My name is Caroline LaFave, and I am a freshman in Environmental Engineering and Spanish at North Carolina State University. Last year, as senior, I participated in an Environmental Brigade in Piriatí, Panamá, through my high school, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. We were fortunate enough to be the first high school brigade in Panamá, and it was, hands down, the best experience of my high school career! It was actually an accident, too. Originally, our group was headed to Honduras for the Water Brigade, a program which some of our schoolmates had participated in the year before. The Peace Corps pulled out of Honduras less than a month before our brigade date, and after some hectic phone calls and e-mails, we ended up heading to Panamá! Although I would have loved to go to Honduras and help with the Water Brigades, I must admit that (as an environmentalist) I was really excited to be able to participate in a brigade that was right up my alley. It allowed me to experience, first hand, the waste management and deforestation issues in another part of the world, where the people don't have a sustainable system of waste management or agriculture.
Coming home after that week was the hardest thing in the world. There was definitely some culture shock - it's amazing how one week can change the way a person looks at a plastic bottle, or the packaging of all the items that can be bought in a store. The work that we did on site during the Brigade was amazing, but it was only half of the reward of the trip. I also gained this heightened awareness of the repercussions of my everyday choices and actions that affects me in everything I do - and this, unexpected though it was, I feel is a very important result of the brigade. It is easy, in the United States, to be blissfully unaware of the repercussions of a wasteful lifestyle. Everything thrown away is then taken away, never to be seen (or thought about) again. When you experience a place in which people have to live surrounded by the waste that they make, with no real way to get rid of it other than burning trash piles (which releases neurotoxins), you realize just how big of an issue that waste really is. It brings up questions like, what happens to my trash, when I throw it away? Where does it go? Who does it affect? How can I minimize it?
I know I felt like a completely different, improved person when I returned home after the Brigade. I knew more about waste, the issues it posed, and what I could do about it. And after everything I've learned, I don't want to leave it at that, and stop moving forward. I want to give others the chance to experience what I have experienced, and to spread awareness of the issues with waste management and sustainability to others.