Our final day of activities in the BVI was upon us, and the roosters were absolutely relentless outside our cabin. Our morning was a little slow, but it quickly picked up as we learned about our service project and prepared ourselves for a hard day of work. Our job was to help build and organize the school’s first library as well as help landscape and plant trees. The high school was one of Virgin Gorda’s only public high schools, and it was severely underfunded. Our efforts today would install the one and only library for the entire school, and help beautify the grounds for generations to come. Our dive instructors as well as a company called UNITE BVI would organize our project and set us to work. I began by joining some friends in organizing the tons of books donated into shelves. Many of us were excited to see so many books we remember from our childhood being shared with the younger generation, and we had plenty of nostalgic conversations while organizing. Next I moved to help shovel dirt and transport it to the planting grounds for new trees. In the middle of my shift, my dive instructor invited us all to share in a brief snack break to eat the largest doughnuts I’ve ever seen. They must have been at the bare least two times the size of a regular doughnut. Those huge doughnuts served to fuel the rest of our project as I hauled around buckets of dirt, and once we were finished, we had created a library and gave the school a whole new look in the area. We were reminded later that all of the children who return in the fall will appreciate our work and have new opportunities to learn. With that though in mind, we all shared another meal at the Bath and Turtle for the last time.
Once we returned to Guavaberry Resort, we were given a little time to prepare for our final presentations for our research. We were to show our findings to the entire dive staff as well as our teachers, and one by one we went to hold our presentations. Our Sponge Project had a brilliant outcome. We found that our original hypothesis that larger sponges processed sea water faster was wrong ad the complete opposite of what we thought. The smaller the barrel sponge, the faster it processed seawater. The staff seemed to love our project, and we held a nice conversation about how our findings could be furthered and what we could change. We concluded that we’d aim to expand our project to include many other types of sponges, and we would learn our dive sites a little better in order to know wat we are looking for. To finish off our final day, we ate a large meal at the Baths and reviewed our week. Our staff prepared a slide show and a couple of small speeches to show their appreciation of having us here. We shared our last goodbyes and with our dive instructors and gave a couple of final words to give our thanks for their efforts in handling 19 teenage boys for a week. And what better was to end the day by seeing my first ever shooting star. Ahead of us lies a long day of international travel, and tonight we will finally pack our bags to return home after a long, eventful experience here in Virgin Gorda.
:End Log:
