Greetings From Mexico--No Surf, but Hard Work

When most college students look for a summer job, they search for something that will earn them lots of money, give them a directed start for when they step out into the competitive world and at the same time allow them a fun, laid-back summer.

Then there are the students who decide to do back-breaking manual labor at a place called "the pigsty" in the most polluted city in the world and pay $800--plus airfare--to do it.

No, they are not crazy. They are participants in the Summer Service Project, and according to the program's director Theodore S. Wills, the participants will have "the summer of their lives."

Wills runs this three-year-old project that recruits American college students to go to Mexico City and work with and for the poor. Each year the program concentrates on a different social service project. Last year, the group built a public area for children to play in, and this year, the participants plan to teach English to the poor.

The project is sponsored by Elmbrook University Center, located halfway between the Quad and Harvard Yard. The center, which is not affiliated with Harvard, serves as both a student center and a dormitory for an organization called the Prelature of Opus Dei which strives to incorporate religion into public life. The project is all-male because Elmbrook is for men only.

Although the center is affiliated with the Catholic church, the nine students who worked last year with Wills and Mexico's poor included Jews, Protestants and Catholics not affiliated with the center. The participants also represented five colleges, including Harvard and MIT.

While Elmbrook sponsors the program, the New York-based Association for Cultural Interchange--a group that tries to get teachers to go to the Third World--pays Wills' salary.

The summer project's main focus is not religious and the student participants say that what they liked most about the program was interacting with the poor people they worked with.

The program gets students to make an investment of themselves, so that they're not just helping another Third World country, says Wills, a Dartmouth graduate. "What they get is the friendship with these people. It's not just grime and sweat," he says. "That's as simple as that."

Diarrhea and Housing

Bruce S. Miller '90, one of four Harvard students who went on the service project last year, agrees. He says he found his stay in the Mexico City slum very disagreeable but in retrospect, he felt the project was a worthwhile experience.

"Everyone hated it," he says, "we all had diarrhea, we hated the housing, and we hated the food." But he says he appreciates the interaction that took place with "the people in such a different culture. It had a big impact on me."

Two things in particular made the experience worthwhile, Miller says. First was the size of the task that the group undertook and completed. "It was a very ambitious project," he says. "Finishing it in a month was amazing. We turned a neighborhood that was going to the pots. We really did something for changing [the neighborhood's residents] lives." The other was giving up his summer for "being able to interact with these people. [In this sense,] I didn't give up the summer; I received as much as I gave," he says.

Elmbrook Assistant Director Dwight Duncan '73 agrees with Miller's evaluation: "It's a lot of work, but students in previous years have felt that they got more out of [the project] than they put in."

So do many of the programs direct beneficiaries. One child recently wrote a letter to Wills--in Spanish--in which he says, "Ted, you are more than a friend to me because you taught me many things and how to face everything. Thank you for your friendship Ted, it's the best thing we all have."

Last year the nine students converted a garbage dump into a public plaza. The dump site "because it was the only open area, was also used as a playground by children," says Jim Palos, an alumnus of last year's program and its Midwest coordinator. "We also built a drainage system under it so excess water from the daily rain could escape," Palos says.

Construction of the playground next to a Catholic church was very important, Palos says, because of the ambiance it creates together with the church: "[A plaza] is a communal area which is very important to Latin American culture."

In the construction, the project members were aided by local engineering graduate students who lived in the the student housing where they stayed, the Residencia Urbana Panamericana.

One-on-one

By helping the poor, the Mexican graduate students were also doing something unusual. Says Wills, "it was neat for them because [college students] don't normally interact with the lower class. We provided a bridge which wasn't really planned, and that was very gratifying to see."

The project also gave some of the American students the opportunity to interact one on one with Mexicans. "I had particular fun with the kids and I realized that there was something wrong with one of them," Miller explained, saying that this child wheezed and the other kids made fun of him. "When I flew back to the States I was really bothered by this kid still being back there, having trouble breathing."

Miller, a Kirkland resident, did more than just worry about the child. He undertook the task of bringing the boy and his mother back to Tucson, Arizona. He spent several weeks fighting bureacracy and immigration red tape, to get the child into America. Once there, Miller's father, an ear, nose and throat specialist diagnosed the child as having tonsilitis complicated by pneumonia and operated on him. Last Miller heard, the child was fine and had returned to Mexico.

Other Harvard students who have gone to Mexico with past projects are John G. Donaghy '90, Jeffrey Hunsinger '89, and William J. Murphy '88.

This summer, the participants will teach English to poor teenagers in Mexico City through an intensive language course. "Our goal is to achieve fluency in seven weeks," Palos says. Once again, the project's goal is very ambitious. Palos explains that seven weeks is currently considered by professionals to be the minimum time in which fluency can be achieved.

"I was asking what to do this summer," Wills explained of his choice for this year's project, "and a teacher in a peasant village told me `Teach kids English and we'll fill the place.'"

While he was investigating the idea of teaching English, Wills says several Mexican private schools asked him to teach their students. "There are no natives teaching English in Mexico," Wills explains, adding that he turned down these offers, because he wants to teach poor children in Mexico to be comfortable around Americans. "With all the tourism, it opens up job opportunities. No one's ever done this, we could be the best language program in the city," he says.

"With our construction projects, we don't pretend to remove poverty, but we try to make it more livable," Palos says. "We think that immediate help is important, but there's also the whole idea of teaching to fish. By teaching them English, we give the kids marketability; knowing English is an advantage in the job market. This is something [the teenager] can hold on to and he can use it to improve his own life."

Palos explains that although the Mexican children learn English in the public schools, in terms of speaking ability they learn nothing. "The kids themselves will tell you: English in the public schools is a joke," Palos says.

Duncan says that to teach English, the project this year is taking down 20 students, to be chosen from an estimated pool of four times as many applicants. But Wills says that, if necessary, "we can go up to 40 people."

Palos says that some of these students will receive financial aid, to allow interested people who cannot pay for their stay the chance to go. To this end, he is currently looking for donations from private individuals. He is also talking to airlines to see if they will donate tickets for the trip. "We hope to reduce the cost for volunteers who are already giving up summer wages," he says.

The program has drawn criticism from some who object to its requirement that participants be men and not women. Wills says that women are not invited to participate in the program mainly because of organizational convenience. Opus Dei is organized into distinct, but equivalent sections for men and women and Elmbrook is a male branch of the organization.

A sister section of Opus Dei also sponsors a project in Mexico, Wills says, "It's simpler for me to make it single sex. There are difficulties with women as far as housing since our dorm [in Mexico] is not co-ed."

However, Palos says the fact the trip is student-funded acts to screen out all but the most serious students who can afford it: "If you're going, you're going for the ideal, so the fact that the student has to make a sacrifice is good because it shows he's interested."