The Merits of Pre-college International Service Trips

One reason I fully support Obama is his Service Plan, which can be found on his website. I specifically like these parts

Expand the Peace Corps: Obama will double the Peace Corps to 16,000 by 2011. He will work with the leaders of other countries to build an international network of overseas volunteers so that Americans work side-by-side with volunteers from other countries.

Show the World the Best Face of America: Obama will set up an America's Voice Initiative to send Americans who are fluent speakers of local languages to expand our public diplomacy.

Expand Service-Learning in Our Nation's Schools: Obama will set a goal that all middle and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year. He will develop national guidelines for service-learning and will give schools better tools both to develop programs and to document student experience. Green Job Corps: Obama will create an energy-focused youth jobs program to provide disadvantaged youth with service opportunities weatherizing buildings and getting practical experience in fast-growing career fields.

More below the fold.

While not included in his plan (as to my knowledge), I personally like the idea of expanding the options high school students have for volunteering internationally. Government funded programs could be similar to the Peace Corps and would help reach the goal of 50 hours of community service a year. There are plenty of developing countries that provide safe environments.

Most current programs that send high school students overseas are either geared around studying or being tourists. There are few options that I know of that are volunteer related.

As someone who just graduated from high school in May and was part of an international trip to Bolivia that was partially service-related, I believe I can speak for the merits of such a program.

I spent three weeks in Bolivia in June of 2007. A teacher/friend organized and led a trip that sent nine Houghton High School students from the middle-of-nowhere Upper Peninsula of Michigan to the middle of South America. The trip was partially service related, but was mainly intended to broaden students’ knowledge of third-world conditions and build ties between two vastly different cultures. I went there with an open mind and a feeling of excitement and returned with genuinely sweet memories from the three greatest weeks of my life.

The main portion of our trip was spent at Rio Colorado, an agricultural school located in the rainforest. There, our group spent a lot of time bonding with the students: eating with them, playing sports, and attending their classes. We also performed a service project, which consisted of constructing brick walls for a new boys’ shower. One of the great benefits of performing such a project was that we were able to further strengthen our friendships with some of the Bolivian students who worked with us. The project foreman was one of the Bolivian students named Juanciño. This is a great example of how Rio Colorado is successfully teaching students to become leaders and work towards a better future. It is really awesome to learn about a country’s problems and to firsthand witness what they are doing to combat them.

Issues that currently plague Bolivia include water pollution and soil erosion. At one point on our trip, we came to a small village located on a river. They used the river for drinking, bathing, and cleaning. Located right next to the river was a "baño publico," or a public bathroom. One look at it and it wasn’t too difficult to imagine where the waste was going. Parasites from contaminated water supplies are a serious problem in Bolivia and other developing countries. Being the experimental, yet silly sap I am, I drank the water there numerous times and walked away from the trip with an intestinal parasite. On the topic of soil erosion, Rio Colorado, being an agricultural school, is working on teaching the students better grazing and cultivation methods.

In early November, I gave a presentation at Michigan Technological University as a part of the D80 Conference. The D80 Conference was established to help showcase and increase attendance in college programs like Engineers Without Borders and Peace Corps. I spoke on the benefits of a high school program and the ways in which engineering students can help change the world through digging wells, introducing better, more practical irrigation methods, and simply getting involved. In the process of changing the world, they would also be changing themselves.

Experiences like the three week Bolivia trip help me better realize that there is a whole different world out there from mine—a world that is facing concerns different from mine, but a world with people like me. These people have similar dreams and emotions and families, and they deserve as rich of a life as I do. It seems like many people focus on themselves and their communities and nations, while forgetting that there are countless other countries in the world. I may only have one sibling by blood, but I feel like I have more than six and a half billion brothers and sisters around the globe. When my brother in Darfur is hurt, I am hurt; when my sister in Bolivia can’t go to school, my future is injured; when my family in Myanmar is oppressed, I am being oppressed alongside them. We are all connected through the collective human spirit. I believe people should work to improve the lives of their brothers and sisters, even if they are separated by borders, large bodies of water, or religious and cultural views. I think John Lennon had it right in his song "Imagine." "No need for greed or hunger \ A brotherhood of man \ Imagine all the people \ Sharing all the world." That is a beautiful image indeed, but it can become more than an image if people truly begin to look past differences in religion, language, and skin color, and instead focus on the big picture—the human race. Until then, the nations of the world will continue to fight, and oppression and poverty will continue to hurt us all.

International pre-college experiences like the one I was involved in are invaluable. First, they are great interactive learning experiences. One learns of a foreign culture, their own culture, economics, language, self, body, and soul, and unlike a class where the majority of the information is forgotten after the exams are completed, the knowledge gained from such a trip as this is forever ingrained in one’s memory. Second, a service aspect to the trip means helping those who are in need. The Bolivians, and other citizens of developing countries, cannot do it all on their own. That doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to do the work, because that is false in a lot of cases. Their problem is a general lack of funds for buying the materials they need. Finally, it is an experience of a lifetime. All clichés put aside, this really was a life-altering trip. I find my ideals, goals, and dreams being altered because of it. Largely because of the trip, I will now be studying International Relations and Political Science at Northwestern University. I want to seek positive solutions to the problems that the world, specifically developing countries, faces. Not only do I care about the billions of brothers and sisters I have around the world, but I want to meet them and laugh with them, just like I did in Bolivia. The world is constantly growing, and I want to help cultivate the garden.

I know I am not the only one who was changed by this trip. All nine students who went were changed in positive ways. I am sure there are thousands of high school students who would jump at such an opportunity if  one was provided to them.

On a slight aside, a book I highly recommend is William Powers’ Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: a Frontline Chronicle from Bolivia’s War on Globalization. The book is a blend of memoir and analysis, which forms a "frontline chronicle" of the economy, environment, culture, and politics of Bolivia. The author, William Powers, left a well-paying desk job in the capital city of Bolivia, La Paz, to take on a new, lower-wage-paying position for an environmental project in the much smaller, less advanced region of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. The project involved setting up a protected environment zone in areas of Bolivia’s rainforest, which was meant to promote "ecotourism" as part of the Kyoto Protocol. The book also heavily deals with the social and political upheavals that took place in the first five years of the 21st century.

Note: This is my first attempt at a diary on DailyKos, so hopefully I followed all of the rules.