Help Send Ship Students to Chile: Service for Service

Help send our geography field studies class to Chile. 

We are Shippensburg University students planning to travel to northern Chile over Spring Break as part of a field studies and service learning course in Geography! From the coastal city of Iquique, to the Atacama Desert, to the Andean Altiplano, we will be learning first-hand about the cultures, landscapes, and environments of this part of the world. We are excited to be immersed in a new culture, learn how other people live, and practice Spanish with native speakers.

We also want to make a difference in the world. As part of this course we will be learning about the importance of Andean wetlands. Local Aymara indigenous communities rely on them as a water source and as grazing land for their llamas and alpacas, and they are globally important in supporting unique wildlife and sequestering carbon. But, the human population on the Altiplano has declined as Aymara have migrated to urban centers, and the wetlands are declining as a result. A local non-profit, Corporación Norte Grande (http://www.cng.cl/), has launched a wetland restoration program that brings in teams of volunteers to help the remaining Aymara communities manage and maintain the wetlands.

Your donations will help to offset travel costs to Chile. We are fortunate to have the generous support of a donor who is providing a dollar for dollar match, so your gift will be automatically doubled! And, we have partnered with the Friends of Michaux (https://friendsofmichaux.org/) to do a local service project in our own local headwaters, Michaux State Forest, where many of our local streams originate. We will be helping the Friends group clean up litter and graffiti in the State Forest.