Emily Stout: Student Report from 2014 Alternative Spring Break in Jamaica
When my friends heard I was travelling to Jamaica for spring break, so many of them replied with, “Wow! I’m so jealous! It’s beautiful there; you’ll have so much fun!” I understood what they meant—they were picturing warm sandy beaches and the cool turquoise ocean on the edges of the island. However, that wasn’t the experience that awaited me in Mandeville that week.
I worked with a group of five other students from UT on a construction project, where we helped build a restroom facility for the Richmond Primary School. The current bathroom is falling apart and is dangerous for the children to use, as it is a distance away from the main school building. The tools we had to work with were simple; we used shovels and hoes to mix concrete (no cement mixer for us!), pickaxes to break up the rocky ground, and our hands to move stones and boulders from the building area.
The work was by no means easy. We came home to our host families each afternoon with tension in our backs from constantly bending over to mix and spread the concrete, as well as in our wrists and shoulders from cutting steel rebar with a handsaw. However, the aches and pains soon faded, and we were left with a sense of pride and accomplishment in our work.
The feeling of camaraderie at the work site was unique. We worked with other Projects Abroad volunteers from Belgium, Germany, and Denmark, and we soon learned to join in the banter with them and with our supervisor, Percy. Calls of, “Mix it up, turn it around, move it in, turn it over…”,”More stone!”, “Yeah mahn!”, and “Coming, Percy…” became common background noises, blending with the laughter and chatter of the students playing in the school’s courtyard.
In a way, the cultures represented by our construction team were remarkably different; at the same time, though, it was incredibly interesting how similar they were. It sounds cheesy, but it’s true – serving the kids at that school really did bring us together in a way that might not have happened otherwise. By the end of the week, we had helped fill the entire footer with cement and stone and had begun building the wall on one side of the bathroom. We were so proud of our work and, simultaneously, so tired and ready for a break.
Friday, the last day of our trip, was our “fun day.” We traveled to the Appleton Estate rum distillery, where we got to see the entire process from sugar cane to the final product. As a chemical engineer, I thought this was really cool to see firsthand.
Next came a trip to YS Falls, which was absolutely beautiful and so relaxing after a tough week. We spent the whole day with a group of girls who had been working on another project in Mandeville throughout the week. They were all from colleges in the northern part of the States. The cultural differences were again obvious; though maybe not as extreme as they had been with our European coworkers, they became irrelevant as we got to know the girls.
That seemed to have been a common theme throughout the week: Although we came in contact with people from different backgrounds, different experiences, and different life perspectives, we were all the same. We were (are) all human, and we were simply there to serve each other.
My experience in Jamaica was one of familiarity (I ate a LOT of rice, beans, and
chicken) and one of newness (I tasted cow’s foot). I experienced things that I understood, like the enjoyment of small talk with chatty cab drivers as they drove us around their city; I also experienced many things that were difficult to wrap my mind around, like the struggle of kids having to use an unsafe restroom at an elementary school.
If I can be so bold, I think we’re all a little sheltered here at home. We see the combination of poverty and beauty in places like Jamaica on television and on the Internet, and if you’re like me, you tend to brush the images off and keep moving forward in your own business, your own worries, and your own life. I think an experience like working in Mandeville, Jamaica, is one that we all should have. We need to be pushed out of our comfort zones in a way that gives us a desire to serve each other, and at the same time, in a way that reminds us of all the things we have to be thankful for here at UT. We need a different perspective to better appreciate where we are.
Jamaica wasn’t exactly what I had expected, but I’m glad that it wasn’t. It was an experience that I am very thankful for, and one that I won’t soon forget.