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More students choose work over wild for spring break

IMMOKALEE - First-year medical student Vanessa Escobar spent a recent week lancing a cyst on the wrist of a Haitian tomato packer, taking vitals on an infant born to a young Mexican farmworker and giving oxygen to a 6-year-old with severe asthma.

She wasn't on a medical rotation; she was on spring break.

"I did the spring break trips to Daytona Beach and South Beach," the soft-spoken 26-year-old said. "It was fun, but this is so much better. You learn so much."

The Florida State University-sponsored trip to Immokalee was a far cry from the all-night parties and bikini contests that have become a rite of passage for many college and graduate students. Yet educators say a small but growing number of students are choosing spring-break service over Seagram's and sunburns.

Elizabeth Hollander, head of Rhode Island-based Campus Compact, which encourages academic institutions to participate in civic life, said the boom in spring break service trips is part of a larger trend toward more community service at colleges and universities nationwide.

The nonprofit Break Away, which helps coordinate alternative spring breaks, estimated about 33,000 students were participating in such trips this year, up 15 percent from 2005.

"The nice thing about the spring break stuff is that it gives you a chance to do more concentrated work," Hollander said. Students often learn as much as if they were in a classroom.

Escobar said the trip to Immokalee gave her a chance to see whether she would like a career practicing medicine in a rural community. She also got coveted technical training. "That was the first time I got to stick a needle into someone," she said.

According to a 2005 survey by the University of California at Los Angeles, about one in four first-year college students said it was essential or very important for them to participate in community action programs, the highest percentage since 1996.

Given the vast need on the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, this year is a particularly strong one for spring break volunteer projects.

Tulane University in New Orleans organized its first spring break volunteer projects in 2005, sending about 40 students to places like the Everglades, Atlanta and Appalachia, according to Hamilton Simons-Jones, director of community service for the school.

This year, the school plans to host more than 600 students and is scrambling to help house about 10,000 students who are expected to come to New Orleans for post-Katrina cleanup, he said.

The five FSU students who spent the week sleeping on inflatable mattresses in the Marion E. Fether clinic in Immokalee said they learned lessons about the most basic challenges rural health care workers face.

"There are things you take for granted, like not worrying about fungus between your toes. That's a major problem for some people here," said 23-year-old Eboni Ellis.

Escobar said she was shocked and surprised by what she saw.

"You have 10 or 20 people living in a trailer, and all their clothes are hanging up to dry inside because they're afraid of people stealing them. When one person gets sick, everyone gets sick," she said. "It's not just about writing a prescription and people go out and buy it."

FSU's medical school, which opened its doors in 2001, also offers trips to the Texas-Mexico border and to Panama, and the trips abroad draw special interest.

Sometimes it seems students are more interested in going abroad than helping out at home, in part because it's exotic and because they hear more about the extreme conditions in Third World countries, said Arthur Fournier, associate dean for community health of University of Miami School of Medicine.

UM began sending medical students on spring break trips to Haiti 12 years ago. It now offers three trips a year. About a third of its students now go on the trip before they graduate, even though they don't get credit, he said.

"They know about the problems in Rwanda and Haiti, but they don't necessarily know about the problems in their own back yard," Fournier said.

[Last modified March 18, 2006, 02:30:29]