Spring Break: students take trips for service and academia
By: Elissa Filozof
During spring break, students from John Carroll traveled to three different countries and two continents on week-long cultural immersion trips. Internationally, groups of roughly 20 students or fewer flew to Berlin, Germany; to the Costa Rican rain forest and to Sicily, Italy. There were also three domestic trips to Immokalee, Fla, to Pine Ridge, S.D., and to Louisville, Ky.
Sophomore Carlee Duggan was part of the group that visited Germany’s capital with professor of political science Andreas Sobisch and history professor Matthew Berg. Like the other students who went on the trip, Duggan is enrolled in a history and political science course on campus whose highlight is the week-long excursion to Berlin.
She said that although the class was probably “one of the hardest” that she has taken at college, it was highly rewarding to travel to the country that they had studied in the classroom. In addition to taking a tour of the Parliament Building, the Reichstag, and seeing other historically important sites, Duggan feels that she learned quite a bit about German society.
“I learned how to not act like a tourist from experience as well as advice from our tour guide. Something that I noticed while walking around the streets in Schoeneberg near our hostel is that not many people smile at you when walking by (unlike students and teachers at John Carroll). This knowledge didn’t happen all at once, it took the entire 10 days to develop.”
Several students attended the trip to Sicily, Italy under Luigi Ferri and Santa Casciani, two professors of Italian language at the University. Ferri, a native of Italy himself, explained that the trip was designed to expose students to the culture, particularly the film and literature, of the large Mediterranean island. “We went mainly to Sicily to visit places that were connected with what we taught in class,” he says. “Every single visit to museums, churches, sites of interest were like class time.” One of these “sites of interest” was the grave of Luigi Pirandello, a Sicilian playwright best known for his play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” which was produced by the John Carroll Theater Department in the fall of last year.
The trip to Costa Rica was led by Ralph Saporito, a professor in the Biology department whose area of expertise lies in tropical ecology and amphibian biology. Each year, Saporito takes a group of Biology students to set up field experiments to study predator-prey interactions among amphibian species native to the rain forest. This spring break, students placed decoy female red (or strawberry) poison dart frogs outdoors and observed the male frogs’ reactions.
The domestic trips, on the other hand, focus specifically on issues of social justice, or “injustice,” as Andy Costigan, assistant director of campus ministry, explains. The students are exposed to difficult topics leading up to and during their immersions; the Louisville group, for example, spent the week working with refugees from countries in crisis like the Congo and Somalia, and the students who went to South Dakota visited a Native American reservation in Pine Ridge.
“I’m hoping that students grow personally, that they connect with their group and have that experience of community, but most especially, that they’re engaging with the issues of social justice through the lens of the people that they meet, that is the value of this. We can do some of the critical analysis of these issues on campus, but not in the same way as when you go out and actually meet people and experience life through their eyes.”
Students met a few times in the fall semester, and on a weekly basis during the spring semester up until they departed for their spring break destinations. These sessions helped to prepare them for what they experienced on their trips.
Mary Beth Waters was one of the 12 students that headed south to the migrant farm workers’ town of Immokalee, Fla., to which John Carroll University has been sending students for over a decade.
“As a senior, I wanted to go on a John Carroll immersion trip because I had never been on one before, and I really enjoy learning about people and doing service,” she says.
Waters continued, “It was sort of an impulsive decision, and my friend pushed me to apply last minute. I could only choose from the spring break options. I didn’t know much about Immokalee before applying, but it was my favorite of the three choices for spring break. Through our meetings prior to going to Immokalee, I learned a lot about the rights of migrant workers who pick the produce that we eat. This made it personal because I eat fresh produce almost every day, but before applying for this immersion I rarely thought about where it comes from, who picks it, and how they are treated.”
While in Florida, the students visited the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of the thousands of migrant farm workers, many of whom live in migrant labor camps and have suffered a history of exploitation at the hands of employers.
The CIW, which has attracted national attention to the issue of migrant workers’ rights in America, additionally educates these workers on proper documentation, the fair pay they should expect and the dangers of pesticides they will encounter while on the farms. According to Waters, most of the organization’s employees are former migrant workers themselves.
“We also visited Lipman’s Packing Plant, one of the plants where tomatoes from Lipman Farms are packaged and observed the working conditions,” she says. “Some of us visited Guadalupe Social Services which allowed us to sit in on cases of people, mostly women with young children whose husbands work in the field, seeking legal advice, financial aid, or food. Others spent time in classrooms at iTech, a technical school that offers English language classes. We also all spent time at the Boys and Girls Club and the Immokalee Soccer School, both organizations that provide academic help to children in the community. Our group became very close.”
