Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Teen volunteers get chance to travel, learn

WEEKEND EDITION: June 15, 2002

Most kids don't have to be dewormed after they return from their summer vacations, but for four local teens, it will be part of the adventure.

Heather Mecham, 19, Tyler Futrell, 18, Stephen Waite, 18, and Samantha Stewart, 16, embarked Friday on a three-week humanitarian service trip into the heart of the Brazilian rain forest.

"It's an opportunity to go to another country, see the world, have a little fun and work on a tan," Waite said.

It's also a chance for service.

The teens and their adult chaperones, Andrea Croft, 24, and Glenn Bingham, 47, will join other volunteers in building classrooms for a children's shelter along the Amazon River. The trip, organized by the nonprofit group Alliance for Youth Service, will take the teens through Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, past the Iguacu falls and deep into the jungles of Brazil.

Bingham and his wife, Elizabeth, founded AYS in 1999 to give their teenagers a chance to go on humanitarian mission trips within the confines of their moral standards as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"When my oldest son was 17, I wanted to send him as a volunteer with some of the great service organizations that are available in the world," Elizabeth Bingham said. "However, I was concerned that these programs might put him in a situation that would test rather than strengthen his standards."

The organization partners with established service organizations to provide labor and money for ongoing projects, then recruits teens to do the work and raise the money for the trip. The trips are open to teens of any denomination, but everyone must abide by the LDS codes of conduct.

The local teens raised more than $2,000 each to participate in the service trip, by doing odd jobs, soliciting donations from family and friends or by dipping into their own savings.

"They are paying for more than their actual travels," Glenn Bingham said. "They are donating several hundred dollars to the actual construction costs."

The group will spent most of their time doing that construction in conjunction with the nonprofit group Amizade in Santarem, Brazil. The shelter there, Pastoral Do Menor, was started a Catholic priest to get kids off the streets during the day.

The schools there are overcrowded and the kids are forced to go to school in shifts, with some not starting school until 7 p.m., Glenn Bingham, who visited the shelter in 1999, said.

"During the day, their parents are gone at work and they are just running free," he said. "There is no child care there or anything like that, so this is just a way to help them with their studies, make sure they get a good lunch, that kind of stuff. For a lot of them it is the only meal they get that day."

Last year's team built houses and painted an orphanage in Nicaragua.

The service aspect of the trip is a major plus for Croft, an eighth grade math teacher at Burkholder Middle School.

"Since they are going down to build a school and I am a schoolteacher, I really felt like that was something I wanted to do," Croft said.

Like her younger counterparts, Croft is excited to visit another country. None of the teens had been farther than neighboring Mexico or Canada, and some haven't even left the country.

"I think that is what I am looking forward to most, is being immersed into a different culture, a different atmosphere," she said.

Croft's cousin, Stewart, said she hopes the trip will help her appreciate what she has here. Mecham was enthusiastic about learning how to lay bricks while the boys were mostly excited by the prospect of exploring the beaches of the Rio and the jungles of the Amazon.

In preparation for the trip, everyone got immunization shots for yellow fever, malaria, hepatitis A and B, tetanus and diphtheria. There is still a danger of Danghi fever -- a severe version of the flu -- and the teens will be dewormed before they are allowed to re-enter the United States.

The girls were a little scared before their departure of some of the animals and bugs, but for the most part they were game for anything -- even swimming with piranhas.

"I'd do it," Stewart said, enthusiastically.

The Binghams were looking forward to forging humanitarian notions in the maturing youths.

"With everything that happened last year, people are getting more of a global perspective," Elizabeth Bingham said. "When we go down there, we know nothing about the country. But as we serve, we come to love those people, to really love and care about the people there. And we learn how to help."

To learn how to help with future trips, check out the website at www.ays.org.

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