Renbrook Summer Adventure’s Encore Service Learning Adventure to Costa Rica Rainforest

Costa Rica 2011 Senior Trip Posted 11/15/2011 by J.A. Herd

On the heels of the resoundingly successful 2010 trip to the rainforests of Costa Rica and The Cloud Forest School (www.cloudforestschool.org) in Monteverde, Costa Rica, Renbrook Summer Adventure returned with a mission:

To deepen our roots of cooperation with this progressive and growing educational community known locally as El Centro Educacion de Creativa.

Our contingent of 12 Renbrook current and alumni students (14-17 yrs.) together with the two chaperons, John Herd and Pat Reese, continued the work ethic begun in 2010. Our task was to work on their campus to ready the facilities for the beginning of the new school year that was to begin August 8th.

This summer’s projects were similar to the previous year. Our students and school staff worked to stabilize erosion prone areas of campus together with miscellaneous repair and painting of classrooms. But the larger project undertaken this summer was to bring this growing school into compliance with building access codes by connecting the separate buildings with stabilized pathways. This improved not only the safety of transgressing between buildings, but reduced the load on building maintenance as the rainy season approached. Keeping the modest and interspersed buildings connected physically and figuratively is an ongoing battle for the school.

Homestays with the families of the Cloud Forest School enrich our stay with cultural experiences and connections to a family. Several returning travelers reunited with families they have stayed with on previous Renbrook trips. They enjoyed the time to catch up on the events of the past 12 months in their respective lives and families. The re-immersion for these students back into the Tico culture is so comforting and rewarding the second time around, and it further solidifies connections to this idyllic area of the world.

When we arrived the CEC summer camp program was in the final days of its highly successful inaugural year. Our students played games, ran workshops, and recruited the local kids to help on our projects. While staying in Monteverde, the group carved out time for some R&R, enjoying excursions into the forest canopy on zip-lining adventures, horseback riding to hot springs for therapeutic swimming, hiking into the primary forest to view spectacular waterfalls, and enjoying the amazing variety of plant and animal life in this poetic display of living colors.

Our service work began back in CT, where students raised money for school supplies in fundraising efforts: volunteering at the building sites of ServCorp in Hartford, practicing their Spanish, and hiking in preparation for the mountains of the Cloud Forest. The group delivered over $750 of much needed school supplies into the school’s supply closet to launch the new school year.

The Director of the CEC visited Renbrook School October 24th to deliver a report on the programs that are coalescing at this wondrous facility and to explore further connections to the community of Renbrook. At this meeting the overview plans for a return trip to Cloud Forest School the summer of 2012 were established.