Page 6 The Clarion March 30. 1989
Mexican Odyssey
TheBC work team kicks off new service program
The world stands out on either side,
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky, —
No higher than the soul is high...”
“Ren(ucence"
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Brevard College’s first “Project Inside-
Out” work team returned March 11 from
Durango, Mexico, after a week of building
on both construction projects and interna
tional relations.
Brevard sophomore Ann Whitmire
echoed the sentiments of the entire crew
when she said, “It was the most incredible
experience of my life.”
The 12 students accompanied by four
faculty-staff adults spent the March 3-11
Spring Break repairing an old school gym,
teaching English to Mexican children, and
renovating the home of an 89-year-old
woman.
They say they learned, among other
things, that love is the international
K
V
The BC students adopted “Little Grannie.** Senora Lucita
Hendersonville freshman Penni Todd combs the 89-year old woman*s’
language. According to Hendersonville
freshman Penni Todd, “You don’t have to
be able to speak someone’s language to
show you love them.”
They witnessed a land of contrasts: grin
ding poverty next to opulent homes, chok
ing air pollution next to the most beautiful
courtyard gardens in even the poorest of
homes, and the open use and sale of co
caine on the streets in contrast to the
sheltered lives of the elementary age
schoolchildren they taught.
“You could never learn this from a tex
tbook at college, could you?” said work
supervisor Mike Dodson reflectively.
Director of Public Information Jock
Lauterer agreed. “It was total cultural im
mersion,” he said. “Even those of us who
couldn’t speak the language came back
spouting Spanish.”
That was one of the purposes of Project
Inside-Out—to give a real education
“from inside the classroom to outside to
the real world,” said Project Coordinator
Sybil Dodson.
The Mexico work trip was but the first of
what BC administrators hope to be a
broad-based community and international
service program aimed at two things:
enhancing the total education of Brevard
College students and making a difference
in this world.
The trip kicked off BC’s new service
component which will required of I990’s in
coming freshmen class.
As the BC work team departed, they
heard President Billy Greer tell them,
“you’re making history for BC. Someday
you’ll be able to look back and tell your
grandchildren you were the start of all
this.”
Into Another World
After flying out of Asheville on March 3,
the work crew arrived the next day by car
in the 400-year-old, high mountain desert
city of Durango (pop. 500,000).
From then on, the BC students found
themselves immersed in a week of un
forgettable experiences — beginning with
the Sunday church service during which
BC saxophonist Anthony West played
“Ode to Joy” on the sax in the echoing,
tall-ceilinged church. That was followed
by Robin “Wick” Wicker delivering the
sermon in English — translated line by
line in turn by pastor J. Milton Velasco.
Wick told the parishioners, “I know at
the end of the week it’ll be hard to leave —
but we all had the thirst to come.”
There at Durango’s little Methodist
church, the visiting American students
sang “Amazing Grage,” only to have the
congregation respond by singing the well-
known hymm back loudly in Spanish.
Afterwords, someone observed that it
reminded them of the musical exchange
from Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the
Third Kind.”
The afternoon was spent visiting and
singing with the church youth, and taking
a walking tour of the city. Monday morn
ing the work team met two challenges in
“Eye! Eye! Boca Raton, Fla.fl
in Durango, Mexico. (BC photosU
the same place: they were welcome to Col-
egio MacDonnell by the scores of
schoolchildren they would be working witt
— and this, coming at an assembly in the
same gym they would be renovating.
Even the school’s American director,
Kenneth Darg, called it “that hwribte,
primitive auditorium.” The thick plaster
walls had faded to the color of sallow dirl.
The makeshift fabric ceiling had been
riped away totally. Thus, the BC wort
team found themselves in a large, dark,?
bonechilling cave where most of the light
came from sunshafts piercing through
several high tiny windows offering little
hope of light or warmth.
The transforming began with music,
spirit and then sheer grit. *
First, it started with the children. Fann
ing out all over the courtyard-style school
(a transformed monastery), the BC
students taught English, sang songs and
played games with the Mexican school
children who so thoroughly adopted their
American visitors that they t>eseiged them
for autographs.
But the old gym had a harder heart to
warm.
Someone suggested that “Dirty Danc
ing” veteran Penni Todd warm up the
group with aerobic dancing accompanied
by American rock and roll (a rarity there)
on the tape deck. Then, the group pitcbci .
in and for three, long muscle-weary days
slapped, daubed and rolled multiple coats
of paint on the old walls and built part of a
lattice-style ceiling.
It was bone-numbing, grubby work in 3
depressing cave of a gym. But the BC
students were more than up to the
challenge. Said Baker, La., freshman Dan
ny Miller brightly, “I came to get dirty
Down and Dirty
It got down and dirty midweek when the
school’s American director announced
that the gym would have to be entirely re
painted because he didn’t like the color the
team had used — until it was pointed oul
that it was he who had ordered the paint
color. After he publicly apologized to the