Broadneck’s Habitat For Humanity Club Visits North Carolina

People always say that your senior year is one of the fastest years of your life. I was never one to buy into the hype, but as I stood in the Broadneck High School parking lot with other students last month, waiting to depart for our spring break trip, I started to understand it for the first time.

On August 10, I was rushed out of The Y in Arnold in the middle of my shift, waltzing into the Habitat for Humanity meet-and-greet with my counselor T-shirt still on, 45 minutes late. Now, 224 days later, I waited to embark on the culmination of countless hours spent fundraising: our service trip to Cape Fear, North Carolina. It was a really sobering moment, and one that caused me to reflect on how much all of us in Broadneck’s Habitat for Humanity club have grown throughout the year.

A silent auction, endless yard work, hours of club meetings, and a fair amount of sock sales all went into this trip. As the money coordinator, I didn’t think we’d make it at times. In one of our earlier meetings, I remember joking about how my bank account had more money in it than the club account. Fortunately, depending on how you choose to view it, that is no longer the case.

It took us eight hours to reach the campsite. Its surrounding environment consisted of apartments undergoing development, a highway, and a BP gas station that shined its green light on us from across the road, like a fluorescent beacon designed to make it as difficult as possible to fall asleep. The stark contrast was fairly humorous, and it prompted me and my tent-mate, Miller Bogarde, to spend an hour intentionally mistaking construction noises for various exotic animals as we failed to fall asleep.

Throughout the trip, the weather was not on our side, at all. One of our planned build days, on March 23, was canceled due to a rainstorm that left several of our tents flooded. It was also much colder and windier than any of us expected North Carolina to be during late March, and it was mostly cloudy with few exceptions.

“The weather was cold, wet, cloudy, windy, and we were all tired,” said club facilitator Brian Hussey, who also teaches AP world and European history at Broadneck. “Yet the laughter never disappeared. At the build sites, eating dinner, around the campfire, the laughter was always there.”

At the build sites, the Cape Fear Habitat affiliate was a pleasure to work with. All members of the affiliate were unbelievably charismatic, and they did everything they could to make us feel comfortable on the build sites. My personal favorite, though, was Al, a Long Island native who moved to North Carolina this past summer. He’s a massive New York Giants fan, which sparked some debate when I brought up my beloved Washington Commanders.

Some days, we were landscaping, weeding and laying sod over top of yards, eerily reminiscent of the yard work that we did in order to raise money for the trip. But we got some more action later in the trip, as we got to paint rooms and install doors in houses, among other carpentry-related activities that I personally was not involved in.

“This trip renewed my faith in humanity,” said Faith Culp, a facilitator for the club and a counselor at Broadneck. “It was so nice being with a group of philanthropic individuals who were willing to give up spring break in order to give back to the community.”

The parts of this trip that will stick with me the most are those that did not involve construction. For example, one of my friends was unwittingly forced to be a sword swallower’s assistant. Also, Miller and I went on a gourmet cuisine tour of Wilmington. There is also the time everyone taught the teachers slang while sitting around the campfire. Plus, the time that we plunged into freezing waters at Wrightsville Beach. And even the time that we did calculus on a whiteboard, sitting around the campfire as we lost our minds.

The connections you form with people are intriguing once you disconnect from the world for a bit. We were allowed to have our phones for only one hour each day, so we didn’t have much of a choice but to take the time to get to know everyone else. Sometimes, it was exhausting. But other times, it gave us an opportunity to get to know people on a deeper level, and I appreciated that.

“My favorite parts of this trip were talking around the campfire and being able to disconnect from your phone,” said Paige Reilly, a student in the club. “It made me realize that I didn’t need every necessity.”

One night, I was around the campfire with a couple of the adult facilitators. One of them, Ashley Goldberg, was my honors English 11 teacher last year. I remember thinking to myself, “There’s no way you could have ever seen yourself sitting around a campfire with Mrs. Goldberg a year ago.” Life comes at you fast, doesn’t it?

When you take away the classroom and the technology, they’re all people, just like you and I. Trips like this have an interesting way of leveling the playing field. We all spent a week away from our families. We were all roughing it in the cold and rain (although some of us had space heaters). And we all did it for the same reason: a strong desire to give back to the community, any way that we can.