| Alternative breaks, summer study programs planned BY SALLY ACHARYA The air is still crisp and cold, and the campus remains a place of bare trees, heavy jackets, and anxious attention to weather reports. But there’s more in the air than the winds of winter. Plans for alternative breaks and summer programs around the globe are being finalized, so students who make their plans early—and the faculty, staff, and students who create the programs—are already thinking about Italy, Ecuador, Malaysia, and other hot spots on the educational map. This year’s roster of alternative breaks is now finalized. Six are scheduled for spring break, from March 11 to 19, while three others are set for the summer. Most of the trips are new this year, with the initial proposal and planning done largely by students. The trips are designed to have a social and community justice theme and to develop student leadership skills, so proposals are reviewed on that basis, says Shoshanna Sumka, coordinator for global and community-based learning at the Community Service Center, where the programs are now based. This year’s alternative breaks focus heavily on Central America —largely because its proximity makes it feasible for a quick trip during spring break—but also include summer trips to Zambia and Ecuador as well as trips to Appalachia, New York City, and the U.S.-Mexico border. The new destinations include a spring trip to western Virginia to work with low-income African American and Hispanic families in low-income housing. A trip to Belize will focus on issues facing Afro Caribbean cultures, while a trip to Guatemala, inspired by the arrival of Pura Vida on campus, will take a firsthand look at fair trade coffee production along with eco-tourism and microenterprises. Students going to Nicaragua will work with local farmers on an irrigation project or with teachers in local schools, while another first-time trip will take students to the Mexico-U.S. border at Tucson, Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico, to look at illegal immigration issues. Students will also travel, as they have before, to Honduras with university chaplain Joe Eldridge, where they will work with a youth empowerment organization. The trips this summer will focus on indigenous groups in Ecuador, HIV-AIDS work in Zambia, and human rights issues facing the gay and lesbian community in New York City. The students, Sumka said, “do all the planning. They contact local organizations to do volunteer work, do travel and hotel arrangements, and plan all the themes for predeparture orientation sessions.” Most of the planners, in fact, are undergraduates. While the alternative breaks focus on social and community justice and are, by their nature, brief trips, many students also take advantage of the summer break to squeeze in credits overseas. This summer as part of SIS’s series of summer courses abroad, Michelle Egan will teach a course in Rome on European integration. In the United Arab Emirates, a professor at the American University of Sharjah will combine forces with George Berg, language and foreign studies, to teach about the Gulf States in a 6-credit program that will include Arabic language instruction. Students will travel to Northern Ireland to study peace and conflict resolution. They’ll study democracy and development in South Africa. Malaysia will be the site for a 6-credit course on globalization and southeast Asia. And Peter Kuznick will again lead students to Japan to study the historical roots and political dimensions of the nuclear arms race. It may seem like a long time until summer and spring break. But plans are already falling in line. |
