Peters Township seniors share South American sojourn with classmates
Taylor Lilley and Makenna Parker did not take your typical summer vacation.
Instead, in between their junior and senior years at Peters Township High School, the two spent 21 days doing community service projects in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands through the company Westcoast Connection.
Scott Orelli and Keith Compeggie, both AP environmental science teachers at Peters, were impressed to hear about their students’ efforts.
“We just found out in conversation with them that they had been to the Galapagos islands. We decided to just ask them, ‘Would you be willing to share that, and do a little presentation?'” Orelli said.
Lilley and Parker did just that on Tuesday after school. They took their classmates through their trip, which started in Quito, the capital of Ecuador.
“We flew into the capital, which is the highest constitutional capital in the entire world at 9,000 feet above sea level, and due to how high the altitude was we had to take altitude medication as a precaution so that we wouldn’t get sick,” Parker explained during the presentation.
Lilley added that their first two days were spent mostly sightseeing, but then the work began.
One of their first community service projects was painting murals on the walls of a preschool.
“On our breaks, and whenever we were allowing the paint to dry, we got to do little dance parties with the kids and got to play games with them,” Lilley said. “It was really interesting, because we got to try to use our Spanish speaking skills to try and communicate with them since they didn’t speak any English.”
Their trip also took them to the Amazon Rainforest, where they were able to work with the Kichwas, an indigenous tribe. Lilley and Parker helped them plant banana trees.
“We also went down to the river and got rocks, and we made a fire pit for them,” Parker said.
In Riobamba, the two helped build a new house for a local family that lost their home in a landslide.
The work included digging a 13-foot hole for a septic tank. Parker explained that they started the house in August, but another group recently finished it earlier this month.
“Which might sound like a long time, but the entire house and everything in it was built solely by hand without the use of machinery or electrical equipment. So it was a lot of hard work,” Parker said.
In the Galapagos Islands, Lilley and Parker were able to see its famous wildlife up close, including the giant tortoises.
One of their service projects involved working with a local tortoise sanctuary to help the local population.
“We pretty much just planted trees in a big field, and that’s to preserve the land and all the stuff that the tortoises eat,” Lilley said.
Both Lilley and Parker said they became close friends with other students on the trip, and encouraged their classmates to take advantage of any opportunity to travel.
“There is more to see in the world. Just from growing up here, we don’t have that much diversity. That was something that was really important to Makenna and I, that we got to experience different cultures, and we got to meet people from different cultures and backgrounds,” Lilley said.