FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - Here are your choices for college spring break. You could spend the whole time lying on the beach with friends. Or you could work the midnight shift feeding people, standing on your feet for eight hours every day.
For 15 students at Florida International University, the choice was clear. They will work for the Salvation Army, feeding workers who are clearing Ground Zero, the site where the twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed on Sept. 11. The group departed Saturday for New York and will be feeding workers through Friday.
"I was super excited to go," said Maria Victoria Llantada, 21, an FIU junior who found out about the Ground Zero trip from her friend Alex Zarut, a trip organizer.
Zarut hatched the idea of helping at Ground Zero shortly after Sept. 11, but then the relief effort was swamped with volunteers so his overtures were discouraged. Later he got a tip from a Red Cross worker that the Salvation Army needed people to serve food at its round-the-clock feeding tents for workers. The FIU group is being filmed for a segment of the CBS documentary show "48 Hours."
The purpose of alternative spring break programs is to connect willing college students with rewarding volunteer experiences. Programs vary widely, from house-building for Habitat for Humanity in Georgia to gang prevention in Detroit to work with children in Peru. Other students opt for adventure through trips to India, Thailand or U.S. national parks.
And if the spring break volunteers counteract a prevailing stereotype - air-headed sorority girls and hard-drinking frat boys - that would be a good thing too.
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Llantada's sorority, Alpha Xi Delta, collects money and works for children's charities. The money they make at their spring formal dance also goes to philanthropic use.
Some would say that spending 25 hours or so cooped up together on a bus would be enough of a bonding experience for anybody. On the contrary, group organizers say the FIU group needs to bond before they climb on the bus so their camaraderie will hold up through the tedium of the trip, as well as the long workdays.
The group and two faculty advisers have been meeting regularly for weeks in a variety of team-building exercises and get-togethers. The big moment came on March 3, when the group did teamwork exercises on a ropes course on FIU's north campus. For seven hours, the group solved problems as a team.
"It was incredible," Llantada said. "At the beginning, nobody wanted to do it, but we came out loving each other. It was cool to see how we respect each other."
FIU students have gone on alternative spring breaks since 1995. Zarut, 21, a junior from Miami, learned about alternative spring break three years ago from a Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity brother. Some of Zarut's friends were headed to Panama City and Cancun, and he made the decision to try a spring break alternative in part because he was short on money.
Since then, he has done gang prevention work in Detroit and counseled at-risk students in New Jersey.
The experiences, he said, "totally changed my direction."
With a major in criminal justice, Zarut's goal is to work as a special agent for the U.S. Customs Service.
He bristles a bit at the frat-boy stereotype. But he also does not want to leave the impression that the alternative spring break group is a bunch of humorless do-gooders.
"I like to party, but I also like to get involved. You'll see the same people partying one day and doing community service another day. That's how it is."
Knight Ridder Tribune
