UI students traveled over winter break to help struggling communities
University of Idaho senior Courtney Stoker spent her winter break working in Santa Julia, Nicaragua, with a women’s cooperative that operates a coffee planation. According to Stoker, the community was established under the Somoza dictatorship, and when the regime fell in 1979 the land was given to the women who banded together to lead it.
“The community was very unique,” Stoker said. “The women are in charge.”
George Wood Jr. | Argonaut
UI students Adam Jones and Rachel Davis help reroute a trail to connect the cross-state Palmetto Trail in South Carolina. They were part of a 13-person team of UI volunteers participating in the Alternative Service Break program over winter break.
Stoker was one of many UI students who expanded their horizons by spending their winter break volunteering around the world on an Alternative Service Break trip, organized through the ASUI Center for Volunteerism and Social Action.
“Service learning trips have a very essential role in a college student’s life,” Stoker said.
Students traveled to two locations in Nicaragua, as well as Peru, Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania.
On the Santa Julia trip, a group of UI students built a porch with a cover so the community would have a place to meet without being pelted by dust from the wind, Stoker said.
Another group of students traveled to Peru, where they helped to construct a school and worked with some of the school’s students. According to Anna Doezal, a Peru trip participant, the team worked on building the school in the early part of the day and got to help students learn English in the afternoons and evenings while the students helped them to learn Spanish.
Building the school was particularly special, she said, because they got to hang out with the students who would study there.
“(We got) to see the fruits of our labor,” she said.
Some of the school’s students walked for about two hours to get to the school so they could learn, said Brady Fuller, ASB coordinator and Peru trip participant.
“It was unreal,” he said. “It was hard to process.”
On the other trip to Nicaragua, the team experienced basic living while helping the agricultural community of El Balsamo. There was no electricity or running water in the home where the team lived, said participant Jessica Darney.
“I fell in love with the simplicity of it,” she said. “They didn’t need everything to be happy.”
While every ASB trip is unique, Darney and Fuller said the connections UI students make with local community members around the globe are life changing.
“You make relationships you wouldn’t have made by staying in Moscow,” Darney said.
ASB trips are designed to do more than just help other people, Stoker said. The people who went on the trips learned about other cultures and bonded with people they would have otherwise never met.
“That human connection is something you can’t put a price tag on,” Stoker said.
The highlight of the trip for Doezal was getting to interact with the local community members.
“We were awestruck with how happy they were,” Doezal said. “It was humbling for us, coming from so much.”