Immerse yourself in a spring of service

By Nate Seltenrich

While it may be a tradition for college students to party away their scholastic worries during Spring Break, some Santa Clara students have decided to use their upcoming breaks to learn about and serve others.

Almost 100 students will be participating this year in the seven Spring Break Immersion Trips being sponsored by the Arrupe Center and other on-campus organizations including Campus Ministry and Santa Clara Community Action Program.

Although many of the trips were originally started by SCCAP, they have all recently been gathered under the Arrupe Center umbrella. This means that the programs are well-supported, well-funded, and institutionalized in their operations. There is now one application form and common due dates for all trips.

This change was facilitated by the acquisition of a five-year Lilly Endowment Grant in 2002. The grant funds Santa Clara's DISCOVER program, which is aimed toward vocational development and community involvement for students, faculty, and staff.

The immersion programs have also recently been expanded to include graduate students and resident ministers rather than strictly undergraduate students. However, due to the exclusion of the popular El Salvador trip as a result of an increased focus on domestic issues, the number of applications for the trips dropped considerably this year.

The seven destinations for this year's immersion trips are: Tijuana, Mex., Oakland, Calif., Central Valley of Calif., Immokalee, Flor., Nogales, Mex. and a Navajo Reservation in Tuba City, Ariz.

Michael Colyer, Program Manager for Faith and Justice Administration in the Arrupe Center, works with the seven student leaders in organizing, planning and supervising each of the trips. His work with the leaders involves selecting the destinations, making logistical arrangements and facilitating the reflection sessions.

"The goal is to empower our students to see the world with new eyes," said Colyer. This is accomplished through "direct contact with people who are marginalized, " he said.

The most important objective for the trips is education, the second building relationships, and the third service, as every immersion trip also has a service component.

Lulu Santana, a Campus Minister at Santa Clara, is helping to organize the trip to East L.A. for the 7th year in a row, although Santa Clara students have been visiting there for at least 12 years.

Santana and the seven attending students will visit the Dolores Mission, a Jesuit church located in the middle of a number of housing projects in East L.A. Students stay with families in the neighborhood and learn about programs offered by the church.

Junior Jocelyn Stauffer is the student leader for the Oakland trip. This is the first year that Oakland will be a destination for a Santa Clara immersion trip, and there are a total of eight students who will be going. These students' local destinations will include a Catholic elementary school, a drop-in center for homeless people, an adult education center and various non-profit organizations. Their activities will be geared toward addressing issues of poverty and violence in Oakland. The students will be staying with local families and also at a local church, and will be connecting with a total of five Catholic parishes there. Stauffer chose to serve as the leader for the Oakland trip because of her interest in political science and local issues.

"We sometimes forget that there are impoverished areas nearby," she said.

Kevin Edwards is leading another first-time trip, to a Navajo Indian Reservation in Tuba City, Ariz. This particular destination was chosen because it allows students to work with an important demographic that would otherwise have gone unrepresented in the program: Native Americans. The 11 students on the trip will be living on the reservation, which, with 17,000 residents, is the largest in the country. They will be tutoring elementary school students and participating in cultural events.

"The first year is always experimental," Edwards said. "But we try and educate ourselves before we go...Initially it's a risk, but everyone ends up having a blast."

Last year, Edwards participated in a Spring Break Immersion Trip in Tijuana. This year there are 28 people going on the Tijuana trip, which has been an immersion destination for Santa Clara students for over six years.

û Contact Nate Seltenrich at (408) 554-4546 or nseltenrich@scu.edu.