by Lauren Gasek
Thirty students, 24 hours of traveling, 16 years in the making, two layovers, and one whole year of planning. That’s the amount of effort that Peru Crew 16 put into making the trip to the Amazon so memorable. For the students who have never been to the area before, and even for those who have gone once, twice, and even three times before, this year’s trip has made an impact on how they view the world, and each other. They described those connections and experiences on Thursday, June 9, when they shared photos and stories from their trip with the public.
Many students only knew each other by name before the trip, but that all changed on the Amazon trip.
“You get to bond with people. Within the Hudson High group, they’re not all friends, so you get to make new friends with people that we might not necessarily have even spoken to before,” says chemistry teacher Erin Cothran. She was a part of the original Peru Crew 2000, and she has been a part of all of the Peru Crews since. Seeing everyone befriend new people was one of her favorite parts of her trip in 2000.
“I appreciate the people we went with,” says Brian Matthews, a senior who was a part of this year’s crew. “We got to know them in a way that we wouldn’t ever have gotten to know them.”
On top of that, all of the students met at least one person that they considered a sibling by the end of the trip, and they found it very hard to leave them as the Crew prepared to leave for home.
Alyssa Cabral had this sense of connection with a boy named Eddy.
“We were just holding hands and looking at each other and laughing, and I have never felt such happiness,” Alyssa Cabral reflects. “At the end of the day, he wrote te amo on a piece of paper.”
“You just looked at a kid, and he comes over and grabs your hand,” says Jacx Cannistraro, who is the only student of Peru Crew 16 who has been to the Peruvian Amazon three times. “This kid brought me into his house, and he introduced me to his mom and his aunt.”
World Cultures teacher June Murray’s early teaching experiences led to her connection to South America.
Before she started teaching in Hudson, Murray taught at the middle and high school level in Chelsea, Massachusetts, where most of her students spoke Spanish. She was trying to constantly overcome a tough language barrier between her and the kids, and eventually she set out to learn the Spanish language on her own.
So, she found a job in which she could teach world history in English to Spanish students in Columbia, and she worked alongside the head teacher of the school’s social studies department who taught the same material but in Spanish.
She taught there for a year, and during that period of time she visited the Amazon in the location where Columbia, Brazil and Peru meet. She came back to Massachusetts after her trip, and soon afterwards she went to the Peruvian Amazon with her boyfriend, who is now her husband.
Murray then got a teaching job at Hudson High School and taught ninth grade civics and AP psychology. When her ninth grade students became sophomores, they complained to Murray about how in their new world history course, they learned primarily about The French Revolution and Europe, and they wanted to learn more about the rest of the world. They knew that she had taught and traveled in South America, so she decided to make a course of her own on what the students wanted to learn about. She named it World Cultures.
Once the course was created, the students then kept bugging her to take them to the Amazon so that they could experience the reality of the stories that Murray had told them. Murray then contacted those with whom she had relationships along the Amazon, and thus, the Peru Crew of 2000 was created. The group consisted of 36 students, including sophomore Erin Cothran, and four chaperones.
“My favorite thing about the trip itself is the possibility it presents for my students because I think that my kids get to experience existing in ways that I can’t offer them staying here in Hudson. It is an opportunity for them to experience a perception shift, to see things differently. It doesn’t happen for all of them, but for the kids that it happens for, their lives will always be different because of that.”