International Service Trip

On March 12, 2004, eight NDSU students piled into a van to begin their road-trip to sunny California for an eleven day adventure known as Alternative Spring Break 2004: San Francisco.

The Alternative Spring Break project was started by the Volunteer Network in the mid 90’s to allow students to travel to fun places and take on a big volunteering project over spring break. After a seven year hiatus, it was started back up again in 2002, when the project moved to Florida for two consecutive years, where the students volunteered at Boggy Creek Gang Camp, a camp for terminally ill children.

This year, the student coordinators of the Volunteer Network decided to head west to the beautiful San Francisco/Bay Area. After a long overnight drive, filled with PS2 playing, card games, trying to sing with the radio, and, of course, the making of a “Real World” parity; the students were primed and ready to get to work on their volunteering projects.

Our first project was to volunteer for Trips for Kids, an agency that takes underprivileged children mountain-biking. The program is designed to get kids out of the inner city and onto the amazing ocean-side mountains of China State Park only fifteen minutes away, so they will be able to experience and appreciate nature. Trips for Kids takes all sorts of groups, from inner city after school programs to developmentally disabled programs. One of the groups that we were able to help was an after school group from Benjamin Franklin Middle School, located in downtown San Francisco. The project of the volunteers was to assist the children in learning how to ride the mountain bikes, to provide positive encouragement, and to help the children if they had an accident. We quickly found the mounting biking to be very enjoyable and difficult (try keeping up with 6th graders on energy bars all day). The interaction with the youth was also very rewarding, especially when one group started to cheer each other on toward the end of the day. By the second day of biking, the volunteers felt like they were really making a difference and having a good time doing it.

Our second project involved a program called Sports 4 Kids, which is a program in Oakland for elementary students after school and during recess. Sports 4 Kids is designed to get students from different backgrounds to get to know each other by involving them in sports and games and to stop segregation among students before it starts. The volunteers assisted by creating, organizing, and playing games with kids while supervising the play area. Volunteers were also able to assist in the after school education program by helping children with their homework and telling them all about North Dakota and college. The kids really enjoyed having college students around, and the college students really enjoyed that much attention. By the end of our three days, we had developed such good relationships that the kids didn’t want us to leave, and we didn’t really want to leave either. I think we learned more from the kids than they learned from us.

Between all of our volunteering events, we managed to see a lot of the Bay Area and enjoy the 85 degree weather. In our free time, we went kayaking in the Bay, went to a comedy club, went to the beach, went dancing, went sight seeing by Golden Gate Bridge, hung out at Fisherman’s Whorf and Height-Ashbury, checked out some of the local universities, saw an NBA basketball game, ate all kinds of good food, met relatives for the first time, and even ran into former NDSU students.

With all this stuff, we were able to keep the cost pretty low by doing some group fund-raising before we left. This year, we were able to raise enough so the trip only cost $150 per person (plus extra spending money).

If all of this sounds pretty fun, that’s because it was. If you are interested in going next year, you won’t want to wait too long. Student coordinators from the Volunteer Network start taking applications for the trip in the fall, usually November. If you want to do your part to make a difference over spring break, and have fun doing it, Alternative Spring Break might be the perfect fit for you. Contact us at ndsu.volunteer.network@ndsu.nodak.edu.