We have arrived back home to Pittsburgh from Trinidad! Our trip offered us so many amazing opportunities to understand in a much deeper way the goings-on at Nature Seekers on a day-to-day basis. We also had several opportunities to indulge in the rich history and culture of Trinidad during our trip. This blog would be far too long to mention all of those experiences, so I’ve compiled a few that stood out to me the most.
Our first day was pretty light after a pretty hectic travel day. We met with Denise, our All People Be Happy contact, getting an overview of our activities throughout the course of the trip. Immediately after, we met with Suzan, one of the original founders of Nature Seekers, for a lesson on the history of Nature Seekers as well as an overview of the specifics of what they do, and what we would do with them. After lunch, we had a quick serving-learning activity to understand the basics of how turtle tagging works, and then had a food distribution activity where we packaged some food into portions to be donated.
Our second day, Monday, was far more eventful. After an early breakfast, we hiked our way to the Mermaid Pool, one of the activities that Nature Seekers would use our proposed booking system to organize with their clients. Sequestered deep into the woods off of the main road of Matura, was this beautiful oasis. We were able to go for a quick swim, and then headed back for lunch.
After lunch, we headed over to Nature Seekers to learn about how they recycle glass collected in their yearly beach clean-up to create beautiful jewelry. We had the opportunity to melt some glass down into beads, and had a craft session after where we were able to create our own jewelry from the same kind of glass beads.
After a quick dinner, we headed out to patrol the beach with Nature Seekers, looking for any turtles reaching the eastern beaches of the island to lay their eggs. This experience was one that truly set the tone for the remainder of the trip. It was such a beautiful experience, for one, with such little pollution on the Eastern side of the island, you could see every star in the night’s sky across the barely-visible horizon of the ocean. The people, however, were truly the highlight of the experience. Though we did not see any turtle nesting, we had some six or so hours to learn everything we could from these patrollers, who we quickly realized could answer practically any turtle-related question we could come up with. For me, it was the moment I truly realized that every person there treats their membership with Nature Seekers as not just as a job, but a vocation. Many of these people have dedicated decades of their lives to helping protect turtles on the Eastern beaches of Trinidad, some even involved with the eradication of the poaching industry for turtles on the island. They explained to us that they walk around with red lights instead of white lights on purpose, as they raise the heart rate of the turtles the least, so as to not scare any turtles away when they make it to the beach.
After not seeing any turtles coming to nest for several hours, we left the patrol to finish their job on the beaches, many staying past 3 in the morning. The next morning, we had another quick breakfast and headed to hike a “Nature Trail” with Anderson, another senior member of Nature Seekers. It again became very evident that Anderson, like others that joined us for the beach patrol, treats this as a vocation and loves what he does. Once again, there was not a single question about anything we saw on the Nature Trail that Anderson could not answer. This also gave us a great catch phrase for our group photos for the rest of the trip, as we all enjoyed when Anderson took the following picture of us and said “Say Nature Trail!!”.
After lunch, we had a few hours to rest and then met with Chelsea, who deals with a lot of the business-related aspects of Nature Seekers. We presented our ideas for their online booking system to her, and later went out to have some authentic, homemade ice cream from a shop near where we were staying. Without exaggeration, this was easily some of the best ice cream I have ever had. That evening, we went back out to the beach for an additional, unscheduled patrol in hopes of seeing turtles nesting, which we unfortunately did not see.
On Wednesday, we painted some expanded offices for Nature Seekers, where our group was able to bond and show off our keen ability to work as a group. After lunch, we had some relaxation time, which we certainly took to our advantage, playing about 2 hours of “Marco Polo” in the pool at the house we were staying in.
After having said goodbye to our friends at Nature Seekers, we headed to the Port of Spain for some of the more cultural and historical parts of our trip. We met up with our tour guide, Miriam, who took us ona driving tour of the some of the both modern, and historical architecture of the Port of Spain, finishing off our tour at the Royal Botanical Gardens that surround the President of Trinidad and Tobago’s residence. After, we toured Mille Fleurs which is a historical house just across from the Queen’s Park Savannah where some parts of Carnival take place. After, we trekked up to Paramin, with many beautiful views of the Western side of the island. And finally, we finished off the day with a boat tour of the Caroni Bird Sanctuary, where many of us were happy to rest and take a seat for a while, seeing the many different species of birds that call the sanctuary home. We moved our things into Samise Villa later that night, and had a great dinner with Denise, where we reflected on our trip thus far.
Our final day in Trinidad, we started off at Fondes Amandes Community Reforestation Project, where we had the opportunity to learn about the efforts to fight forest fires on the island of Trinidad, and this 40+ year old organization that has helped educate the community on the risks of forest fires and prevent them from destroying this place they call home. After some educational firefighting activities and a brief hike, we had a while to swim in the river there and then had lunch before we headed back to Samise Villa for our dance lesson. Leanna, our dance teacher, is another example of someone who truly eats, sleeps, and breathes what she does. Dance is not just her job, but it is her vocation; learning it, teaching it, doing it – dance is her life. I’ll spare you the videos of our group dancing, as we found out very quickly that dance truly does take many years to master.
At the end of the evening, we said goodbye to Denise and headed to the airport for our journey back to Pittsburgh. As we took our final car ride in Trinidad, I thought back throughout the week of what my favorite thing we did was, and it didn’t take long for me to decide. The experience patrolling the beaches with Nature Seekers, though we did not see turtles, was overwhelmingly influential for me. The conversations we had on the beach, with one another as well as Nature Seekers, truly influenced me and showed me how similar we all were, even with such different backgrounds and different life plans.
I had a few cultural and personal expectations for this trip that I quickly learned were not necessarily based in the reality of what Trinidad really is. For one, I had expected that this experience would be similar to some of my other experiences in the Caribbean. Trinidad could not have been more unique, not just in its culture but also the people. As I said before, each and every person we met truly loved what they were doing. From Suzan and Anderson at Nature Seekers, to Miriam our tour guide for the Port of Spain, to Denise who guided us through the service-learning aspects of this experience, they all do these things because it is what they love to do.
Another expectation I had was that the accent barrier would be significantly easier than it ended up being. Though all of us got ahold of the accents rather quickly, it was surprising initially to be speaking to people who were speaking English, but I still could barely understand. I had spoken to Chelsea and Joshua from Nature Seekers before our trip, and I later learned that their accents were certainly not characteristic of the accents of the general population.
Some expectations I had that were met were related to the cultural food, and the musical culture. Though I did not try ever food item we had available to us, I was anticipating many of the dishes we had and enjoyed them thoroughly. One of my favorites was that Trinidad serves goat a lot more regularly than here in the states, and I ended up realizing how much I enjoyed it. The musical culture was ever-present throughout the experience. For the first half of our trip, Carnival was happening on the other side of the island and so, the citizens of Matura celebrated in their own way by playing music and spending time with one another for days, and nights, on end. The music never stopped, and neither did the celebration.
A challenge we were presented with was understanding the true depth of the turtle-related aspects of Nature Seekers without having that experience of tagging a turtle or seeing one nest on the beaches. Though we learned so much through our experiences anyway, it does pose a challenge going forward for us to fully understand the depth of the organization having not seen one of the most important things to them, turtle nesting. We will continue to research and ask questions to our friends at Nature Seekers to ensure that we properly represent that core value of the organization in our deliverables for our project.
A class reading that proved to be relevant during our in-country experience was “Developing Intercultural Competence by Participating in Intensive Intercultural Service-Learning” by Nadia De Leon. In this article, De Leon explores the concept of “intercultural sensitivity” which she states, “requires awareness of similarities and differences, but is evidenced in the ability to accept, respect, and appreciate differences.” Unequivocally, understanding this concept was a key tool in ensuring that we had a successful cultural immersion during our experience in Trinidad.
One of the evenings we spent with the beach patrol, I had an opportunity to have a casual, friendly conversation with Tiara, one of the younger members of the Nature Seekers organization. We spoke on various topics, some heavily personal and others as simple as our music tastes, which we quickly learned was one of our greatest differences. The similarities that we shares, however, were ones that I expected us to relate on, but truly made me reflect on how similar we truly are. Yes, we were born on different continents to entirely different cultures, and yet we shared the same core characteristics when it came to things like loss, and political understanding even. We shared our different opinions, our different experiences, and truly learned from one another. That is one of the things that I will truly never forget about this experience, that we were such different people with such different backgrounds, and yet we shared so many common thoughts and experiences. If there is one thing that I could bring back here to the United States from Trinidad, it was that grace that we had with one another to understand what made each of us different on cultural, social, and environmental levels, and yet still being able to relate to one another.
Overall, this experience is one that I will never forget. In full honesty, I applied to this program on a whim, looking for a fun and exciting experience in a country I knew very little about. After this experience, I can say that this trip was so much more than just that, though it was certainly fun and exciting. It’s not everyday that a student like me is able to learn things in such a direct way, from the people who care about those things the most. I’ll always hold onto the grace and appreciation that everyone we interacted with had with us for wanting to learn about their way of life, and what they’ve dedicated their lives to doing. I hope that through this experience, I will be able to truly improve the business side of Nature Seekers, but also share my story of this unique experience with the people I interact with, and those that also have something to learn about what it means to be a Global Citizen.
