WATCH: UC Student Service Organization Remains Active over School Breaks

As the first week of winter quarter got underway at the University of Cincinnati, dozens of UC students were reflecting on a winter break that involved more than the valued traditions of visiting family and hometown friends, enjoying a good home-cooked meal, sleeping in and opening gifts. They also dove into the giving spirit of the season through service experiences with no comforts of home – travels that some of the students are calling the opportunity of a lifetime.

Students with UC’s Serve Beyond Cincinnati organization traveled to South Carolina, Louisiana, Peru and El Salvador – with all of them intent on service that would get them energized for their next academic quarter. Approximately 60 students took part in Serve Beyond Cincinnati’s winter break events. Each individual trip was represented by 11-to-15 UC students.

Serve Beyond Cincinnati is an organization created in 2007 by UC students who envisioned fueling the passion of a civic-minded generation by providing national and international service experiences for UC students. Costs of the trips are supported through student fundraising.

Here’s a brief wrap-up of Serve Beyond Cincinnati’s winter travels:

Cusco and Machu, Peru

Students worked with the national Hampy organization – dedicated to providing service-learning experiences that support self-sustaining development projects in economically depressed areas of Peru. Fifteen UC students traveled to a village that was devastated by a mudslide last year.

The students worked with an ecological school, completely designed from reused materials. Students built a park area with benches created from old school chairs, a plank of wood and a backrest built of plastic bottles. They also dug holes to plant trees and dug a section for a sandbox. The UC volunteers also finished building an office for the school’s student government called the “bottle house,” because the entire building is created from old plastic bottles.

Students departed Cincinnati on Dec. 9 and returned on Dec. 20. The trip cost approximately $1,600 per student.

Jacqueline Kruse, a fourth-year architecture major from Ottawa, Ohio, says the trip brought her “many new friends, a better understanding of Peruvian culture and an experience of a lifetime. Serve Beyond Cincinnati is a great organization where you can meet lots of people from different backgrounds – with all of them sharing the common interest of helping people.”

San Luis Talpa, El Salvador

Students took part in a housing construction project coordinated by the Fuller Center for

Housing – a nonprofit, ecumenical Christian housing ministry dedicated to eliminating poverty housing worldwide – and its partner, Homes from the Heart, which is dedicated to eliminating world poverty. “We did a lot of digging,” says UC senior Allison Ng, a Spanish and biology major who is also earning a minor in Latin American Studies. The 15 UC student volunteers dug ditches for septic tanks and water pipes, laid the foundation for a home and created a sandbox for neighborhood children.

The student volunteers departed Cincinnati on Dec. 9 and returned on Dec. 18. The cost of the trip was $1,200 per student.

“I gained so much from this trip to El Salvador,” says student trip leader Jennifer Ray of Findlay, Ohio, a UC senior who is majoring in organizational leadership/HR and business. “I gained amazing relationships with people from UC and El Salvador. But most important, as a result of the trip, several families will have a safe home and community in which to live and raise their families,” she says.

“I am so thankful for the opportunity to go on this trip,” Ng says. “As much as I’ve learned in the classroom, there are certain things that you can only learn from experience.

“Hearing stories of the people who lived there and seeing the way they live there made me even more grateful for everything I have,” says Ng, who is from Green Township. “At the end of the week, we donated a lot of our work clothes and shoes to the people who had been admiring what we were wearing all week. When we left, some of the neighborhood kids cried,” she says.

“I know we didn’t save the world in 10 days, but it made me feel like we had some small impact on someone’s life, even if it was just putting a smile on their face for a few days,” Ng says.

Minden, La.

A team of 11 UC students traveled to a rural community outside of Shreveport to volunteer with the Fuller Center for Housing Dec. 11-18. They helped construct a new, three-bedroom home for an elderly woman who was living in a mobile home with no running water. The UC volunteers painted the exterior and interior of the home, as well as hanged and painted siding. The cost of the trip was $300 per student.

“After each of my Serve Beyond Cincinnati trips, especially this one to Louisiana, I am reminded of the many things to be grateful for in my life,” says Rachel Niederhausen of Bridgetown, a UC junior who is majoring in finance and international business. “I take running water and basic luxuries for granted so often, but there are many people in America who are living without these necessities.”

“The winter break trips are so refreshing,” Niederhausen says, “because they really put my priorities back in order, especially around the holidays.”

Spartanburg, S.C.

Student volunteers participated in several projects with the Fuller Center for Housing, including repainting the interiors of two Habitat for Humanity homes, replacing damaged flooring and adding new carpet and renovating the kitchen of an elderly resident. “We had to tear up the floor, lay down plywood and then linoleum flooring, repair holes in the walls and ceiling and then repaint the entire room,” says team leader Allison Hibner about the kitchen project. The fourth year Vandalia, Ohio graphic design student adds that the volunteers then tore out all the old cabinetry and the kitchen sink and installed the replacements.

The group of 11 students departed Cincinnati on Dec. 11 and returned on Dec. 18. The cost of the trip was $300 per student.

“My last two trips with Serve Beyond Cincinnati were abroad, so experiencing this trip closer to home showed me that work still needs to be done in the Unites States,” says Hibner, who is now working on a UC co-op in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s a different level of poverty, but people still need help.”

“I feel it’s important for everyone to know what is going on beyond our own backyards,” Hibner says. “Not everyone is as fortunate as we are and it should be our duty to use our resources to help others who need it. The experiences one has on these kinds of trips are unlike any other. The amount of compassion, generosity and love shared between the members going on these kinds of trips and the people receiving the help is immeasurable,” she says.

“I think it is important for students to do this work because they get to see how fortunate they really are and how the simplest acts of kindness can really change someone's life,” adds Hibner. “The students learn and receive just as much as the people they are helping.”

Spring Planning

Serve Beyond Cincinnati is planning five service trips for spring break, the most the organization has ever taken at one time, says Lindsay Long, a co-president of the organization. The group is planning its first trip to earthquake-ravaged Haiti, as well as its first trip to build housing in Missouri with the Fuller Center for Housing. Other volunteers will return to Louisiana with the Fuller Center, partner with Hampy in Peru, and serve in El Salvador.

Long, a senior biology major from Carrollton, Ohio, is one of the student co-leaders of the upcoming trip to Haiti, a nation that has also been struggling under the cholera outbreak. The group will be working with the Fuller Center for Housing to assist people displaced by the earthquake.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching names UC among 115 American colleges and universities for its 2010 Community Engagement Classification. The foundation issued the announcement this month, naming UC among 35 research intensive universities to receive the classification.

Serve Beyond Cincinnati website

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