By: Sally Ann Flecker

Carlton Reeves was already struggling to stay awake on the bus. It was going to be a long ride ahead for him and the 11 other Carnegie Mellon students in his group—eight hours bumping along jungle roads to get around the mountain as the bus made its way from Quito, Ecuador, to the Congal Biomarine Reserve, which is on an island just off the South American country's Pacific coast. Night had already fallen, and there wasn't all that much to see. But in a way, that was the point.

The darkness veiled the tangle of tropical brush edging the road for mile after lonely mile. But suddenly a groggy Reeves would see a hotspot of bright light pop up out of nowhere. The bus had come to a town. It was Saturday night and everybody, he thought, seemed to be at the one local hangout. The rest of the town and surrounding countryside was dark, but here it was like a spotlight shining on the people laughing and talking and having fun.

Then the bus moved on, and again it was all darkness and miles of desolation until he could see the next little settlement blinking in the distance, like a star come to alight on the earth.

The draining, sometimes jolting bus ride into the night came after a full day of touring Quito, Ecuador's capital city. And that came on top of the 2,700-mile flight from Washington, D.C., with a layover in Panama. It was a long time and a world away from the restaurant near Carnegie Mellon's campus in Pittsburgh where everyone had met up for a late dinner before pushing off at midnight for the drive to Dulles International Airport. This was the first day of spring break for Reeves and his classmates, and it promised only to get more intense once they reached the reserve—because this was no ordinary lay-around-all-day-in-the-sun, party-till-the-wee-hours kind of spring break trip. They would see a little of Ecuador's beautiful Pacific coast, but time on the beach would be the punctuation to a long day of hacking away with machetes at the overgrowth on the edge of the jungle or helping local farmers harvest bananas. Welcome to Alternative Break.

Alternative Break is a concept taking off at many colleges and even some high schools around the country. Students forgo the usual week of vacation or plain-old catching up on sleep to immerse themselves in a community service project, often run by nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity.

What's different at Carnegie Mellon is that students have the opportunity to participate in their own student-led organization called, appropriately enough, Alternative Break. Nuveen Marwah (HS'06, TPR'06), now a sales and trading analyst at Deutsche Bank in New York City, established the club in 2005 by making it his project as a fifth-year scholar. Brad Miller, a founding member who succeeded Marwah as Alternative Break president, points out what it means for the students to take full responsibility for the venture: They do the research and choose the trip, look for funding, determine travel requirements, and explore what they should know about the region, culture, and environment. "It's not heavy lifting, but it does require a fair amount of planning," says Miller, a senior electrical and computer engineering major with a Spanish minor.

The alternative breakers have done muscle-aching labor by helping clean up homes ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in the town of Bay St. Louis, Miss. They've also been a part of humanitarian efforts by working alongside the Border Angels in San Diego to provide life-saving supplies of food and water for those crossing the border. But the trip to Ecuador was perhaps their most ambitious yet as it was the group's first project flying beyond the United States' borders.

Their chosen destination was the Congal Biomarine Reserve, which is operated by the Jatun Sacha Foundation, a private Ecuadorian organization dedicated to the conservation of natural resources and promotion of sustainable development practices. The Congal Reserve is part of a region designated as a biodiversity hotspot, which means a rich variety of plant species particular to that region are being threatened.

"We thought the reserve was very promising in the sense that they were relatively established," says Miller. "They had been in the habit of hosting volunteers. When we called, they answered the phone in English, which suggests a certain degree of competency in dealing with foreigners. They seemed to be a reliable group, and when you're sending people to Ecuador, you prefer things to go as smoothly as possible. We value that."

Miller knows firsthand the vicissitudes of traveling with a group. On the organization's inaugural trip over winter break 2006 to Bay St. Louis, he found himself stranded in Buffalo, N.Y., when an ice storm shut down the airport. The travel plans had been complicated to begin with—trip participants flying in from other airports; converging in Cincinnati, Ohio; flying from there to Jackson, Miss.; and then driving six hours the following morning to their final destination. They had all gotten to where they should be, with the exception of Miller, who just happened to be one of the trip co-leaders. To catch up with everyone, he engineered a plan that involved flying into a different airport the following morning and convincing an airport shuttle to drive him an hour-and-a-half, which included crossing a 26-mile bridge, and then leave him at a Holiday Inn along an interstate, where the van of in-transit alternative breakers could swing past and pick him up. "After that, no multiple airports," Miller says.

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