July 10-18, 2010
The Park City 5 Memorial Group’s expedition to Santa Cruz, Bolivia was a unique one and a productive one. We felt incredibly blessed to have over 35 expedition members who were able to honor the memories of the PC5 and their own loved ones by serving the members of the La Gaurdia community. Again, most of our participants were students from Park City High School who benefited from the language, culture and service exchange. It was a truly successful expedition. Thanks to all those who participated and donated.
At the school we assisted, we built an addition to a school in the La Guardia community in Santa Cruz, a poor urban area in Bolivia. In contrast to our first expedition, we stayed in a hotel instead of being in the village or homes of the locals. While this made the stay a little more comfortable, we did miss the closeness that we felt on the expedition to Ecuador the year before. The major “hiccup” of the trip was that while we were there, the country experienced a major cold spell with temperatures in the 30’s and rainy, which none of us were really prepared for. This made progress a little difficult, however, we did manage to accomplish a lot and provide much needed resources for the children. Some of those accomplishments were:
- Planted community garden to help students and their families sustain their needs.
- Helped landscaped around the school
- Moved A LOT of dirt!!!
- Dry walled and spackled walls of school
- Ran Business classes –how to start and run a business
- Visited a sister school to see the programs offered in the area
- Matt Knoop’s family collected soccer balls and gave them to the school, then they played a game with the champions of the region (our kids were surprised when they got beat).
- Financed construction and worked on the construction site in mornings
- Worked in classrooms with students
- Started roofing framing
In addition to the memorable moments working on the site, expedition members visited the rain forest where they went hiking, swimming and sight seeing. None of them will forget hearing the jaguars around the campfire and camped.
Servicio de por vida!
More pictures from our Bolivia expedition…
(Click on any picture to enlarge.)