Through Ignatian Immersion Program, Santa Clara Students Learn Accompaniment and Solidarity with Local and Global Communities
By Ana Karen Barragán Fernandez & Madi Smith
Last winter, students from Santa Clara University (SCU) had the opportunity to visit the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador (PUCE) as part of an immersion program sponsored by SCU’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education, which focused on accompaniment and intentional communities in Quito, Ecuador. The trip was designed to help foster a relationship between the two institutions and help SCU students learn about the positive social impact that our sister Jesuit university in South America has been making in Ecuador.
The visit was an inspiring experience for the SCU students. Through discussions with PUCE professors, they learned about the university’s initiatives in vulnerable urban regions, as well as the Amazon rainforest, that are striving to advance social justice. These institutional projects entail the active involvement of PUCE faculty and students, who are focusing on academic research and community accompaniment for and with the communities, in alignment with the Universal Apostolic Preferences.
During this visit, a significant goal was to foster within our students a culture of encounter and belonging amongst our global network. We intend to accompany our students as they participate in these international experiences, which will enrich their vocation and engagement with their local communities upon their return. We also seek to inspire our students to commit themselves through the lens of social change and reconciliation to build a more humane, just, and sustainable world.
Madi Smith, a senior at Santa Clara, shared some reflections on her visit to PUCE:
After spending time in the more rural areas outside of Quito, our day in city central was a radically different setting from the neighborhood visits we had been making for most of the week. Exploring the city with its unique landmarks and charms was interesting, but stepping onto PUCE’s campus late in the afternoon was a nice break in the city. This beautiful urban campus is full of students running to and from academic buildings, packed into a campus the size of two city blocks.
We were welcomed into their beautiful library with such excitement and hospitality, where two professors were lined up to share their unique and exciting projects with us.
The first, Venus Medina Maldonado, Ph.D., leader of the Prevention of Gender Violence Research Group, was a nurse before she turned to education in community practice and research in healthcare. She shared with us how Ecuador’s healthcare system collapsed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how the university helped to implement a better testing system that allowed people to get their results much faster than the standard two weeks from the hospital. This anecdote was emblematic of the large role PUCE had in their community. It was clear that this university and its projects were centered on benefitting the communities they were a part of and made that a priority in its education.
In addition, Maldonado shared her research on domestic violence in teenage relationships, which included the development of a questionnaire that determined someone’s likelihood that they would become violent. It was designed to be the start of a prevention program that connected high school students at risk of violence to resources that could help their development at a critical time in their lives. Maldonado’s project was fascinating to us and something we all felt could benefit the communities where we grew up in the United States.
Our next speaker was David Lasso, Ph.D., coordinator of the Yasuni Research Station, who is studying the Waorani and Kichwa indigenous communities in Ecuador’s part of the Amazon Rainforest. He talked about the work of the University to support preserving biodiversity, as well as the ancestral cultures of the area and how this is connected to the Encyclical, Laudato Si’, and the mission of Jesuit universities. We learned a lot about how resource-rich the Amazon is, not just in terms of species, but also cultural practices from the Yasuni people, all of which contribute to Lasso’s and his researchers’ commitment to preserving and sharing its richness.
Throughout our time at PUCE, we learned about what other universities in the broader Jesuit network are working on and how so much of our work is interconnected. Students from our group who were studying Women and Gender Studies, Environmental Science, and Public Health all related these projects to things they had learned and talked about in their classes back home. During that afternoon, there was a clear connection between the two universities in different regions. We all took so much away from the privilege of these researchers coming to speak to us. There were even chats as we left about coming back to study abroad with PUCE. It was simply that exciting!
The Immersions Team from Santa Clara University extends their deepest gratitude to the Internationalization Office at PUCE for their warm hospitality towards our students and staff members during our visit.
Ana Karen Barragán Fernandez serves as the Senior Program Director of Immersions for the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education at Santa Clara University. Madi Smith is a senior majoring in management at Santa Clara.
