Volunteering

The summer going into my Junior year I went on a community service trip to the British Virgin Islands. It was an amazing experience. I went with a company called ActionQuest and within ActionQuest my program was called Lifeworks. There were about 20 different groups within the company that were in the British Virgin Islands also. All of us lived on catamarans or sailboats and we sailed around the British Virgin Islands gradually stopping and doing activities. There were two catamarans with Lifeworks with about 15 people on each. For three weeks we would sail during the day to a different island, stop there and help out, and then go back to our boat at night to sleep. Some of the activities we did were painting a fence around a museum on the island Tortola, beach clean-ups, planting mangroves in the ocean, painting a church, playing with local children, painting a community center, planting outside of the VISAR search and rescue building and helping them with measuring tapes, and tagging turtles.
Tagging turtles was, by far, my favorite thing to do on the trip. We would split up into groups of 5 and each group got their own dinghy boat. The dinghy's had ski ropes tied to the back of them with knots along the rope. Three people would get into the water with snorkel gear on and hold the rope in between the knots while the other two people stayed in the boat (one drove, the other was on lookout). While the boat was moving at a slow pace, the people in the water got dragged throughout shallow parts of the ocean looking for sea turtles. I can't even explain how amazing this was. I never caught a turtle myself but, regardless, while I was pulled through the ocean I got to see beautiful fish and coral; it was unbelievable. Anyway, once someone found a turtle, they would raise their arm in the air to let the people in the boat know to stop. When the boat stopped, everyone, but the driver, dove into the ocean to go after the turtle. If the turtle was caught, we would bring it back with us in our dinghy to our catamaran where we would take measurements and, finally, tag the turtle. Once we were done, we brought the turtle back to the place where we found it.
This trip was one of the hardest things I have ever done physically and mentally. In the mental aspect I was living with 14 other people and I only knew one when I started the trip. We were all very different, and in the beginning it's easy to pick out those differences, but in the end I didn't want to leave them. At home, everyone has their own groups of friends and there's always judgments against each group. On this trip, I got to escape from what I was always judged by, or from how everyone knew me to be. When we would be painting fences or doing another activity, we always had to be aware of the culture of the island. We couldn't wear certain things, like a tank-top, because that's offensive to the locals. This trip was very different from something I would normally do, and although it was hard, I am thankful that I got to go on it. I had a chance to open my eyes to so many things and do activities that I never thought I would do.