Sant Bani Students and Faculty “de-tire” the Baker River

High school students and staff started the year with a canoe trip down the lovely Baker River in Plymouth, NH. While they may have picnicked along the way, their canoes ended up filled with rusted car parts, leftover debris from various high water events, and over 100 tires. The school typically begins the year with some kind of community service outreach, but this event kept town employees in Plymouth busy as well, as they received the “payload” of canoes that ferried back and forth between a washed-out junkyard and the pick-up site at Smith Bridge. It would have been very hard to make it happen without the support of Earl Flanders of Pemi-Baker River Adventures who provided the canoes. As SBS is built on the twin principles of a reverence for all life and service to others, helping to clean up a beautiful natural resource was a wonderful example of both. And while there were many highlights, the students who rescued a white cross once placed in honor of a child who had lost her life on the river were thrilled to find that it would be returned to its rightful spot on the banks. By the end of the day, the sixty students and staff from Sant Bani (including our international contingent from Indonesia, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Germany, Thailand, and Colombia) were “tired,” but deeply satisfied.