Digging for change

The house’s paint was peeling. Its floors were sagging from years of neglect.

But Luke… The house’s paint was peeling. Its floors were sagging from years of neglect.

But Luke McDonald and the rest of his group would spend the rest of their spring break putting up drywall, replacing ceiling tiles and installing support beams. He thought he knew what he was getting into.

McDonald knew as well as anyone the stereotypes about West Virginians. He wasn’t particularly surprised to see houses that seemed to be part-motor-home and part-hut increase steadily as his spring break group traveled deep into the mountains of Pipestem, W.Va.

He wasn’t surprised when he saw that some of these houses didn’t have underground sewage systems or when he learned that the closest grocery store was 20 minutes away.

But as his group worked to fix the house, a deeper and more subtle kind of repair began to take place.

As the homeowner stood in the living room, her young child clinging to her leg, she surveyed their work appreciatively and thanked the group for all they had done.

“That five-second period of her saying that – that made it all worthwhile to me,” McDonald said. “There’s a well known stereotype of West Virginia, and I completely disagree with that after I went down there.”

For this reason, McDonald is now the business manager for Pitt’s Alternative Break Student Organization and decided to travel to the same site this year to continue helping that community.

According to Break Away, the company that connects the organization to communities that need service, about 35,000 students nationwide participated in an alternative spring break last year. This year, 71 students will be traveling through Pitt’s Alternative Break Student Organization to different places across the country.

The organization engages students in community service projects that help them to better understand and discuss social issues.

But, to the students who choose an alternative break, the experience is difficult to sum up with words. Many participants are drawn to this kind of spring break because they want to put themselves outside of their comfort level.

Brittany Martin, a Pitt senior and vice president of the Alternative Break Student Organization, is a self-described “indoor girl.” As a freshman, she spent 33 hours on a Greyhound bus to get to Florida for spring break.

After baking in the sun for a week without the chance to socialize outside her circle of close friends, Martin boarded the bus with nothing to show from her trip besides a serious sunburn.

“I couldn’t wait to go home,” she said. “Oh, I went to Florida. That’s kind of the end of it.” This dissatisfaction was partially responsible for sparking her interest in an alternative break. Now, as a two-year veteran of the program, she has traveled to Puerto Moelos, Mexico and Gila National Forest, N.M.

During last year’s trip to Gila, her group spent their time building trails camping in tents. Since they couldn’t take showers, Martin can attest that the experience brings out the rugged side of even the most polished people.

“These are probably girls like me, who want to be someone different for a week and do something good,” she said of her team of nine girls, who will be traveling to a Habitat for Humanity site in Lynchburg, Va., over spring break.

“I’ve never done construction. I’m a little worried about the hammer-wielding thing,” she laughed.

Stephanie Paylor, president of Pitt’s Habitat for Humanity chapter, said Martin shouldn’t have anything to worry about. Her chapter will be traveling to Dade County, Fla., for a service trip of their own over break, and Paylor assures that the program can make builders out of just about anyone.

“Habitat is very skilled with working with unskilled workers,” she said. Their spring break trip tends to be very popular, she said, and this year they will be taking a group of 20 students down to the site.

With an inexperienced team of this size, Paylor said the group can expect to build an entire one-story house from the foundation up.

The houses are initially sponsored, but all the labor is free. Recipients of the houses pay an interest-free mortgage, typically a 30-to-45-year mortgage. On their trip to Albany, Ga., last year, they rehabbed an entire home and got to see the owner’s gratitude firsthand.

“They came over, and they just had tears in their eyes. They were so amazed to have these kids come and build a house for someone they had never met,” she said.

Alternative breaks use this selfless approach as the backbone of their programs. Alternative Break Coordinator Cathleen Connor-Weiss said they tend to attract students who are primarily service-oriented. The organization weeds out students who don’t mesh with the organization’s strict no-alcohol policy.

This is generally not a problem, she explained, because applicants attend a series of training activities before the trip that allow them to bond. They are also headed by an experienced team leader who has usually been on prior alternative break trips.

“Our students are usually really good students who want to help others,” she said, explaining that aside from an on-site coordinator, participants are left to manage, delegate and execute their own plans.

Terrence Milani, the director of Pitt’s Student Volunteer Outreach, said that the Alternative Break program has been active at the University since 1996. Although enrollment has been stable over the years, Milani has worked closely with Connor-Weiss to tweak the program and make necessary improvements.

“We try to get the best of the best available,” he said, in reference to their selection of trips. He added that the selection could be better if more students enrolled in the program.

This year, the organization offered seven different destinations, all of which are inside the country. The prices range from $100 to $400, and include all expenses except for airfare, if applicable to the site.

Sophomore Elana Woolf was attracted to the Cumberland Trail site in LaFollette, Tenn., because of her prior interest in the outdoors and the trip’s reasonable price. At $100, the Cumberland Trail is the cheapest alternative break site.

Woolf hopes to be able to connect with like-minded people on her first alternative break trip.

“I know what spring break is. I’ve seen it on television, and that’s fine,” she said, in reference to trips that are centered largely on drinking and partying.

“Here we’re going to be doing physical activity, and it has a purpose.”

Her only concern, along with her mother’s, is the eight-hour van ride down to the site. But, she said that her decision to go through with the trip was an important step.

“It was actually, honestly, kind of a ‘growing up’ moment,” she said. She said that she hopes to learn a lot from the older people on the trip, whom she feels can offer advice on how to avoid the mistakes they have made.

Martin has her share of learning experiences to pass on, but she stressed the importance of just the opposite.

“I don’t want to become that bitter, disillusioned senior who is just counting down the days until I graduate,” she said of her decision not to shun freshmen friends. “It keeps me young, having younger friends.”

These types of relationships help to ensure that the organizations that seniors care about will be carried on by incoming students. The only downfall to the alternative break organization so far, according to Martin, is its high turnover rate.

“I don’t have anybody from my trip coming back because they were so inspired by alternative break that they went abroad,” she said

Now, students not only have the option to go abroad for a semester, they can also go abroad for the duration of spring break. Pitt’s Center on Race and Social Problems has implemented the University’s first study abroad course offered during the break.

The course, “Race Relations in Paris,” will focus on the issue of heightening social and racial inequality in Paris through a number of informational meetings.

Pitt senior, Glynnis Rutland, is a student in the School of Social Work. She enrolled in the program to explore other cultures and feels confident that her first trip abroad will be worthwhile.

“I’m interested to see how the initial culture shock is going to hit me,” she said.

Ralph Bangs, the associate director of the Center on Race and Social Problems, designed this course after returning from his second trip to Paris and said that he doesn’t expect the students to have problems adjusting.

“How can you not enjoy Paris? The people treat visitors well, and we’re not just visitors,” he added, reitterating the group’s racial focus of study.

The students will also have time to see important attractions such as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe.

Bangs hopes that this will be the first of many study abroad courses offered over spring break and emphasized the importance of exploring social issues in a group of people who share the same interests.

These interests can divide people or bond them. Martin said that many of the people on her alternative spring break trips became some of her closest friends because of their shared experience.

The Alternative Break Student Organization will hold a celebration in March to commemorate the groups’ experiences. And although time and other commitments drive people apart, Martin said that she is able to stay connected to the friends she has made on the trips.

“We become the people we were before,” she said “That’s where you can tell if you’ve really meshed with someone.”