Students give back to community over break

Chelsea Craigie ’09, the coordinator for the Breakout Princeton trips, said in an e-mail that “because the most common reason for not being involved on campus is not enough time during the average week,” the trips aimed to capitalize on the free time that spring break affords students. Craigie is a former sports writer for The Daily Princetonian.

“Getting off campus and into communities different than our own makes us better citizens and better policy-makers,” said Mary Bruce GS, a coordinator for the New Orleans trip.

One of the trips brought 11 students to New York and Jersey City to learn about refugees and asylum seekers.

Trip co-leader Adrienne Clermont ’09 said that she felt “the most affecting experience in the whole week” was a visit to an immigrant detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., “where asylum seekers are detained in a prison-like setting.”

“To see them locked up like that was a very emotional experience for all of us,” Clermont said, adding that they spoke to the asylum seekers on separate sides of a glass wall via telephone.

The students also sat in on immigration court removal hearings and performed volunteer work with the International Institute of New Jersey, an immigrant rights and support organization.

Co-leader Kohei Noda ’11 described the experience of going to the detention center as “heartwarming.”

“When I was about to leave, the man who I was talking to was so glad that I came and he wanted me to come again,” Noda said. “He hadn’t had a visit in a long time.”

Another group of 14 students spent time on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. They spent their first three days in Flagstaff, working with local organizations and helping the Navajos with sheepherding and home-building.

Trip co-leader Brian Geistwhite ’09 said participants interacted with individuals in Flagstaff who were “calling out for youth empowerment [and ways of] improving the daily lives of the Navajo.”

Co-leader Christine Chong ’10 said that the trip gave participants an opportunity to connect with the real world. “You need to get your hands dirty,” she said.

A third trip went to New Orleans to help with several aspects of the post-Hurricane Katrina recovery process.

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“Katrina has dropped from the front page of the headlines, and I wish that wasn’t so because there’s still a lot to be done,” Bruce said.

The group worked on the Gentilly Project, which mapped “the reconstruction effort of residents to accelerate the residential and economic recovery efforts of post-Katrina New Orleans,” Bruce explained.

Craigie said that her favorite part of the trip — which also included attending conferences and working with the mayor’s office to help rebuild wetlands — was when she met local residents on the mapping project.

A construction worker “laughed at my northern pronunciation of the city’s name, but was excited to see us and reminded us how much work is going on to the people who were skeptical of what we were doing,” she said.

“Those conversations were the most educational and informational of the trip and gave us a non-academic, but real, sense of the city,” she added.

The fourth trip took students to jails in Los Angeles, giving them direct contact with prisoners and experts. Trip coordinators could not be reached for comment.

Bruce added that the Pace Center had roughly 30 spots for about 70 applicants for the trips.

Craigie said that the program is slated to expand in the future to “more locations and break periods, while continuing to let the students decide where they would like to go and what they would like to do.”