Day Seven: Looking Back at Pre-Trip Service!

Today we continued to clean and widen the trail with Wavell. Some people picked up trash and the others used machetes to cut down trees and bushes. After lunch we all worked together to clear the trail and Wavell was extremely impressed because we far surpassed his expectations of our group. Originally, I didn't believe we were helping the environment by cutting down trees and didn't really want to use the machete. However my reservations were removed after talking to Wavell who said that the trail originally had natural beauty, but with all of our work we enhanced the beauty.

During pre-trip service some of us did trash pickup and some cleared out invasive species – I was on invasive species duty. Today during service I ended up on trash pickup duty for the first time. We went to a site that was discovered the previous day but not completely cleared. After machete-ing our way in, we cleared out a bunch of old car parts, a bike, and bags of discarded cans. Some of the cans had dates ranging from the late 70s to the early 80s on them – indicating that the trash we were picking up had been dumped about 30 years ago. We spent almost the whole morning on this one person’s trash – really making the impact that one person can have on the environment stand out in our minds. It felt good to be able to clean up this trash, but it was eye-opening that it took a group of American students 30 years later before it was dealt with.

The pre-trip service somewhat prepared me for the upcoming trip to Andros. Removing the invasive species from Magruder Park was foretelling of the kind of labor that was to come later on the trip.  Here in Andros, however, we are clearing roadsides, which is different in that you don’t need to distinguish between invasive or native plants. All of it is cut down, which some of us on the trip have mixed feelings about. The general consensus in the end was that, although we are cutting down trees, our purpose here is to help BNT and support ecotourism. Also, the trees are going to decompose right back into the soil where they came from, so we are not damaging the environment in the long run.