Calvin Students Getting Ready to Serve During Spring Break

February 25, 2008 == MEDIA ADVISORY

Summary: More than 100 Calvin students will use their upcoming March 8-15
spring break to serve at sites around the country.

Full story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2007-08/spring-break-trips.html
  
Every year when spring break rolls around, a sizeable contingent of Calvin
College students bypasses the conventional trek to the beach for a chance to
work in some less relaxing locales.

This year, from March 8-15, 110 students—double last year's total—and
eight mentors will participate in Calvin's service-learning spring break trips.
The groups will travel to eight sites around the country.

Calvin students and mentors will spend spring break doing everything from
urban ministry to hurricane relief. Three of this year's trips represent a
growing partnership between Calvin and several Louisiana communities to help
these towns recover from the one-two punch of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in
2005. Those three trips will be to Houma, Dulac and Boothville, La., and will
involve 52 students.

This is a third consecutive year for the Houma trip, mentored by Dan
Vandersteen, a counselor at Calvin's Broene Center who first traveled to the
community immediately following Katrina. Vandersteen provided counseling for
the many people who were homeless because of the disaster and to the many who
relocated away from Houma.

Seeing that the post-hurricane rebuilding of Louisiana communities was
stalled, Vandersteen has returned every year to Houma during spring break,
always working to restore housing on the same block of the same street.

The Houma venture has proved a popular one, drawing not only new students but
veterans—and this year an ’07 alumnus—back to work in Louisiana. And the
success of the partnership in Houma led to the trips in Dulac and Boothville,
the latter a partnership with the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee.

Vandersteen is happy to see the partnership prosper: "I'm just so blessed. To
go back with Calvin students, who pay to go back and give up their spring
break—I am really, really blessed. We have good groups of students. They work
hard. Every year."

-end-
Received on Mon Feb 25 13:49:31 2008