Jeff Wahhab, a junior in the Connell School of Nursing, was like many other Boston College students preparing to go on spring break. He and his roommates had been planning their trip to Acapulco for months, but somehow things never came together.
December rolled around and one of his roommates suggested he sign up to drive for Appalachia. With that, Wahhab said "hasta la vista" to Acapulco and "hello" to country roads.
"No big deal," he said, driving down Route 13 on Virginia's eastern shore to his placement in a community called New Road. "It's just one week. We can just go to Acapulco as seniors."
Each year, BC sends hundreds of students all over the United States and beyond for service and immersion programs that enhance their classroom education.
From the Appalachian and Gulf Coast regions to Native American reservations and even internationally to Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, BC students spend a great deal of time, money, and effort in order to learn from and serve the communities that host them.
Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback these trips usually generate from the participants and communities, there remains a healthy contingent of objectors who propose that the money and effort might be better spent in other ways.
The most common objection I hear, for example, goes something like this: "Wouldn't it be a lot more helpful to just donate all that money you raise?"
The obligatory voice of dissent has a point. I can't help but think that the $300,000 raised to send 500-plus members of the Appalachia Volunteers to their placements could have been more helpful if it weren't used to offset the costs of travel, food, and lodging. After all, on my trip we painted some walls, cleaned a few yards, and fixed a couple of doors on houses that cost $42,000 to build. For $300,000, we could have given the community seven new homes.
It's true that donations of that size can dramatically and almost instantly address stark needs of the community, but the trips are about something more than charitable giving.
Nhu Huynh, A&S '08, who just returned from leading a Pedro Arrupe trip to Jamaica, believes that the trips have an immeasurable transformative value. "It's more about being present with those you meet in country and the possibility of transforming the world through changing hearts," she said.
It is within this transformation, the conversion of heart, that the strength of service and immersion education lies. The programs at BC and other schools are listed as "extracurricular," but are they really just the cherry on top of the sundae that is academic ice cream?
Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the recently retired Superior General of the Society of Jesus, believes that formation and learning go hand-in-hand in fulfilling the Jesuit mission to educate the whole person.
"Tomorrow's whole person must have, in brief, a well-educated solidarity," he wrote in 2000. "Solidarity is learned through 'contact' rather than 'concepts.' When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection."
Kolvenbach goes on to argue that service programs allow for this type of education to occur and "should not be too peripheral or optional, but at the core of every Jesuit university's program of studies."
Is he right? Do these experiences really transform hearts and minds? Maybe there's no universal response, but Wahhab feels his eyes were opened by the experience.
"I expected something different, but not this profound. I had no idea just how much need for change there is in the world," he said.
So, what does his senior spring break look like for next year?
"Acapulco will always be there, man. I'm going back to Appalachia."
Maybe there is something priceless about this whole endeavor after all.
Matt Carroll is a Heights staff columnist. He welcomes comments at mcarroll@bcheights.com.
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