During the Olympic break, the U welcomed the world?a select group of U students let the world welcome them.
A group of 19 U students and faculty traveled to Grenada, Nicaragua, for the U’s first-ever international Alternative Spring Break. It lasted from Feb. 9 to 24.
The students took Spanish classes for part of the time, but for the majority of their time the students focused on volunteer projects.
“It’s a unique situation because the students will receive service learning Spanish credit, which is something you can’t get in a classroom,” said Aaron Rose, director of the trip.
Some of the students volunteered in a school for mentally handicapped students ranging in age from 3 to 30, some volunteered at a medical clinic and others volunteered at a school.
At the school for the mentally handicapped, students taught English and math and also did arts and crafts projects.
“There were all sorts of people with different disabilities. Some people had Down syndrome, others were deaf and mute,” Rose said. “There isn’t a specialty school for these people to learn skills at, and the school is really underfunded.”
Students who worked at the medical clinic helped with immunizations and basic health care.
“A doctor volunteers five or six hours of his time every day to help with stuff like stitches, birth control pills and pre-natal care,” said Mike McKenzie, project site leader.
At the school, students ranged in age from 4 to 17 in a single classroom setting. A retired teacher set up the school, and volunteers make up the staff.
“We would work in small groups, which were more intimate,” said trip participant Andrew Gillman. “We would teach them for about an hour and then go play in an abandoned lot for another hour and a half.”
Because the trip focused on personal contact, Gillman feels that playing with the kids was a large part of the experience.
“The schoolyard was just as opportune for the kids as the language diagrams we made for them,” he said.
A hard part of the trip was dealing with the poverty of Nicaragua.
“The schoolyard had old machinery, broken glass, barbed wire and a 25-foot deep hole,” Gillman said. “But it didn’t matter to these kids, they loved it.”
Throughout the trip, the city went without water for the majority of the day and then experienced power failure at night, Rose said. But the poverty didn’t affect the attitude of the participants.
“People are people wherever you go,” McKenzie said. “Their culture and people aren’t any better or worse than our culture and people?just different.”
Rose was proud of his students’ ability to adapt to the country.
“We had students who had very little experience with Spanish, and this was the first international experience for a few of them,” he said. “The group did really well, they were really optimistic. They weren’t just tourists either, they really got involved and made it very personal.”
Having the Olympics on television was an extra bonus for the participants.
“It was really cool because we were able to take Salt Lake City with us,” Gillman said. “We were able to show them the city we live in, which was really cool.”