but I knew I wanted to go to a Spanish-speaking country to work on my speaking skills,” Greg said, of which he added he “definitely made improvements.”
The trip lasted from June 27 to July 26. He and his group, which consisted of 22 other American students from all around the country and two chaperones from American Field Service, stayed in a different place each of the four weeks, performing different kinds of work.
“The first week we were in Liberia,” Greg said of an urban area in Costa Rica. “We were painting the local high school.”
While saying it was hard to choose the most memorable part of his trip, Greg said he enjoyed the first week the best.
“I had a really awesome host family,” he said, adding each member of his group stayed with a different family. “It’s just amazing that people who had so little were willing to offer so much. The family was so warm and took me in with open arms. They were so hospitable.”
Greg and his group then traveled to Manuel Antonio National Park, on the Pacific coast.
“That week we were doing all sorts of work around the park,” Greg said. “We worked the security gate, handling people coming in. We also chopped bamboo to use on the park trails — all sorts of maintenance work.”
Greg said the living conditions were “very rustic” but it was “totally worth it” to live in those conditions.
Immersed in “the heart of the rainforest,” Greg found himself face to face with exotic nature.
“I saw a sloth up close,” he said. “There were monkeys that would be jumping on the top of our cabin. There were raccoons everywhere. I just got to see so many aspects of wildlife I thought I could only see in pictures.”
His whole experience in the park was a lot of hard work but was “very rewarding,” he said.
The teens then went to another urban community, Perez Zeledó, where they painted the town’s high school.
During the last week, “we were on an organic farm called ASODECAH,” Greg said. The farm is located outside of Cartago, he said.
There, the group helped run the farm for a week.
“We did all sorts of organic farming things like feeding goats, organizing compost, planting seeds, taking out weeds, painting stuff,” he said. “Another day we actually dug a trench to install a water pipe for a cabin deep in the rain forest, a whole lot of hard work.”
When asked if he’d recommend the trip to others, Greg said, “absolutely, to anyone that’s just looking to experience a lifestyle that’s completely different than their typical lifestyle. Everyone gains a lot regardless of what program they go on.”
In the end, Greg said he got exactly what he wanted out of the trip.
“I was hoping to gain a lot, and I certainly did,” he said. “I wouldn’t have changed anything.”
_To view the original article, please click here
 |
Printer Friendly |
