During winter break, when most Tufts students were relaxing, skiing or tanning, some courageous types took a very different approach: In preparation for a spring semester Ex College course about sustainable development, members of the class headed down to Nicaragua to help, learn and bond with the community.
From Jan. 5-15, the students worked alongside local Nicaraguan university students on three different farms in Santa Rosa, Nicaragua, in the region of Siuna.
"We would wake up at, like, 5:30 in the morning," said sophomore Dan Katzman, a trip participant. Before going out to work on the farms for the day, Katzman said, he and his Tufts peers "would have breakfast alongside the Nicaraguan students"
"It was pretty serious, strenuous stuff," junior Alex Pileggi said. "Oftentimes, we were planting and clearing the land with machetes."
The trip was done through the BUILD (Building Understanding through International Learning and Development) program. At the end of the related Ex College class in sustainable development, students can write a grant proposal to be implemented in Nicaragua, and if theirs is chosen, they can go back the following summer. The program was formerly known as TIILES (Tufts International and Intercultural Learning through Experience and Service.)
Senior Katherine Conway-Gaffney, who now teaches the sustainable development course, participated in the TIILES program as a sophomore and was dissatisfied with its format.
"You had Nicaraguan history and stuff leading up to the trip, and then it was over," Conway-Gaffney said. "I thought it would be better... if we had a class afterwards to go through what we'd learned, so that's what's happening now."
Though she did not go on the winter break trip to Nicaragua, Conway-Gaffney had been there twice before, once through TIILES and once last summer to organize details for the trip in January.
Setting up the trip was "a lot of work," Conway-Gaffney said. "It was a 20 page grant that we had to write with the UCCPS [University College of Citizenship and Pubic Service] and the IGL [Institute for Global Leadership], working with a bunch of different groups that aren't used to working together this closely."
Despite the initial obstacles, Conway-Gaffney said that the final experience had "definitely been rewarding."
While in Nicaragua, students mostly worked on planting, re-planting, clearing away brush - and, in some cases, making manure. Sophomore Bruni Hirsch, another trip participant, recalled one day when her group was led around a farm by the youngest child there - a nine-year-old.
"The son was sent out with Dan and I to go to the farm and collect manure and I would be like, 'How about this piece of s-t?' and the son would be like, 'No, no, too moist.'
'How about this one?' 'No no, too hard,'" Hirsch said. "Taking directions from a nine-year-old was this very neat experience."
Students like Hirsch said that the trip allowed them to really get to know the community. The purpose was "to show support and solidarity in ways other than sending down a check," Bruni said.
Tufts students also learned the value of community. After the trip, "it became very clear that having a healthy and close family is very important," Hirsch said. "The families that we were working with were very poor. However, the members of the families always had smiles on their faces because they had such pride and love for each other."
Sophomore Erica Shipow had similar sentiments. "A lot of times, people in the U.S. think of third-world countries, and especially rural communities, as being kind of hopeless, and that we come in to 'help save them' or whatever," Shipow said. "But what I saw was this incredible community that was working so hard together to accomplish their needs."
The community, Shipow explained, was able to overcome many boundaries in order to stay close-knit. "For us, we have all the amenities in the world - communication, transportation - we have all these things and yet we can't always seem to find a way to come together," Shipow said. "Whereas in this Nicaraguan community, they live half an hour walking distance through a Nicaraguan jungle and it rains all the time, and they have to walk through the mud, and they don't have e-mail to say 'Oh, I'll be there a little late,' and they don't have cell phones to call and say 'It's raining today, I'm not coming,' and yet they can still get everyone together for a community meeting."
This close-knit community in Siuna welcomed the American students with open arms, explained senior Doug Glandon. The Siunans "didn't judge us as wealthy Westerners or foreigners. [They] just kind of appreciated the fact that we were there, just trying to learn something."
The Tufts students felt especially welcomed and accepted when attending a Nicaraguan church service. "The community had saved us the front rows, and they involved us in everything they were doing, even though they knew that we couldn't understand everything," Shipow said. "There was one part where we were all singing, and we were all holding hands with the Nicaraguan community member next to you, and they were very inclusive."
The students also learned that money doesn't always buy happiness. The trip "broke this preconception that I had that living a happy lifestyle required a certain amount of money," Glandon said. "What they want for themselves is not to be wealthy, not to have tons of things, but just little things, like improving their agricultural techniques."
Students saw that even living in poverty, the Nicaraguans' sense of community and family kept them happy. "The houses looked like the shacks you would see in a National Geographic magazine," Katzman said.
Despite inferior living conditions according to American standards, the Nicaraguans were content. "They know that they can live their lives perfectly happy and they can still be proud of everything they're doing," Shipow said.
Pileggi got a sense of this happiness after a heart-to-heart talk with a Nicaraguan man who had been hospitalized after his appendix burst. "He was unable to work for a few months, probably like six," Pileggi said.
"This man has children and grandchildren and a debt to pay because of the surgery, and he was just so wonderfully sincere, and so happy to be around his kids and be home [even though] he has an awful lot to feel somewhat desperate about," Pileggi said.
"It was a real source of optimism about the possibilities of global development," Glandon said about the Nicaraguans' happiness. "They can be happy without all the materialism of the West."
