Mountain Christian School senior students volunteer in Whitehorse

DAWSON CREEK, B.C. – The 11th and 12th grade class at Mountain Christian School in Dawson Creek took a ten-day trip into the Yukon last month to practice serving in communities beyond their own.

Megan Polowski, the teacher of the eight-person class and the trip’s coordinator, says the trip’s service-based purpose tied into one of the classes that the students were attending on citizenship “and how we can serve our community, and how we can show love to others.”

“So the purpose of the trip was to serve in other communities, as well as our own,” said Polowski.

While in Whitehorse, the students volunteered with the city and helped clean up its fireworks grounds— a detail-oriented task involving many small fragments of paper and plastic littering the space from the spent pyrotechnic devices. The students also painted sheds and did some landscaping for a local church.

Fundraising and the school itself supported part of the trip; the students paid for the remainder of the adventure. 

Despite the 14-hour school bus trip across the province’s northern border, Polowski said it was “a pretty smooth trip.” 

The students also got to enjoy Whitehorse’s fun and laid-back atmosphere and experience Carcross, a nearby Indigenous community. 

While there, the class swam in a glacier-fed lake. “And no one got hypothermia! So that’s good,” Polowski said with a good-natured laugh.

The class stayed in tents and cooked food over the fire—a novel experience for some of the students. 

“Some of them had never been camping before,” Polowski said. “And so they got to learn to chop wood, and they learned to make a fire, and they learned to cook.” 

“It was fun to see that kind of growth happening, as well,” Polowski said.