While many of their peers boarded planes bound for home or warmer locations, a number of Wesleyan students opted to spend their spring breaks a little less traditionally. For those students who chose to do volunteer work in places like Nicaragua, El Salvador, and New Orleans, there was no kicking back after the midterm crunch. Instead, these students traveled to far away places to work odd jobs, form lasting relationships, and stand in solidarity alongside those confronted daily with every brand of adversity.
The expeditions these students embarked upon were by no means run-of-the-mill service trips. They did not plan these to donate a few dozen man-hours to impoverished peoples to then return home with an elevated sense of personal integrity. On the contrary, most students intend to return to the places they visited over spring break and view their recent experiences as the beginning of long lasting partnerships, not one-time missions.
“We’re not going to go in for ten days, come back, and say ‘that was amazing,’” said Lorena Estrella ’10, who went to Nagarote, Nicaragua with five other Wesleyan students involved in the Nagarote-Wesleyan Partnership.
Recently, Estrella and three other Wesleyan students were awarded one of a hundred $10,000 “Projects for Peace,” enabling part of the group to return to Nagarote this summer to continue work.
The Nagarote-Wesleyan Partnership worked with the Jeronimo Lopez Youth Project, an initiative started by The Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project. Located outside of the city center in Barrio Jeronimo Lopez, this after-school program hopes to deter the more than 150 children who participate from joining gangs by giving them other options.
While there, the Nagarote-Wesleyan Partnership handed out marble notebooks to the students they were working with, encouraging them to use the books as their personal journals or as a place for creative thoughts.
“Seeing them produce creative work was very powerful,” said Estrella, explaining that most of their in-school writing consists of transcribing sentences, allowing little room for expressiveness.
In El Salvador, a group of students from the University’s Jewish organization, Havurah, worked with La Coordinadora, a grassroots organization in the Bajo Lempa region of the country, encouraging self-sustainability among the area’s low-income farmers.
Working part-time on an organic farm and helping to build a community center, the group spent much of its time learning about Salvadoran history and grassroots politics.
“A major part of the trip was introspective questioning,” said Elana Baurer ’09, who organized the trip. “What does it mean to be wealthy, white, and American in a poor Salvadoran non-white community?”
Given the United States’ history of involvement in Salvadoran politics and the recent civil war, the group felt it was especially important to maintain a humble approach.
“We were there to be in solidarity with their struggle for self-sufficiency,” said Hannan Braun ’09.
Students who were in New Orleans cite similar sentiment as the guidepost of their work there. Many students traveled to New Orleans on a trip organized by the Wesleyan Christian Fellowship, and a number of small groups of students worked with Common Ground Collective, a hurricane relief organization, while in New Orleans.
Common Ground Collective was started by Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, and is based out of a dilapidated former Catholic school in the Upper Ninth Ward. The slogan of Common Ground is: “Solidarity not Charity.” Although a number of students were there for the first time, there were a few Common Ground veterans who were making their second or even third trips down South since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in late August 2005.
Allison Kadin ’09 returned to New Orleans this spring break after working there in January of this year.
“I felt like I had made real connections with people from the city, and even though many have moved on, I wanted to go back and continue to foster relationships,” Kadin said, who came with a few friends from Wesleyan.
Most students who participated in trips of this kind agreed that the value of the understanding and experience they gained likely exceeded the value of their own contributions.
“It’s so weird when people come up to me and say ‘thank you,’” said Molly Alexander ’09, who was in New Orleans. “I didn’t feel like I was doing something that I needed to be thanked for.”
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