By Jim Mahar
Professor Columnist
BonaResponds volunteers teamed up with SBU Enactus for another successful trip to Freeport, Bahamas. Enactus has been doing its trip for 16 years, and this is BonaResponds’ fourth year of working in and around Freeport. Work on the trip included remodeling a classroom, hanging drywall, painting a basketball court at a school, working in a national park, repairing a roof and replacing rotting drywall in a bathroom. Additionally, Enactus gave out over 20 of the donated iPads we have been working on receiving over the past year. The main work, however, centered around gardening.
Working with PositiveRipples, a local charity formed to work on socio-economic and educational issues globally, BonaResponds has helped to sponsor garden projects in Haiti, Liberia and Sierra Leone for several years. Gardens are important for many reasons. They give the owners food and add to their food security, crops can be sold and generally, the vegetables are cheaper and more nutritious than food that can be found at the local convenience stores.
This year’s trip to the Bahamas allowed us to have the opportunity to do a larger experimental garden plot to test various aspects of farming: a portion of the garden is under a sun screen, several sections of the garden have gravity-fed irrigation systems and one section has a plastic weed block. The intention of the project is to determine what is worth the cost and what methods should be dropped. We also built several raised beds at another site to allow individuals to rent a section to have their own gardens.
Possibly the most impressive garden program took place at RTI Vocational School where graduate MBA student Dominic Caropreso led a team to make a prototype hydroponic set up to teach the students, with hopes to be scaled up so that the school can sell some of the crops.
These garden programs are all seeds that will yield a large harvest down the road. While we have not yet announced it officially, we hope to make a return trip in May to see the harvest of this first planting and to work with the local government and schools to get more gardens in schools and backyards across the Grand Bahamas. Save the dates (the two weeks after graduation).
The key takeaway from the trip? We can all make a difference and a helping hand can change the path of multiple generations to come.
Looking ahead, we have another relief trip coming up. It will be over Spring break, March 1 to 10, to Wilmington, North Carolina to clean up after Hurricane Florence. As many of you know, in the fall we went there and gutted many homes that had been flooded from up to 11 feet of water. There is still much work to be done. This trip we will be working primarily on rebuilding. Specific tasks include hanging insulation and drywall and painting and putting down new floors.
We hope to have over 40 volunteers this year and would love faculty, staff and alumni to join us for the entire week or any portion of it. The cost of the trip will go up the longer you wait. Currently, the cost is $100 per volunteer. Food and a place to stay at St. James Church in historic Wilmington are included.
For more information on the Wilmington trip, please email Kelly Fitzgerald (fitzgeks18@bonaventure.edu) or Maggie Finley (finleymc16@bonaventure.edu), or you can visit BonaResponds.org. Hope that you can come to make the world a little better! (P.S. it will be fun!)
jmahar@sbu.edu
