Volunteering Over Break
While students were going home for the semester to be with family or staying on campus to scope out the empty bar scene, the culmination of 4 months of planning was finally ready to end for me. This Holiday break, I and 4 other members of a club called Alternative Break Program (ABP) drove to Florida over New Year’s to help a national park in Florida clean up beaches.
Partnering with National Park Services and Biscayne National Park, our group was responsible for going to 4 different beaches to collect trash along the shoreline. Starting days at 7 am and ending late in the night was hard but rewarding work (not to mention the countless mosquito bites and blisters that covered my body). Not to mention the fact that my group and I were practically strangers to each other.
Riding a boat out into the ocean, we would disembark onto a trash-covered beach to spend hours finding different garbage and debris. Some of the items we found included:
An intact boat lighting system
1970 soda cans from Cuba
An unusually large amount of tires
A fridge
A fully glass TV from the 80s.
And so much more. Over 4 days, we were able to collect roughly 4,000 pounds of trash, which is a large feat. To put that into perspective, that’s a white rhino, or a Ford Taurus, or a Four 30-foot Hydro Poles, or even 40 bags of cement. Biscayne was nice enough to gift us each a heart-shaped seed, called Sea Hearts, which can be found all around the western hemisphere beaches.
Last year, I planned a similar trip to D.C. for prison reform. This year, besides a few short meetings, I had never conversed with my teammates.After a 19-hourr drive, we were practically inseparable for the rest of the trip, for better or for worse. If you ever find yourself in the same situation, try to find as many similarities as possible with each other. Fortunately, our degrees and plans for the future were quite alike, but our backgrounds were very different, which is something I love. Being able to meet new people with different histories than myself was something my hometown never had. We mainly bonded over TV shows and ended up watching almost 2 full seasons of Suits.
If you do not have the personal aspect to rely on, it can come down to the work that all of you are working on. Our main job required a large amount of teamwork, from walking trash that weighed up to 100 pounds out into sea to board a boat or face the cold salt water that greeted us every morning. Just remember, if you are feeling exhausted in your team role, it is a good chance that your teammates are too.
Truly, while some might see this as a boring experience, having to pick up trash for a week in blistering temperatures, I am sad that it is over. I learned more about my physical and mental limits than I ever have and being able to lend my time to help something greater than myself can never be replaced. Having come back to Bloomington, it is hard to maintain the same goals of cleaning up beaches, so it is imperative to adapt goals to your situation. For example, I would instead volunteer at local national parks and help clean trails or even think about tourism there.
According to the National Park Service, volunteers are an essential part of the workforce that helps maintain and preserve our national parks, so I encourage all to look into giving their services to the parks. And hey, seeing the natural vegetation and animals was only a bonus!
