Burke High School students reflect on Central America work

Students from the Jeremiah E. Burke High School raised funds to travel to Panama and Costa Rica where they helped build houses and repair a community center.

Earlier this month, Jeremiah E. Burke High School students spoke about a recent 11-day community service project trip to Panama and Costa Rica and all had similar feelings — before the trip they were not sure if it would have an impact, but after they were all impacted personally and saw the effect of helping others.

Junior Arium Wyne said she had minimal expectations going into the trip. She expected to spend long hours working hard in the hot sun with little to no communication between the natives and herself due to the Spanish-English language barrier.

It didn’t take long for her to realize that the trip would be much more than she anticipated.

“It was just really humbling and we got to communicate well with them even though we really didn’t speak Spanish and they didn’t really speak too much English, Wyne said. “I though it was just really nice that we could all bond and seem like we were one and part of one group.”

The group — 10 students and three teachers — spent four days in Panama building three houses and seven days in Costa Rica repairing a community center in April.

The trip marked the third year students from Jeremiah E. Burke High School have traveled out of the country for community service.

Last year, a group of students travelled to the Dominican Republic. During the first year in 2012, two separate groups traveled to Cape Verde — a group of islands off the west coast of Africa — and Puerto Rico.

“I want the students to just build this love of helping others. That’s the only thing I think about,” Jeremiah E. Burke English teacher and community service trip leader and organizer Maria Depina said. “The only reason I do this is so when they do these projects they instill this passion that will never end.”

To make the community service trips possible, Depina, the other organizers Nivia Pina and Karimah Williams and the students have to raise funds each year.

This year, the group raised $25,000 with a portion put toward purchasing materials to build the three houses in Panama.

The group sold more than 1,000 donated lunches from Merengue Restaurant during the school days prior to the trip and received sponsorship from Quest Adventures and Steward Health Care.

Quest Adventures has a mission to empower youth by helping them develop leadership skills through planning and participating in service trips.

The group also partnered with an organization named Un Techo para mi País — A Roof for my Country — to build three homes in Panama.

The three students who spoke about the trip last week — Wyne, Michaela Bates and Aaron DaGraca — agreed the house-building project in Panama was more difficult than the community center repair project in Costa Rica.

The students also endured a tougher living situation in Panama where they were housed in a school with sleeping bags and without running water or a fully equipped kitchen.

Nonetheless, the students named the trip to Panama the most impactful and memorable of the two.

“Our students worked very hard to build these homes together with the families that are living in these houses today,” Pina said.

The students had to walk up large hills in 90-degree weather to get to the homes and worked from eight to 10 hours each day without a shower to return to at the end of the day, Williams said.

“The kids they never complained,” Williams said. “They were hot, they had to walk and the condition of food was different. They really just gave themselves wholeheartedly.”

One thing that stood out to the students was how willing other members of the community were to help with the housing project.

Wyne’s group met a man named Victor, a neighbor to one of the families the group built a house for, who helped with the project and opted to make the group lunch every day, DaGraca said.

DaGraca didn’t work with Victor, but he did work with a man named Nico who was a single father with two kids.

“He was a hard worker. You can see every time we had to dig rocks out of the bottom to build the foundation, he was so powerful and determined with each hit to the floor,” DaGraca said. “That really kind of motivated me to want to help other people.”

The group also observed how much happier the families were with the little they had.

The three houses built by Techo and the students were the size of a small- or medium-sized bedroom, Bates said.

“Their whole house can fit in our room and only my little sister and I live in there,” Bates said. “We complain about it all the time, but five people live in one house and they’re just so happy.”

Quest Adventures Executive Director and President Claudia Bell pointed to the students as a prime example of what the organization hopes students will take back from service trips.

“We hope that we are helping to plant a seed in you of your responsibility, your duty to help bring up your community,” Bell said. “You’re doing that by getting a broader experience and bringing them back to Boston.”

The community spirit felt while on this service trip has motivated the students to come together and invite the entire school to participate in a bench-building project at the school.

“We’re going to work with City Year [an AmeriCorps Program] and one Saturday we’re going to build a bench together to let the community know the Burke is open,” Bates said.