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Students offer their services during spring break
By Adam Petty
Features Editor
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The sunset in New Mexico. Take that, Grand Rapids.
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For many students, spring break means one thing: Florida. Heading south to where it’s warm is a pilgrimage that they undertake with as much fervor as peasants traveling to cathedrals did in the Middle Ages, although the intentions of today’s pilgrims may not be as pious of those of old.
However, some students took the opportunity this past spring break to take trips with a different slant to them. The Service-Learning Center here at Calvin offered three different service project trips this past spring break. Students went to Kansas City, Missouri, Rehoboth, New Mexico and Knoxville, Tennessee, respectively.
Approximately fifty students total went on these three trips. Each group had at least two student leaders, an advisor and then the rest of the students. Senior Mike Fennema was one of the student leaders of the Kansas City group.
“We got connected with Habitat for Humanity in Kansas City,” said Fennema. “The work that we did for them involved helping build houses, as well as some landscaping work. But what turned out to be the most significant work, in my opinion, was what we did with a shelter for women and children.”
When his group was looking for accommodations for their time in Kansas City, Habitat for Humanity suggested they check with the Forest Avenue Baptist Church in the area. The S-LC got in contact with them, and they allowed the Calvin students to stay at the church.
Forest Avenue Baptist also ran a ministry designed to help women and children in the area, and it was here that the Calvin group spent some of their time.
“People stay at the shelter between dinner and breakfast, and we ate dinner with them each night,” said Fennema. “One night we did a chapel service for the women there. We did a foot-washing ceremony as part of the service. We washed the feet of a few of the women, and then some of them came back up and washed our feet. We were served as much as we served ourselves.”
Fennema said that this sense of servanthood was present throughout the entire trip.
“It was good to do an amazing thing for others, but I think we experienced grea
ter growth ourselves,” he said. “The people on the trip grew as a group, and it was by the grace of God that everyone came together so well.”
Another destination was Knoxville, where twelve women went to the Florence Crittenden Agency. This is an agency that seeks to help young women in crisis situations, such as abusive families and unexpected pregnancies. Senior Cheryl Van Andel was one of the student leaders for this group.
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Mitch Macheila and new friend.
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“Part of the work that we did had to do with maintenance—yard work, weeding, things like that,” she said. “We also ate meals with the girls, and had opportunities to develop relationships with them. Some of them had never met a college student before.”
Van Andel actually got the chance to get to know one student in particular.
“There was one sixteen year-old girl who was pregnant,” she said. “She was very gothic, had a tough shell. She hadn’t been there long, and she was still angry about being there. But as I talked to her, I came to see that she was a little girl herself, about to have a baby of her own. She really opened up when I talked to her. She thought about going to college to study choreography, but she didn’t think she’d be able to do it because of her baby. Now she thinks her dreams might not be shattered, but delayed. She’s definitely someone that I’ll keep praying for.”
She also said that she faced some personal challenges of her own.
“I was scared that I wouldn’t know what to say,” she said. “I didn’t think I was that good at relating to teenage girls. I would get scared that I wouldn’t have the right things to say. But I found that what the girls really needed was someone to listen to them. So I would listen to their stories, and I would tell them mine.”
They also got the chance to get to know the women there in a more social setting.
“We set up an ice cream social for the girls,” she said. “The girls were pretty high energy and active, so quiet activities wouldn’t have worked. We played volleyball with them and also went contra dancing. It’s a cross between folk and country dancing.”
Van Andel would recommend the trip to anyone considering going on it in the future.
“The people were very loving all throughout the trip,” she said. “It was a beautiful place, and getting to know the girls was a very rewarding experience.”
The final trip sponsored by the S-LC was a trip to Rehoboth, New Mexico. This was the trip that drew the most students, numbering twenty-six. Junior Cicely Wiers was one of the student leaders.
Maintenance and renovation were also on this group’s itinerary. This was a service project, after all.
“There were three different sites that we went to,” said Wiers. “”There was the Rehoboth Christian High School campus, a low-income housing project, and a center for recovering alcoholics.”
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“When we were building a back porch, we ended up making it out of old tires, pop cans and mud,” said freshman Rebekah Sage. “The Navajo people that we spent time with were very resourceful.”
Much of their trip involved spending time with people from both the Navajo and Zuni tribes native to the area. One day, they had the chance to go hiking in the mountains with a Navajo woman.
“Her name was Eunice,” said junior Mitch Michaela. “Every few feet she would point at a rock or a plant and tell a story about what they would use it for. It gave me a sense of the love for the land that these people have.”
A reason why the group’s services were needed is that the Rehoboth area is actually quite poor. People in the group were often struck by this.
“We could drive for two hours and the only houses we would see were shacks made out of trash on the side of the road,” said freshman Laura Kladder. “When we would see trailer homes, they would look like really great houses compared to the other homes we would see.”
“I got a better sense of how big the world is,” said Sage. “I also came to see that poverty isn’t hard to find, and that some of what we saw in New Mexico can be found in Grand Rapids as well.”
During their time there, they often met together to reflect on their circumstances.
“We met and discussed how to apply what we were seeing to our everyday lives,” said sophomore Matt Pasma. “The quote that was our theme for the week was from St. Francis of Assisi, ‘Preach the gospel at all times and when necessary use words.’”
Whenever his friends have asked him if he would recommend the trip, Pasma has a quick answer: “Go. It was fantastic, and also very meaningful. Our group got along very well, and our faith really was deepened through this. I felt like I had a flame re-ignited. It was better than Florida.”
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