Community Service

In 1990, when Lovett Science teachers Connie and Bob Braddy passed through Santa Rosa, a village within the Andean cloudforest of Northwest Ecuador, they found the town's local school in desperate need of repair. The teachers pledged to assist the community with rebuilding the school. Within a year Lovett's Ecology Club raised funds, and the village fathers built the school, Escuela Rio Cenepa, establishing a bond between Santa Rosa and Lovett's Siempre Verde.

In the 20-plus years since, students have continued to help provide for the school, offering supplies, uniforms, textbooks, and the like. Every Lovett-sponsored trip to Siempre Verde schedules time for visiting with the schoolchildren of Santa Rosa. Creating a relationship with the youth of the area is one of the most memorable lessons that students visting Siempre Verde learn.    
 
Getting to know the residents of these neighboring towns is a key component to a visit to Siempre Verde. Visitors to Siempre Verde are not trying to impose American values and ideas on the Ecuadorians, but rather to learn from them and to provide some vision and assistance to the Ecuadorians’ own goals.

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Other community service projects also take place in other areas of the Intag region, such as Pucará, and extend to Otavalo and Quito, as well.

CARE Future Leaders

The home base for the CARE Future Leaders program, Siempre Verde provides students a forum with which to connect to the physical beauty and complexity of Ecuadoran landscapes. After spending several days in pollution- and noise-filled bustling cities, students are literally able to take a breath of fresh air for several days and experience the wonders of simplicity and nature as only the Ecuadoran cloudforest can provide.

In addition to hikes, relaxation, and incredible views, Siempre Verde’s location provides us with close proximity to the ecovillage of Pucará and Mary Ellen Fieweger’s various projects resulting from her work with the Intag Press in Apuela, both of whom speak and work with the CARE trip students.

Siempre Verde is a place for students to get wet, get dirty, to gain perspective and  ontemplate life, to make some noise, and share in moments of silence. It is a great place for students to reflect on the many things they have been exposed to in Ecuador and feel a tangible connection to a part of the world that is supposedly foreign to them.

Bennett Spann, The Lovett School Upper School English & CARE trip co-leader