Nine Butler students went to Haiti over spring break through the organization Help Heal Haiti in order to make a deeper connection with the country for which they fundraise.
This service trip is the kind of life-changing experience everyone should try to have. Being faced with the realities of life in a third-world country brings perspective to the problems we think we have in our own lives.
The students who went on the trip focused on improving water access for citizens who have to walk miles just to bathe, cook and drink.
In America, we can’t imagine what this would be like. We have access to water everywhere we look.
We can hear about the challenges Haitians face, but it’s impossible to understand just how difficult their lives are until we see them in person.
This is why service trips are so valuable. The experience can help expand a student’s ideas about compassion for others. Help Heal Haiti is a great cause, and its members can now tell other Butler students exactly why they fundraise.
According to the group’s page on Facebook, “Help Heal Haiti desires to expose both students and faculty alike to the reality of poverty, malnutrition, disaster and disease in Haiti and, more importantly, to challenge them to be a part of the movement to bring hope and permanent solutions to a broken nation,”
Service trips do exactly that. They expose students to challenges they might not otherwise experience.
Bringing students to Haiti to serve its citizens is the Butler Way.
The Butler Way “demands commitment, denies selfishness, accepts reality, yet seeks improvement every day while putting the team above self,” according to the Butler athletics website.
Service trips fit every part of this mission statement perfectly. Butler should try to create more opportunities for these trips.
These nine dedicated students did not get to tan on the beach or sleep in every day for Spring Break, but the service trip has a different kind of reward.
They helped impoverished people and learned the value of selflessness.