Global service-learning, as has been suggested on this website and in the broader literature, operates in a tension. Student-learning and university goals often operate on short-term time horizons and course-based or academic-year commitments. Community development is a multi-year, ongoing process, while the achievement of social justice is an aim that – if it can even be thought of in time-bound ways – operates at the level of historic thinking. One of the ironies at the heart of this tension is that social justice and community development thinking often do no resonate until individuals have had transformational global service-learning experiences (Kiely, 2004).

Increasingly, researchers are examining transformational learning among faculty in addition to students. In the open and honest reflective post below, Finance Professor Eric Eller and English Professor Katrina Farren-Eller share how an initial effort to respond to the post-earthquake crisis in Haiti moved them into long-term commitment to a development initiative there. This is transformational learning. Vitally, they partnered from the outset with an existing development organization in Haiti. Readers interested in how some colleges and universities in the region near the District of Columbia have organized for long-term, sustained development partnership in Haiti may also enjoy reviewing the Haiti Compact Model.

Eric Eller:

When the January 12, 2010 earthquake hit Haiti, I had just finished my third semester at a small, private, Midwestern university. Even though I had taught a number of extensive short-term, international travel courses at previous institutions (from multiple Executive MBA travel courses to Russia to a number of undergraduate courses to destinations including Egypt and Cuba and the Galapagos Islands) and had also co-led two Alternative Spring Break experiences (working with an orphanage in Puerto Rico and with Habitat for Humanity in southern California), my new institution had no history of international travel courses since it had transitioned from a January term to a May term several years prior. However, with the Haitian government eventually reporting over 300,000 killed and over 1 million citizens left homeless (out of a population under 10 million), I felt the urge to do something.

It was about the second week in March when I approached those who were then in the positions of VP of International Programs, Chief Academic Officer, and President with what seems, in retrospect, to be an overly-ambitious goal—to put together and deliver a course for May term 2010 which would include travel to Haiti to work in reconstruction efforts. With their encouragement, I began the process which included convincing academic governance committees to approve the course (on an experimental basis) even when May term courses had already been approved months before. The key to the whole thing was to find a partner in Haiti to assist. A colleague in the International Programs office, Kit Klepinger, with the support of the VP of International Programs, readily agreed to help me with both the logistics of the program and in delivering the course. Within days of our initial conversation, Kit had done internet research to find a potential partner. She found Partners in Development (PID), an NGO based in Massachusetts that had had a presence in Haiti since 1990. It was just the type of organization we were looking for in that its mission focused on helping the “poorest of the poor” and providing them the support to lift themselves beyond a life of poverty and charity.

We contacted PID and started making plans for working with them while also working to ease the concerns of our institution’s insurance provider (having PID as a partner was key, given their long-term experience in Haiti). And amidst all of this, we had to recruit and find students to take the course and pay the fee and we had less than two weeks to do it. Eventually, we had ten students sign up for the class and travel to Haiti with us. It was quite an eclectic bunch. The 10 students (5 female) represented 5 countries (US, Malaysia, UK, Vietnam, Maldives) and majors from across the campus.

Having PID handling the logistics for us on-ground in Haiti was invaluable. I can’t imagine how else we could have made it happen. We met a number of people on the plane to Haiti who were going there with no plan and no destination…they just felt compelled to go help, so they got on a plane without knowing who they would work with or where they would go or even where they would stay.

Our university president had previous experience in professional firefighting and rescue and his main worry when I approached him with the idea was that we needed to make sure we were in a position to help instead of actually adding to the burden of those working in Haiti. It was excellent advice.

May term lasts three weeks, so we spent the first 5-7 days in the classroom, learning about Haitian culture and history and economic issues, going through team-building exercises (including working together on research projects about Haiti), and preparing ourselves the best we could for the devastation we would encounter in Haiti (note: we could prepare, intellectually, but you can’t really comprehend what you are about to hear and feel and smell and live). Then we were off to Haiti. Arriving at the airport, we started to get a sense of the damage. The main terminal and air traffic control structure were still unusable (it was only three years later we were able to enter through the main terminal).

PID picked us up at the airport in a tap-tap (basically a multi-colored open air truck that is a main source of transportation in Port-au-Prince) and even on the ride to the PID compound in Blanchard (a village just a few miles from the airport) our senses were overwhelmed as we drove past the seemingly endless tent cities that had been erected wherever enough space existed. We saw some damage on our drive, but the epicenter of the earthquake had been south of the capital. It was only later, when we drove downtown, that we saw the true extent of the devastation. Four months after the earthquake, it seemed that very little had been done to clear the rubble of building after building that had just crumbled or pancaked upon itself. The realization that beneath that rubble, there were still many of the dead was overwhelming, as was the sight of person after person suffering from severe malnutrition. The PID compound includes a free medical clinic and we were able to see dozens and dozens of patients every day who came for medical care, whether their conditions were related to the earthquake or not.

Our nightly debriefing sessions were, needless to say, quite emotional. We were working in an area that hadn’t seen much earthquake damage (all of the PID-built houses in the area remained sound through the event), but we still saw the impact. Our group mostly worked to dig foundations and carry rocks and concrete blocks to build simple residences for those in need, but some of the group worked in tearing down a non-PID built house that had suffered extensive damage in the earthquake. The family who lived there was now living in a small tent beside their unusable home. The feeling of seeing their happiness as we tore down the remnants of their house (since they knew it was a step toward rebuilding and that PID was going to help them re-build) is difficult to verbalize (as is the feeling of going back in future years to see them living in their re-built home and getting hugs as they remembered our group’s assistance from that time).

We were living in tents ourselves on the PID compound with just one bucket of water each a day to bathe and yet we could see how others were living with far less…without clean water (we got ours through use of a solar filter)…without food (we worked with PID staff in preparing our meals, which gave us plenty to eat)…and with very little hope. The work was physically exhausting in the Haitian heat and humidity, but it paled in comparison to the mental exhaustion we experienced. It was actually on our break day that the mental exhaustion hit. PID took us to a beach for our “rest” day on Sunday. We stopped at a church along the way. We relaxed. And then on the way home we stopped at a place on the side of a mountain, along the main road north from Port-au-Prince, and it was there we were told we were standing where 200,000 Haitians had been buried in a mass grave in an effort to avoid the spread of disease after the earthquake. We had seen the news stories of bodies loaded in dump trucks and knew that places like this were used, but we were standing there on the side of the mountain overlooking the Caribbean. The tough physical work of the previous few days had in some ways insulated us from the emotional turmoil….we were too tired to really think of it. But on that day of rest those emotions came rushing in (and they still do, years later, as I type this).

Here’s the thing: I had taught a number of short-term travel courses in my career, but I had never returned to the same place in consecutive years. I was always looking for the new adventure. But I have taught courses that included travel to Haiti each May term since 2010. What students learn and experience and what I have learned and experienced in Haiti is so much more than has happened in my other travel classes…and it is learning and experience of Haiti and Haitians, but the International Service Learning aspect of the course means that what we learn is very much about ourselves. What is important to us. What we do and should value. Yes, we make a difference in Haiti…every year I go back I can see that…the houses we have had a hand in building…the families that have a safe shelter to call home…but I also see my own growth and the growth in my students and colleagues who have accompanied me in the years since. I can’t imagine any other experience having such a profound impact in such a short time.

Now I have moved again to another college. And this one has January term and I am making plans for Haiti and a class for January 2016. But that means I won’t get to go in May 2015 after five consecutive May terms. However, a former colleague who went to Haiti with me twice will be teaching a class at his new institution that will include travel back to Haiti in May. And a number of student alums of the course continue to sponsor children through PID. And I see many of the alums continuing to give of themselves through service around the world and in their communities. This is what International Service Learning achieves.

Katrina Farren-Eller:

I joined Eric on several of the subsequent student travel trips to Haiti. Being faculty members responsible for the entire trip–from curriculum committee advocacy, recruiting students and other faculty, fund raising, travel logistics, and classroom preparation to being in the trenches with students hauling large rocks, buckets filled with cement, and digging foundations to supporting them (and each other) as we work through our emotional responses (which take many forms, including grief and sadness, anger, and drama)—gives us our own incredible learning experience. I had spent the previous 11 years of my career exploring with students the ways in which our ideological constructs of otherness and difference shape personal and cultural narrative identities, but it is one thing to examine these concepts on an intellectual level and quite another to live them. Living them is messy, difficult, and heartbreaking, especially in an extreme situation such as Haiti.

Our classroom preparation for Haiti is intense, with students studying a large text on the history of Haiti, and then doing in-depth research and presentations on topics such as the economic, religious, and political systems currently in place. We ask students to examine their personal responses to what they are learning and connect those responses to their own cultural constructs and the ways in which they view and move through the world. The reflection papers they write upon their return to the United States pull together classroom information with their actual experience, including insights gained from the nightly debriefing sessions, and indicate a level of personal transformation that cannot be replicated in just a classroom setting. Some students actually change majors and many have gone on to pursue internships or graduate work in fields such as non-profit management or social development.

Like our students we travel with, being asked to question my own narrative identity and cultural constructs has been both personally and professionally transformative, allowing me to delve more deeply into these topics in my classes. I have personal examples that I can call on in these conversations, and I’ve noticed that students not only respond in a more engaged manner, but many of these students end up traveling with us. There’s a cyclical nature between my own learning experiences outside the classroom to the learning that takes place within the classroom that results in an ever deepening and enriching understanding of my responsibilities as a professor, a citizen, and as a participating member of the human community.

Eric Eller, Associate Professor of Finance at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, has extensive experience teaching short-term travel courses for credit at both the graduate and undergraduate level. By choosing destinations ranging from Cuba to Egypt, the Galapagos, or Russia, he creates opportunities for students to stretch themselves beyond what they thought they could do, which encourages deep reflection and cultural learning for the students and for himself. This is furthered through ongoing research into aspects of microfinance in urban Haiti.

For as long as she can remember, Katrina Farren-Eller, Assistant Professor of English at Upper Iowa University, has always been interested in why people believe what they believe and how they come to do what they do. Ultimately, it is about the ways in which our beliefs affect how we relate to and treat each other, especially others who live so differently than we do. Traveling and experiencing difference is one of the best ways to question the stories and judgments she tells about herself and others. She has come to find out that what matters most is the humanity we all share in common, not the differences that threaten to divide us.