Up at 5:30 a.m. and at breakfast by 6:00 a.m., a few crew members leave the table early to collect their tools: scrapers, sanders, hammers, crowbars, studded gloves and dusk masks. Ready to tear up flooring, rip down insulation and sheetrock, remove window frames and knock down ceilings, Georgetown’s Hurricane Emergency Relief Effort team is ready for spring break, as narrated by trip leader Clint Morrison (COL `09).
This Hurricane Relief group was one of Georgetown’s eight service groups, including Border Awareness Experience, Native American Experience, Spring Break in Appalachia and Habitat for Humanity, that spent last week on a community service-focused alternative spring break trips.
Coordinated by Georgetown’s Center for Social Justice, these trips expose students and faculty to communities struggling to overcome the effects of environmental disasters, poverty, violence and social injustice.
Morrison spent the break in Gulfport, Miss., one of the many small gulf-coast towns neglected in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“Even after 18 months, almost everyone we visited was living in a FEMA trailer,” Morrison said. On their first day in town, Georgetown volunteers worked together on one house, where Morrison was shocked to hear the owner say that this was the first time anyone came to help him with his house.
“You can see it as a testament to Georgetown or an indictment of our government. I tend to see it as a little bit of both,” Morrison said.
According to Ray Shiu, CSJ’s program director of student leadership and special programs, all alternative spring break trips devote an equal amount of time and energy to interaction with community members and to self-and group reflection.
“It’s not that you are on a poverty tour,” he said. “We try to have the students work in solidarity with the community members.”
The trip’s human component made an impression on Morrison.
“If you just focus on work, you are an unpaid contractor. If you focus on the homes you are trying to rebuild and not just the houses, then are you a volunteer,” he said.
Six more Georgetown students traveled to Wheeling, W.Va. to volunteer with students from St. Joseph’s University and Boston College. Maureen Stickel (SFS ’09), who led the Georgetown team, cleaned and hung dry wall in a house inherited by two sisters whose sick parents had recently passed away.
“For the last 15 years nothing that entered the house ever left it,” Stickel said. “I couldn’t walk through any of the rooms at first. The living room was totally abandoned because of a large hole in the ceiling. There were lots of stray cats and dogs living in it. We wore face masks because of all the animal excrement.” By the end of the cleaning, the team had filled four dumpsters with trash and excess belongings.
Students on the Border Awareness trip spent their nights in Anapra, a rural segment of Juarez, and their days at the Annunciation House, a shelter for undocumented Mexican immigrants in El Paso, Tex.
“It was really hard,“ Sara Wallace-Keeshen (SFS `08) said. “A lot of people said ‘we want to go with you back to D.C. and cook for you.’ It emphasized the disconnect between us. We could just get on a plane and go home while a lot of people were stuck in the Annunciation House with a very uncertain future. ‘I will cook for you.’ How do you respond to that?”
In addition to talking with undocumented immigrants, the Georgetown students also met with officers from the Border Patrol and Drug Enforcement Agencies and immigration lawyers, and visited a health clinic for abused immigrant women.
Jessika Angulo (COL ’09) felt a sense of solidarity with the community of undocumented immigrants.
“I had to adjust to a new kind of lifestyle and it made me very aware of how much waste I create here at Georgetown,” she said.
