Seeing the troubles in front of us

In the last two years, I've passed by airport security checkpoints more often than I've sat behind the wheel of a car. I realized this last Saturday night while waiting in line with 11 other Princeton students for a flight to Montevideo, Uruguay. Bored, we were swapping passports, exclaiming over pictures and comparing international travels. As someone who had never left the United States prior to high school graduation, I was proud of my collection of entry and exit stamps. Now, however, after a week of community service, I no longer find pride to be the appropriate emotion. If I use my passport more frequently than my driver's license, then I know only the Princeton campus and the far reaches of the globe. I remain ignorant of the world in between.

The alternate spring break program was organized by Hillel Uruguay. We attended lectures on the Uruguayan socioeconomic crisis given by program staff members, university professors, and Martin Silverstein, U. S. ambassador to Uruguay. We learned about the growing poverty affecting the country. We spent a day painting murals and interacting with residents in an elderly home. We ate lunch in a kosher soup kitchen and went to Friday night services in a local synagogue. For our major project we spent three days in El Cerro, a poor neighborhood of Montevideo, building a playground of rough wood and rusty iron. We painted the finished structure with colors diluted in sawed-open water bottles. During our lunch breaks we talked with the Uruguayan workers and queued up to use a neighbor's toilet. Barefoot snotty-nosed kids ran around offering help and kisses, begging to borrow hats and sunglasses and laughing at our attempts to speak Spanish. When our bus pulled out on the last day, they waved goodbye to us from atop the slide.

We had fun, too. Fall was just beginning in the southern hemisphere, and the sun shone always, warm but not too hot. We enjoyed our day off at Punta del Este, a world-famous beach. We spent a morning wandering through a street market bigger than anything I'd seen in Europe, with stand after stand offering whatever you wanted to buy: fruits and vegetables, shirts and scarves, eccentric jewelry, shoes, wooden boxes and plates, leather belts and wallets, even puppies and goldfish. There was an ice cream store across from the hotel that served Italian gelato, an excess of Internet cafes and bookstores around every corner. Because the Uruguayan peso was so weak to the American dollar, we ate steak and drank wine every night. Through these glimpses of local life, so exotic and intoxicating, it's easy to fall in love with a country and its inhabitants.

But we also asked questions about what we were doing. Is it appropriate to take a charter bus to and from El Cerro every day? What do we accomplish by buying a plane ticket instead of mailing a check? Is it justified to go to Uruguay when there's poverty in Trenton?

This last one illustrates an important distinction. It's relatively easy to pack a suitcase with old clothes and step on a plane for somewhere warm for spring break. Wearing nice clothes to cross Nassau Street, taking time out of a busy schedule to volunteer, requires serious commitment. In New Jersey the weather stays cold, the suffering is in your language and the problem sits always at your doorstep. No airplane will distance you from the obligation to act; no passport will absolve you of your responsibility to use your driver's license. My spring break experience convinced me that it's time to look for the world a little closer to home.