While college students typically use spring break as a way to get away from work, some Auburn students participated in service projects ranging from making water filters in a foreign country to repairing houses destroyed by natural disasters.
Alternative Student Breaks hosts an array of service trips for every break for Auburn students. Each trip is coordinated by an undergraduate “site leader,” and each trip has a specific trip issue in mind.
This past spring break ASB hosted five trips, one international and four domestic. Each trip consisted of about 10-12 participants along with a supervisor for the week-long visits.
Community development in Santiago, Dominican Republic
Many rural communities have clean-water crises as the water in the urban areas is not able to be piped out to them, so they rely on
ASB participants teamed up with Wine to Water in the production and distribution of clay filters to the different communities suffering from the clean-water crisis.
The ASB group was able to help make and distribute 75 of the 4,000 filters that Wine to Water makes and disperses every year.
Wine to Water does not give away the filters for free, but rather, they charge the community somewhere from $5–$15, depending on the socioeconomic status of the community.
The first two days of service were spent on the production aspect of the filters, and then the group spent the rest of the week on follow ups with the communities to make sure they understood how to use, clean and repair the filters.
Site leader Bailey Hand, sophomore in marketing and global studies, said she believes that anytime you spend time serving others, you end up getting more reward and lessons than the people you serve, which she said was definitely the case for this trip.“It’s kind of a miracle that we have clean water pumped to us,” Hand said. “That doesn’t happen in most countries. I think that’s what a lot of us got out of it. Whenever we got back to America, we were like, ‘Oh, we can drink water from restaurants, it doesn’t have parasites.’”
Disabilities and healthcare in Paradise, Texas
Site leader Garrett Smith said he realized how special the trip to Paradise, Texas, was when a camper who cannot talk and had been reticent for most of the week showed him affection and gave him a hug after opening up.
Smith, junior in marketing, said moments like these, when it clicked on how valuable the trip was, happened for every ASB participant during the trip to Camp Summit, such as when another mute camper signed, “I love you,” to one of the other participants.
Camp Summit adapts activities to give people with special needs, regardless of age or severity of disability, the opportunity to experience camp-like activities such as arts and crafts, horseback riding and archery, which they may not normally have access to.
The organization has week-long sessions during the spring and the summer.
The camp splits the sessions up so that one week has kids, which is the week that ASB served during, and there’s a week for adults.
ASB participants played the role of camp counselors for the week, which means they were paired with some of the kids and helped with all the different camp activities.
Whether it was helping hold the bow and arrow or safely getting on a horse, the ASB participants taught the kids based on the situation.
“Something that a lot of people don’t realize about special needs kids is that they’re capable of doing a lot more than we allow them to,” Smith said. “Something cool for me, personally, was things that we could teach them, rather than just making sure they had a fun time at camp.”
Animal welfare in Juno Beach, Florida
The ASB trip to Juno Beach, Florida, helped the Loggerhead Marinelife Center prepare for its upcoming annual event known as TurtleFest.
LMC is committed to rehabilitating injured sea turtles and return them to their habitat. Every year, thousands of people travel to TurtleFest to spread education on
Kierra Goins, senior in biomedical sciences, led the ASB group as they helped prepare for the event. For example, they made cardboard boxes into turtle-like shells for the kids to play with at the festival for the purpose of education.
Other work included sorting through and picking out recyclable fishing line, removing hazardous debris from the beach and general beautification of the beach for the upcoming event.
The participants were also able to be the first ones to paint and redecorate the Juno Beach Pier, which had recently been damaged by a storm.
Goins was excited that the pier was finally fully repaired while ASB was there because the church group that ASB stayed with uses the pier every year for its Easter service.
“Everybody was really focused whether it was cutting out cardboard for the kids at TurtleFest or painting for three hours straight or picking up plastic off the beach,” Goins said. “They had a really good attitude and gave it
Children’s healthcare in Kissimmee, Florida
The trip’s site leader to Florida, Hannah Williams, sophomore in
“Anytime there was something to do, they wanted to help,” Williams said. “It was almost like they were fighting over who got to clean the dishes at night. It was an honor to be able to call myself a site leader to them because they are so special, and I was so lucky to end up with them.”
The group split time between two service sites in Florida.
At
Give Kids the World hosts children with life-threatening illnesses. The non-profit throws Christmas, Halloween and birthday parties every week because many of the children will not make it to the next respective holiday.
Clean the World is a non-profit that works with local hotels and airlines to gather different shampoos, conditioners
A special moment for the group was getting to see a child who was paralyzed sit on Santa’s lap for the first time.
“I don’t think there was a single participant that went
Affordable housing in New Orleans, Louisiana
Most people know about the devastation that was caused in New Orleans, Louisiana, following Hurricane Katrina, but many do not realize that many of the areas are still ravaged.
“You can’t always tell when you go into places like the French Quarter because it looks almost back to normal, but then you go into some of these neighborhoods that we were in, and it’s just abandoned,” said Seth Brown, the site leader.
Brown, junior in industrial and systems engineering, led an ASB group to work with the LowerNine organization on rebuilding the areas and homes most impacted in the Lower Nine Ward of New Orleans in a cost-effective and affordable manner.
ASB participants worked on houses by re-paneling the glass, installing
Brown said he was amazed at how quickly the participants were able to learn and work efficiently, considering many of the participants had no experience in the work they did.
“Many of them didn’t have any construction experience or home-building experience, so it was cool to see the progression as they hadn’t used a nail gun or drills, but by the end of the week, they were experts in it and definitely more confident,” Brown said.
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