A summer of service

By Molly McGonigle

India, South Africa, Boston, Tanzania, Mexico and Cupertino. These were just some of the locations where the participants in the Jean Donovan Summer Fellowship and the Hackworth Grant for Student Research and Applied Ethics spent their summer volunteering and researching.

The Donovan Fellowship was created in 2000 because students had expressed a desire to really experience social justice firsthand, said Valerie Sarma, associate director of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education.

It was named for Jean Donovan, a lay missionary who worked with the poor and oppressed during El Salvador's civil war.

The Hackworth grants are given for research connected with classes at Santa Clara. Michael Hackworth and his wife Joan provided the endowment for the grant in 2002 because of their interest in business ethics.

Three of the students share their stories from India and El Salvador.

Francesca McKenzie, a Donovan fellow, worked in India as a teacher at Shanti Bhavan. This school, which means "Haven of Peace," caters to Indian children of the untouchable caste.

Shanti Bhavan, which is privately funded by the George Foundation, works to provide an education to children who otherwise may never have attended school.

McKenzie became interested in teaching through her involvement in theater. "As a theatre art student I am really interested in theatre education, but also very interested in equal access to education."

She said she chose India because the difficult financial situation makes volunteers "incredibly important" in schools like Shanti Bhavan.

McKenzie, who spent about two months at the school, said, "I just really fell in love with the kids.

She added, "The teachers there are really inspiring because they can be there everyday."

Her responsibilities included teaching fifth grade English and high school environmental studies. She was with the students all day, whether they were at school in assembly, the cafeteria or hanging out in the dorms watching movies.

The experience was not entirely easy. McKenzie said serving as a teacher at Shanti Bhavan was also a challenge. While she loved the children, her reality was very different from the reality that the children lived.

"I felt like my actions were making a better world," she said. "I was learning as much as I was teaching."

Two other Santa Clara students, Beth Tellman and Allie Dunne, Hackworth fellows, traveled to El Salvador to study coffee farming. For two months, Tellman and Dunne conducted research at two coffee farms while studying the livelihood of coffee farmers.

Tellman -- who is the co-founder of Santa Clara's Fair Trade Coalition -- chose El Salvador because she wanted to understand the effects of fair trade coffee on those who grow it.

Dunne said she had similar motivations, but also held a strong interest in the way people's livelihoods are affected by the success or failure of the coffee sold.

Through their research, Tellman and Dunne met many farmers and others involved in coffee production in El Salvador.

"The day would consist of us visiting and interviewing various people involved in the coffee community, seeing where the coffee is actually made," said Dunne. "We were always reading up on the subject and interviewing people."

The two farms that they worked on were very different, they said.

"The first one is a nationally-marketed coffee, which means that it's not exported. So the farmers cannot get the correct value for their coffee," Tellman said.

"But the second one exported coffee, which allowed them to make a huge profit off their coffee because people from El Salvador would not pay anything extra for coffee."

Tellman and Dunne said the hardest part of their research was their work with the two farms.

"We got the second cooperative farm to seriously consider joining with the first farm to export together, with the possibility that they might make a better profit," Tellman said. "If that happened, people's lives would be totally different and our entire experience would be worth it."

Contact Molly McGonigle at (408) 551-1918 or mmgonigle@scu.edu.