Hello Pitt Business, I am Natividad Torres, a student currently enrolled in the Trinidad Global Service-Learning program, and this blog post is centered around the in-country experience that occurred over spring-break!
Originally our itinerary had us arriving in Trinidad on the late night of Saturday / early morning of Sunday. However, there were complications with our flight into Trinidad that caused us to arrive late night of Monday / early morning of Tuesday. This was a significant change to our plan as a group, and while dealing with the complications and annoyances of travel delays helped to bond our group, we were ultimately very worried about how our experience in country would change due to these challenges.
It was then very shocking when right before we arrived in Trinidad, we saw the amended schedule and the activities may have been closer together or changed to a different day, but the total amount was more or less the same. This was all because of the work of Denise who works with AllPeopleBeHappy and helped to keep our trip as intact as possible. I personally felt so grateful and excited knowing that the schedule in-country was still filled with all of the experiences that I wanted to do when I got in-country.
The night we arrived we stayed at Samise Villa which was run by Denise and her son Samuel. Samuel and I (along with a few group members) had a conversation on the first night we arrived, partially about music and Trini culture, but also about himself. When he was asked about why he got into doing this type of work, he said that he truly enjoys spreading his culture to people who are interested in learning about it but also for the wide variety of people he meets. This thing that stuck with me most though was about how many people will point out the differences between cultures, and while I will do that here to an extent I, he ultimately wanted me to focus on the similarities between our cultures as that is more likely to bring us together. That helped reframe the whole trip as the differences in cultures are very easy to spot but to dig deeper for similarities between cultures can take a little more effort.
The next day we had a tour of the capital, Port of Spain, which helped to get our bearings around the area and expose us to the different history in both buildings and vegetation that we experienced at a botanical garden nearby. This was good for general knowledge throughout the trip, but the next experiences were more ecotourism centric. We first rode up a tall mountain community, Paramin, which had roads that would twist and turn with what feels like no space for cars to go up and down at the same time, yet the locals drive around perfectly despite it feeling like you could fall at any moment. We stopped about halfway up to grab a bite to eat from food we got at a local restaurant on the way up and had an amazing view at our checkpoint. There was then an overlook at the very top of the mountian where you could see into the ocean and the surrounding land which was beautiful. We followed this experience up with a bird sanctuary tour on a boat. While riding we got to see a lot of different wildlife: tiny bats, snakes, tree-crawling crabs, flamingos, and most importantly the scarlet ibis. The scarlet ibis is the national bird of Trinidad, and they choose to rest on a specific island and come back there at sunset from all directions. If you are lucky, you may even see hundreds fly in at a single moment. These experiences are important as this exposes us to ecotourism that exists in Trinidad outside of our client Nature Seekers. Showing beautiful landscapes or a variety of wildlife is important for the communities that are participating and ultimately profiting from this type of tourism. This helps make people more aware of the need to conserve and protect these environmentally dependent jobs more sustainable for the future as a part of their tourism is a level of education.
This was important context for when we then left for Matura, where our client Nature Seekers resides. Nature Seekers was an organization that set out to eliminate the poaching of leatherback turtles in the Matura community, which was widely successful and has now pivoted to making their mission more sustainable and more present in the Matura community. Because of this, they have a lot of respect in their community. Over the course of our time there we got to experience to ecotourism of visiting the beach to look for nesting sea turtles, and while we may have just barely missed a sea turtle spotting due to our flight delays there was still a lot of education and beauty of the need to protect the beach and stop the spread of trash. We also got to participate in their hikes and jewelry making activities that make their business sustainable to gain more context on what their processes entail. The one aspect of Trinis we noticed was how community driven they were, and Nature Seekers was the embodiment of a cause that is bigger than every worker individually, yet it means so much to them and their path as well. And while the community buy-in may not be comparable to the United States I do believe the general idea of people wanting the best for their community and acting in ways that will achieve that is transferable to many cultures beyond these two countries mentioned, a similarity that is very important to understanding the context of the Trinis we interacted with during our time.
One activity that was vital for our group was to get direct feedback on the project management part of our deliverables. This was something we did not fully get briefed on before we left for Trinidad and had to quickly pivot to something that would work for what was expected from Nature Seekers and the field staff who were ready to learn more about project management. The biggest cultural difference was the business practice of presenting and how our presentation was not nearly as engaging to the audience as it could have been, however when there was more of an emphasis on a conversation and hands-on activity the field staff seemed to be way more engaged. This was not what we had expected as we thought the presentations we had made would be useful to their field staff, and while they still very well could be it would be in both parties best interest to rework on deliverables on being less presentation heavy and more engaging to those receiving the trainings. This was the best outcome we could have ended up after having our preconceived notions challenged by our experiences in-country as it ultimately led us to a better solution.
The communication that was emphasized in multiple readings in class before we left were by far what I thought of the most, as now that our group has a significant amount of context regarding Nature Seekers and how our deliverable has changed, we can ask more effective questions. This is what is now needed for our group to properly deliver as we are so close to executing these trainings in a way that will be benficial to Nature Seeker’s staff and with a little more feedback we can get it to their expectations.