| Spring break service and learning trips stay closer to home by matt getty Alan Boswell didn’t need to travel far to take on an international epidemic during his recent spring break. The AU sophomore just headed down to the Anacostia Metro Station. Boswell was one of ten students and one staff member who took part in AU’s first local Alternative Break Trip, “Washington, D.C.: HIV/AIDS Policy, Education, and Public Health.” Partnering with local organizations, participants promoted HIV-prevention centers outside of Metro stations, crafted healthcare brochures for HIV-infected women, and learned that Washington’s HIV problem is nearly as dire as the third world’s. “D.C. has an HIV infection rate of 1 in 20,” said Christy Nichols, who accompanied the students on the trip as a staff sponsor. “That’s just as bad as in sub-Saharan Africa.” Last year, that eye-popping statistic inspired senior Sereena Hamm to begin organizing the trip after reading an article about the city’s HIV crisis in the Washington Post. She’d just returned from an Alternative Winter Break trip to Thailand a few months earlier and thought perhaps it was time to focus her efforts a bit closer to home. “We’re such an internationally focused school, and there’s wonderful merit in that, but we’re also part of a local community,” said Hamm. “There are just as many glaring problems here as anywhere else in the world.” To study and tackle some of those glaring problems, the participants met with such organizations as the D.C. Department of Health and volunteered for local grassroots nonprofits D.C. Fights Back and the Women’s Collective. Boswell and five others helped D.C. Fights Back promote safe-sex by handing out postcards about the group’s free-condom program outside of four Green Line Metro stations. “Before I started the trip I would have been very uncomfortable talking about condoms to strangers outside of the Metro,” said Boswell. “But once you see what the issue’s like on the ground, it doesn’t matter how controversial it might be . . . You realize you need to do whatever harm reduction you can.” Hamm and the rest of the participants created a PowerPoint mission statement and brochure on AIDS-related skin diseases for the Women’s Collective, a nonprofit organization staffed by HIV-positive women who provide health, information, and job services to other HIV-positive women. “We couldn’t do direct patient service here like you can do in Africa, because we have so many more regulations,” Hamm explained, “but it was good just to support organizations that were doing such great work.” Like Hamm and Boswell, many of this year’s Alternative Spring Break planners found that they didn’t need to travel around the world to make a world of difference. Though the program traditionally focuses on international service learning, five of the six student-planned trips took on such issues as poverty, community renewal, and prison justice without leaving the country. “We wanted to encourage more domestic trips this year because it’s more affordable for students and also there’s a lot of important issues that need to be addressed right here in the U.S.,” said the Alternative Break coordinator, Shoshanna Sumka. “But in the end, it was the students who came up with the trips. As always, these were all student organized from start to finish.” In addition to taking on the local HIV problem, Alternative Spring Break participants helped Hurricane Katrina victims in Biloxi revitalize their communities, probed prison conditions in San Francisco, volunteered on an Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and worked in after-school programs in Chicago. Students in the Kogod School of Business also visited Chicago during spring break through the Roads Scholars corporate study tour. The program gave 13 business students the opportunity to meet with employees from Soldier Field, McDonald’s international headquarters, the Chicago Tribune, the U.S. Soccer Federation, and the Board of Trade. At each company students got career advice and toured facilities to learn the inner workings of corporate America. McDonald’s, for instance, gave them an inside look at its corporate training program, Hamburger University, and the McDonald’s Innovation Center where it tests out new product ideas. “The goal is to expand students’ views of business environments,” said Allison Holcomb, Kogod’s director of programming and student activities. “We take them to a variety of companies with different corporate cultures and different purposes and help them try and figure out what they want to do someday.” |
