Alternative Spring Break a vacation from the ordinary

When it comes to spring break, it is easy to understand the appeal of going to a beach for the week with your friends or going home to mom and dad to catch up on sleep. But another great way to overcome the vitamin D deficiency that comes from living deep within the confines of Fondren is the Rice Alternative Spring Break Program. This year there are eight different locations and social issues being addressed. From hunger and homelessness in New York City to border issues in Reynosa, Mexico, and from children’s education in St. Louis to working with families in Nicaragua, there are so many different places to go and get out into a new environment.

College students are stereotyped as being consumed with their own personal lives, and for many of us this is true: It is really easy to get caught up in our work and social lives at Rice and forget what is going on outside the hedges. However, spring break is an opportune time to gain some perspective on how most people actually live — not filing second mortgages on their homes or refinancing their college loans, but wondering every day if they have scraped together enough for a meal for their children.

Alternative Spring Break trips have two goals: Helping people without the means to help themselves and exposing these people’s lives to students. While the first goal provides some immediate satisfaction to the families the trips support, the second goal is where the real change is done. Trips like these provide a learning experience that goes outside traditional education — they are why we attend a university and not simply a professional school.

In one trip to Birmingham, Ala., Rice students put up all the shingles and siding on a Habitat for Humanity house for an elderly woman who called herself Big Mama. On our last day of work, Big Mama and her family came to the site and made us lunch to thank us for our help, making the service all the more valuable because we knew personally who we were helping.

But service is not the only component of an Alternative Spring Break: There is also plenty of time to explore the community. New and exciting environments provide hiking, museums, local cuisine or even zip-lining in the rainforest. Ultimately, Alternative Spring Breaks are also a great opportunity to get to know 12 new Rice students, learn about the issues surrounding a specific area, travel cheaply and have a great and rewarding spring break.

Seeing the need there is outside the hedges first hand and doing something, even small, to help someone else in a very real way can bring some perspective to a highly academic career.

You can spend 30 years researching in a lab and cure even the strangest of ailments, but it will not compare to the one week you spend outside of your element working with a family to build their own cinderblock home. In one week, you can improve other people’s lives and change your own, too.

So before you decide what to do for spring break, talk to someone who has gone on an Alternative Spring Break about his or her personal experiences. It is almost guaranteed you will get an explanation of why he or she would do it again and give you reasons why you should do it too.

Sanna Ronkainen is a Martel College junior. Bekah Allen, a Martel College junior, contributed to this column.

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