by Brian Cognato > University of Maryland, College Park | photos Ryder Haske

We’re all frauds, college students. We pretend, in our stories and in our Facebook pictures, to be mindless party animals, unholy love children of Tara Reid and Bluto Blutarsky. Sometimes, though, we actually care.
Witness alternative spring break.

An “alternative” spring break, or ASB, is one devoted to something other than general debauchery, usually community service. Schools sponsor these trips in every season, but they’re most popular in the spring, possibly as a direct reaction to Girls Gone Wild.

You can find ASB programs at any area school. For example, the University of Maryland sent more than 200 students on thirteen different trips in 2008. In recent years, ASBers have done everything from spending nights sleeping on D.C. city buses to learn about the homeless to helping gather harvests in the African rainforest. Even MTV, the world’s leading purveyor of spring break hedonism, hosts a website with ASB resources.

James Madison University offers a whopping twenty-five different trips, and still has to ration out spots with a lottery. Heather Stinson, a senior who first took an alternative break to Mississippi in 2006, was so impressed with the experience that she and her friends actually organized their own ASB in 2008, helping at various organizations near Stinson’s hometown of Annapolis, Maryland.
“We did it ourselves because we didn’t want to take opportunities away from others at JMU, and we wanted to do [a project] with our friends and incorporate our faith into it,” says Stinson, a non-denominational Christian.

Over the course of a week, the group worked with several organizations, including Habitat for Humanity in Baltimore and The Lighthouse Shelter in Annapolis, an emergency sanctuary for the homeless that offers beds, meals, showers and more.

“We painted, scraped, hauled, built, and some guys helped haul a washer through a roof – [it was] really cool,” Stinson explains. “A lot of us are music majors, so we
visited a number of shut-ins and nursing homes and one hospital and played music for people.”

American University seniors and twins Sarah and Rachel Beistel went farther afield for their first alternative break—to Guatemala in March 2006—but their program was just as gritty. The Beistel’s woke at 6 a.m. most mornings, hiked an hour up a mountain and picked coffee beans for the rest of the day. A battle for campus retail spacebetween Starbucks and Pura Vida, a fair-trade-only coffee organization operated for charitable benefit, inspired them to volunteer.
“Every time I go to the store and I buy a Pura Vida coffee, I know where this money is going,” explains Sarah. “I met these people, saw their schools, hit a volleyball on the beach with their children.” They decided, of their own free will, to go back and do it all again a year later.

But it isn’t only comments like these that threaten to make college students look respectable. Rachel can rattle off a terrifying array of pro-fair-trade information, mentioning, among other things, that buying more fair-trade coffee (coffee grown sustainably and sold at a price that guarantees farmers living wages) would cost Starbucks only about an extra $0.20 per pound, compared to their profits of nearly $9.00 per pound. The Beistels agreed to meet me at a Starbucks for an interview on one condition: I buy fair-trade coffee.

Unlike the majority of ASB programs, the twins’ trip allowed a little bit of typical spring break conduct; alcohol consumption was not banned completely. For some schools, however, an alcohol ban is one of the major tenets of ASBs: it allows the students to experience a true “alternative” to a typically booze-filled collegiate spring break. For others it’s only an enabling factor— Break Away’s 2008 Program of the Year at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, states that it bans alcohol to create “a more memorable and productive trip,” a point that’s hard to argue. Most ASBers don’t mind the sacrifice anyway.

Says University of Maryland senior Meaghan Fortune, who took an anti-poverty ASB to Chicago in 2007, “We were so busy all of the time with projects or outings that [drinking] didn’t cross my mind. And we had fun just walking around the city and going to a jazz club, blues club, and even had a scavenger hunt one night.”

Maybe more than proving us frauds, ASB just shows that college students have the capacity for both reckless self-destruction and reckless idealism.  We might have to work extra hard during the semester to keep our reps up, but that’s okay. To quote no less an authority than Senator Blutarsky himself, “When the going gets tough…”

DC ALTERNATIVE SPRING BREAKS

If you’re interested in an alternative break, contact your school’s community service office, and remember, you don’t have to wait until spring. Here are just a handful of places students went in 2008.

American University: The Thailand-Burma Border

Students confronted one of the world’s worst remaining bad-guy regimes, meeting with activists and organizers trying to promote peace, human rights and democracy in Burma.  Other noteworthy sights included breathtaking landscapes, ancient Buddhist temples and, if the rumors are true, John Rambo.

Catholic University: Kingston, Jamaica

Students visited a Jamaica far different from the tourist haven a typical spring-breaker would see, pitching in at St. Patrick’s Foundation, which caters to the poverty-racked city’s children and elderly. CUA students can at least find comfort in the fact that even Kingston, Jamaica might be safer than Rhode Island Ave. after midnight.

Georgetown University: El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico

Students experienced all parts of the border experience, from speaking to immigration guards to subsisting on the simple beans-and-rice diet of migrant workers, all while staying in Annunciation House, a safe haven for immigrants and refugees in the Mexican-American borderlands. Like a normal spring break, there was plenty of sand and sun. Water? That’s for wussies.

George Washington University: New Orleans, Louisiana

Students visited what has become the most popular — but possibly also still the most deserving — volunteer location in the United States, aiding hurricane relief efforts at Habitat-for-Humanity-affiliate Camp Hope. What it lacks in originality, it makes up for in gumbo.

University of Maryland: Boston, Massachusetts

Students helped expose underprivileged local children to the arts by volunteering with theaters, choirs and other cultural sites. Sure, it doesn’t have the shock value of Burma, but we all know the true sacrifice it takes to tolerate that accent for a whole freakin’ week.