Day Nine: Our Last Night on Andros!

           I am very sad to leave Andros. Today was our last day of service and it felt amazing to finish our project, but I wish we could stay on this island longer! We cleared a path and picked up the trash in the path in Blue Hole National Park that is about one mile long. We all worked really hard and finished early, so we were able to explore some of the town and buy some souvenirs. We gave Wavell an alternative break shirt, water bottle, and we made him lunch to thank him, but he could not stop talking about how impressed he was that we finished our project so quickly!

There is so much that we can take from this experience on Andros. First, we can take away the lessons we learned about the environment. Wavell taught us about the different plants and other things we encountered during our service. Today he pointed out a cuckoo bird that was chirping and the other day he taught us how to made a tea out of the plants in the park. It tasted really good! Although it was hard in the beginning to understand why what we were doing - cutting down trees to widen a trail – was good for the environment, we now see that we were aiding the beatification process of an already beautiful national park. Hopefully, the beautification of that trail can inspire others to conserve the environment.

The obvious issues that we can take home from this trip are environmental. We can take our experiences of picking up trash and preserving the national parks and try to impart the knowledge on our peers. Using all the lessons learned from the community partners and guest speakers, we can all try to do more to help the community and environment around us. By doing things as simple as encouraging recycling or composting, we can use the values learned from the Bahamas to benefit UMD.

Aside from the environmental issues we learned about, I think we all took a lot away from the Bahamians that we met throughout our trip.  Each person we met had such a positive outlook on life and embraced the simplicity of Andros and the rest of the Bahamas. I think that this is a quality that we can all embrace and try to spread to the people in our lives.