Students look forward to service on alternative spring break

Some students at the University of Richmond are spending their spring break doing service work, discussing and learning about a social issue and bonding with their peers during an alternative spring break trip.

Senior Chelsea Safran and junior Helene Calabrese will be returning to the highlands of Pampas Grande, Peru, on an alternative spring break trip for the second and third time, respectively.

The trip to Peru focuses on health issues in the village of Pampas Grande and is led by Sean McKenna, a professor and pediatrician at the Medical College of Virginia.

Safran said the group of about 15 students was preparing for the trip by deciding which medical supplies to bring and dividing into committees focused on specific health concerns, such as women's health. The committees will work together once students arrive in Pampas Grande, she said.

Safran said that on one trip, when she was part of the women's health committee, she remembered sitting with a 45-year-old woman who had been worried that she was pregnant for the sixth time.

"It was the most nerve-wracking thing ever," Safran said.

When the test came out negative the whole group celebrated, she said.

Safran said some of the main health issues the villagers dealt with were sunburn from high altitudes, joint pain from walking so much and poor nutrition from a lack of fruit and vegetables.

Calabrese said the students' main objective had been talking to the villagers about their health concerns.

"They really respect the fact that we're coming up there to see them and be a part of their culture," she said.

When the students arrive in Pampas Grande, the villagers always have a special ceremony, Calabrese said. The ceremony begins in the middle of the town square at a tree that has small gifts hanging on its branches, she said.

"You have to go around and hit the tree with an ax," she said laughing, "and try to knock it down so that the kids can get the little presents."

Safran said: "Just seeing how much we can do, it's more worth it than sitting on a beach. You can do that any day."

Safran and Calabrese aren't the only students who have gone on the same alternative spring break trip more than once.

Senior Bridget Wiede is going for the fourth time on an annual trip to New Orleans through the student-run service group Students Engaging and Enacting a Dialogue on Service (SEEDS).

"I think sometimes there's a stigmatization of alternative spring break," she said, "that you're sacrificing the week, giving up your time, but I think the benefit is so large, and none of us deny that."

In New Orleans, SEEDS will do a variety of projects including re-building efforts with the Houma Nation, a Native American tribe who has been affected by Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, and an urban gardening project hoped to stimulate the local agriculture and economy by creating farms in the city, Wiede said.

Sophomore Miki Doan, who went on the New Orleans trip last year, said that one of the main reasons she had enjoyed the trip was that she had interacted with people whose communities differed from her own.

"Last year we went to the Houma tribe and talked with the former chief of the tribe," she said. "We didn't plan on that dialogue at all. And she told us all these personal stories about her tribe and about her family. We asked what we could do to help the tribe and she just said, 'Pass on the stories.'"

This year Doan is going on SEEDS' new trip to McDowell County, W. Va. Doan said she didn't know much about the trip yet, since it was new, but that the central theme and discussion would be mountain top removal.

Wiede said that she thought SEEDS's service work in McDowell County would focus more on the poverty in the area, but that there was also talk of a tree planting initiative.

"A lot of times we're not trying to go into a situation under the assumption that we have the knowledge to fix the situation," Wiede said. "It's more that we want to learn from the people in the community and get involved in the issue about what we can be doing."

Although Wiede said volunteer work and learning outside the classroom were two important components of alternative spring break, she said that the strong bonds she had formed through many SEEDS trips were part of the reason she had gone on them each year.

Wiede said one year the group had been eating dinner at a church, when someone decided to give an impromptu, funny speech at the pulpit.

"Then we continued to popcorn people so that eventually everyone gave a speech," she said. "And while they started out really funny, by the end they became really personal and really moving. And it was just a wonderful opportunity to see how the trip had actually affected everyone."

Safran said her other friends had tried to convince her to go to the beach this year, but that the friendships she had formed through the Pampas Grande trip made her want to go again.

"Our group is such a little, close-knit community," Safran said. "It's sort of like, once you become part of it, you don't want to leave it."

Doan said: "I feel like you can do a lot with seven days or you can just lie there and relax and go to the beach. But in seven days, I came back learning so much, that I feel like after I graduate and move on with my post-graduate life, it's one of the times that I will always recall."

Contact staff writer Avery Shackelford at avery.shackelford@richmond.edu