April 1, 2008
Students say alternative breaks are life-changing experiences
One group scraped mold off the walls of houses where the flood line was still visible in the rafters more than two years after Katrina. Another group spent the night in the cold of Washington, D.C.’s streets or stayed warm on buses in a quest to understand homelessness.
It wasn’t exactly spring break on the beach.
The scores of students who participated in AU’s Alternative Breaks this spring learned about homelessness in Washington, D.C., the slow recovery of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the challenges of Native American life on a reservation along the U.S.-Mexico border. They traveled to Brazil to learn about the Afro-Brazilian community, and to Mexico to meet with gay rights leaders.
Students on a spring trip to New Orleans, below, took a break from working on flood-damaged homes to watch a community parade with 47 floats carrying riders tossing cabbages along with beads, flowers, and other vegetables. (Photos by Hannah Hanson)
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Now, although spring break is over, many hope to translate what they learned into ongoing community service and activism.
One group of students traveled to New Orleans’s Saint Bernard Parish, located directly below the flooded ninth ward, close to the Gulf of Mexico. The group of 19 who came to help rehabilitate the houses worked in an area where only a third of the population has returned, and big-box stores still sit empty over two years after the disaster.
Yet they were struck by the vitality and sense of community, and the appreciation that residents had for the young people who are coming in large numbers to help. “I think our whole generation is being looked at differently by people there, because we’re the ones who are there,” said student group leader Hannah Hanson.
She was particularly moved by a meeting with a Vietnamese priest who serves the huge immigrant community, which is rebuilding in strength. “He said, ‘Through devastation comes graces,’” she said. “That was the real take-home message for our group.”
As the New Orleans group put on gas masks to disinfect mold-ridden homes, put on new siding, and met with community leaders, their counterparts in Washington, D.C., were spending two nights in an “urban plunge” organized by the Community for Creative Nonviolence, which runs a 1,350-bed shelter and provides meals, medical care, and training for Washington’s homeless.
The experiential program, which has been operated for many years, involves 48 hours of guided living on the streets, followed by meetings with community organizers.
“It was a really, really intense night,” said student leader Rae Borsetti. One night, her group stayed in Union Station until closing time, when the security guard threw them out, like other transients, although she thinks he’d been alerted to the fact that they were really students.
In the end, she took her guide’s advice and chose not to sleep on the streets herself. “My guide told me if we were stable homeless [women], we wouldn’t feel safe on the street, just on buses.” So she rode the buses around Washington all night, catching cat naps.
It was a deeply affecting experience. “Our group was so amazing; I don’t think we could have had a more awesome group of people. They were really catalyzed into action,” Borsetti said. They now plan to serve meals at the homeless shelter once a week.
Emily Willard led a group to Mexico City to look at the gay, lesbian, and transgendered experience south of the border. “Everyone was really impressed by all the people we got to meet with, fantastic activists,” she said. “We all agreed it was a life-changing experience.
We’ve all been running to each other and crying and saying how amazing it was,” she said.
Another group was directly on the border, on the Tohono O’odham reservation in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. The tribe is often called the Papago, though they have rejected the name, which had been given to them by conquistadors.
Its border location has brought many challenges to the reservation, particularly a growth in crime linked to frequent border crossings by illegal workers and drug smugglers. While this has decreased in recent years with the addition of a border patrol, it remains a major issue on the reservation. The students talked about this issue and others with tribal leaders, and got to know more about the culture, as well, during a dinner at the home of a former participant in AU’s Washington Internships for Native Students (WINS) program.
Amy Gastinger, who led the trip, became passionate about Native American issues during an alternative break trip last year to the Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. “It completely changed how I think about a lot of things,” she said. “It was such a great experience; I wanted others to get involved.”
