Consider Alternative Spring Break. This is an opportunity to volunteer for community projects, organized every year by Youth Educational Services. This year the Y.E.S. house will take 22 volunteers to Oregon, for projects in Coos Bay, Florence, and Reedsport. Volunteers there will work with local tribes, camp, canoe, hike to burial grounds, move nets for a salmon restoration project, advocate college preparation with local high school students, and teach crafts to children among other activities.
For those that cannot take the entire week off, there are many things to do locally.
The Minor Theater will host the Latino Film Festival March 10-12. Three Argentinean films will be screened: Historias Minimas (“Intimate Stories”), El Hijo de la Novia (“The Son of the Bride”), and Lanina Santa (“The Holy Girl”). At 6 p.m. each evening there will be a short discussion of that night’s film followed by a viewing at 6:30.
For bird lovers there is a Vocational Birdwatching Series March 15-18. The days begin bright and early in the field and end with extra instruction in the classroom. Wildlife professionals will teach skills for surveys and conservation efforts like banding and point counts for various endangered species. There will even be a special nighttime owl survey.
The Dell’Arte school of physical theater in Blue Lake will be performing Melodrama. This series of short plays written by first-year students “explores moral dilemmas, neurosis, obsession and struggle.” Pay what you can and bring your own tea.
Maybe you’d rather learn to juggle. Well, lucky you, the Humboldt Juggling Festival will be held March 19 to 22. Workshops, free play, object manipulation, fire shows and tons of circus-style fun will fill the days topped off with a Saturday evening “Juggling Experience” in the Van Duzer Theater at 7 p.m. All the workshops and play are free and the show costs a mere $8-10.
Sunday is the “Redwood Creek Day Hike” sponsored by the California Native Plant Society. The walk will focus on native fauna like the deep red trillium and riparian and forest edge vegetation. For details call Carol at 822-2015.
Of course, there will also be live music, the beaches, the forests and that never-ending pile of homework calling your name too. It may not be Cancun, but Humboldt has a lot to offer.