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Take a second to think about what Spring Break might be like for any given college student.
If you didn’t know much about the tradition at the Catholic Student Center at West Texas A&M University you may think of something similar to this.
Spring Break for many college students is a time to take a break from all the busy pressures of life that we fictitiously or realistically have pushing down on us. This often comes in the form of taking a road trip to the beach, an end of season trip to a ski resort, or perhaps staying at home and watching a number of movies that outnumber our fingers and toes while “catching up on class work”.
However, for twenty-six students from the Catholic Student Center community along with Betty and Fr. Daniel, Spring Break meant travelling to the “Land of Enchantment”, also known as New Mexico, for our fifth mission trip. Our borrowed Holy Cross Catholic Academy bus, driven by Fr. Daniel, brought us to the dark school and convent of San Fidel around 10:00 in the evening after a two hour bus break down on the side of the road.
By this time, there were already many lessons to be learned. The first of these was that there is a noticeable difference in the quality and smoothness of the road system between Texas and New Mexico. While stopped on the side of the road, we learned that a bladder can only be held for so long until you must absolutely resort to having a group of friends hold blankets around you so you can pee in privacy. And just for the record, turbines belong in airplanes and the like, not buses. During our date with the side of the road we were also the beneficiaries of some very generous help from local bus barn mechanics; this stroke of luck also began to teach us the power of being willing to help and to serve.
Once at St. Joseph’s Mission School we met Sister Ellen, a few school employees, and a member of the Parent Teacher Association for the school. As we explored the grounds that night we could already begin to tell how much we truly take for granted each day, even though we may consider ourselves to be poor college students. After a long bus ride everyone was ready to get some sleep and be refreshed to begin our mission of giving the building and equipment a facelift for the kids and teachers. Little did we know, despite all the work that we would be doing, we were going to be the recipients and not the givers during our trip. The church hall in a nearby town was soon transformed into our camp grounds, filled with air mattresses, sleeping bags, food and suitcases that based on the range of sizes you might not be able to decipher if we were staying the month or merely a single night.
The next morning, complaints from some of the girls about a cold night and complaints from a few of the guys about cold showers were soon replaced with an indescribable joy from getting to experience recess and more importantly meeting the kids on the playground that day. Before long the children had made a lasting impression on our life. Brittany Buchanan commented, “Going to San Fidel this year for the mission trip was an incredible blessing. The children really touched my heart and they were definitely the best part of the entire trip! These children have many misfortunes and yet they took joy in the smallest of things and that really got to me, and how much we take for granted. They really changed my life and of course built my muscles because I do not think that I have ever pushed so many children for so long [on a swing set] in my entire life! This mission trip has allowed me to grow as a person and to build some really close bonds with many of my peers. I am very excited to have gotten the opportunity to go and now to come back and to grow from what I learned from those children”. Each day at lunch the children would be begging for us to sit by them in the cafeteria and it became commonplace to hear names like “Barbie”, “Ken”, “Spider-pig”, and “Grandma” being called across the playground.
Jacob Schacher commented that fixing up the library was one of his favorite parts of the trip. Although there was a separate room containing a few shelves of commonly used books, “Their supposed ‘library’ was practically a storage room for books so we cleaned it up, organized it, and turned it into a working, usable library”. Additionally, we deep cleaned many of the classrooms, even steam cleaning the carpets with the help of Chris, the PTA president. One of the classrooms and the upstairs hallways received a few fresh coats of paint overnight and the students were overjoyed the next day to see the changes.
Each day we would make a human tunnel for the kids to run through on their way to the bus with a bucket of candy waiting at the end. On Friday, you could tell that starting around lunch the kids had each come to the realization that we wouldn’t be at the school when they came back from Spring Break. Although we all still cherished the last moments we got to spend with one another, there was an air of sadness as they came through the tunnel for the last time. We sang “Happy Birthday” to one of the older girls as she was leaving school that day and her response to our singing came in tears. She turned to one of her friends and said “I’m about to cry”. Even in her tears she was smiling. I would like to think that her reaction was a demonstration of the connection she felt that she had made with us. Several of the college students wanted to cry too as the bus pulled away that afternoon, the friendships we made with our little angels couldn’t continue to grow but they will certainly never be forgotten.
After the events of each day we would form some sort of a circle to discuss the things that we had experienced thus far. Some conversations stemmed from the beauty of us being able to play a hilarious game for over an hour the night before using only a few pieces of paper and pen. Fr. Daniel pointed out that evening that we have a 46 inch television in our rec room that will never unite quite like a simple game did. We discovered that simplicity is what truly brings true peace and enjoyment of life. Another conversation took the form of friendly heated argument between the girls because of a shower situation that got turned into a race. The five girls who couldn’t shower faster in the convent than eight girls at the hotel with the same amount of showers became known as the “high end convent girls”. The argument was silly, but from the experience we each learned that having a luxurious shower and hot water is a very simple part of our daily lives that we completely take for granted. Other conversations stemmed from how much we admired the willingness of every single person we met to give and to share with us (which would be reiterated as we went to the Feast of St. Joseph celebration in Laguna on Saturday and were welcomed without question into the homes of tribal families who had literally prepared feasts to share with us). We were all touched by the giving spirit that so clearly filled the San Fidel, Cubero, and Laguna communities especially since giving was the purpose of our trip and the people there seemed to clearly outshine us in this mission.
During the trip there were probably twenty-six students who entertained the thought at least for a moment of becoming a teacher or faculty member for this or some other mission school. In reflection from the weekend Kelly Shehan inputs, “The mission trip helped me figure out what I want to do with my life when I become a nurse. The passion and dedication the teachers at St. Joseph’s Mission School showed to the students has inspired me to be a school nurse hopefully at a small school like the one we visited. The mission trip was an amazing experience where we got to help others and see the gratitude in the children’s faces, experience the Stations of the Cross in profound way, learn about and be welcomed into a different culture on the Feast Day of St. Joseph, and I even got to sleep in the church with Jesus.”
Quite clearly we all gained something unique out of our mission trip experience. When asked to input his favorite part or a reflection of the trip Omar Garcia replied, “I liked the mountains!” Additionally, the voyage was a healing process for many of the divisions among friendships within our community and an opportunity to establish unprecedented depth for a few of the previously established friendships. Although we were ready for our own beds that wouldn’t deflate by the morning, it wasn’t easy to pull out of Laguna on Saturday. We have now been away from the experience for two-weeks and although the stress of school and big end-of-semester-projects are attempting to take over our lives, the spirit of the experience will always remain with us.
