Students Serve Overseas For The Summer

Twenty-two Westmont students are devoting at least a month this summer to serve people in Malawi, Indonesia, and El Salvador through Emmaus Road, a Westmont program that’s been sending students overseas for the past 10 years.

The first Emmaus Road group, three business majors and five pre-med students, left May 5 for El Salvador. The business majors are working with local residents to start a recycling business. The project will help provide income for disadvantaged families as well as begin to help with the enormous amount of garbage in poverty-stricken areas. The pre-med students are working in a clinic alongside Westmont alumni who serve long-term in La Herradura, El Salvador.

Seven students will travel to Malawi, East Africa, May 27 to work in an orphanage with children whose parents either cannot support them or have died from AIDS. The students will take care of the children and plant a corn field to help sustain them and provide income for the orphanage.

The third trip of the summer, leaving June 15, will send seven students to Indonesia to work with an ethno/eco-tourism organization led by Westmont alumni.

Emmaus Road participants are responsible for raising the funds for the service projects, which cost from $3,000 to $3,600 per person.

Student leaders began planning for this year’s trips last summer and held biweekly meetings to discuss travel tips and cultural sensitivity.

The goals of Emmaus Road are to sponsor activities that serve to increase campus awareness of global concerns, to broaden the worldview of students and to promote the value of diversity.

“As they learn from those who are different from them culturally, ethnically, religiously and socio-economically, they learn to view faith, life and relationships more profoundly across a broader spectrum,” says Elena Yee, director of intercultural programs. Although Emmaus Road began a decade ago, Westmont students have participated in World Missions week and similar projects since the 1960s.