In February, 2017, Portsmouth High School took the first student trip ever to South America by going to Peru. It was lead by a PHS alumnus Jeremiah Berman, founder of the company Abroaden. Abroaden is a program that is specifically designed to give travelers the true Peru experience by meeting locals, eating home cooked Peruvian food and going beyond tourism by volunteering and seeing sights foreigners don’t know about.

In March of 2017, a month before the Portsmouth High School group was planned to go to Peru, extreme floods and mudslides occurred all throughout the Lima region. The students didn’t hear much about the flooding or the true impact and devastation it had caused, but they knew they wanted to help. They put together a last minute clothing drive and got all the Portsmouth schools involved. The group managed to get 40 trash bags of donated clothes to Peru.

The day they visited the town that was hit by the mudslides, called Cajamarquilla, they found out how hopeless recovery seemed for this small town. The students brought the 40 bags of clothing and large cases of water to 40 different families throughout the town and heard each of their stories. Their homes and possessions were washed away or destroyed and covered by up to six feet of water and mud. The residents had been trying to dig through and move all the mud since the mudslides happened.

Ava Gagne, a PHS student who went on a trip with Abroaden during the summer said “I stood next to the flood line on a concrete wall, I’m about 5’ 1” and ¾ and the flooding was just about up to my rib cage”

They had no electricity, no drinkable water and were running out of food fast. The stores in the town had been destroyed, most of the cars in the town were now broken and if someone was able to get to a store outside of the town, they found drastically increased prices because food and water was in high demand. The residents ways of making money were destroyed as well. Gardens were dead, livestock were killed in the floods or dying now without the means to keep them alive, stores and restaurants were destroyed and had no way of getting supplies anyway. The government of Peru had given just three tents to the town, 15 people lived in each, and the government was planning to take those tents back to give to another town that had been hit. The scene was absolutely devastating and everyone who went on the trip said their lives had been changed and touched forever by seeing and experiencing Cajamarquilla.

The other PHS trip that went in the summer of 2017 with Abroaden also visited the town, Gagne says, “we brought a bunch of donations for the kids, we played soccer with them and they kept the balls, we did coloring and handed out food and candy. “

Danielle Sinclair  (a student who went on the February Peru trip) ”raised about $400 and that went really far, we got a ton of oil and rice and sugar.”

Some of the students from the first Portsmouth trip decided to organize a fundraiser for the town. On Saturday, October 22nd, a trail race 5K at PHS will start at 10am. The race can be done by running, walking or relaying in a group of 3 and costumes are encouraged. The prices are $5 per student, $10 for a relay team of students, $10 per adult and $25 for a team of adults. Donations are also encouraged at the door and prizes will be awarded to those with the best costumes and the fastest finishers. Food and beverages will also be provided.