Students across the country are making travel plans for the upcoming spring break, but contrary to popular belief, not all are heading out just to have fun.
Four Cal State Long Beach nursing students will be traveling to the island of Hispaniola to volunteer in poverty-stricken communities in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
“Haiti has received an outpouring of food and water, and now is the time that disease is setting in,” said Amber Hann, community service director for the CSULB chapter of the California Nursing Students’ Association.
All four students — Hann, Dorie Cook, Heather Short and Melody Lawson — are members of the CNSA, which organized the trip in conjunction with International Service Learning. Their nine-day trip, called the 2010 Haitian Orphan Project, will allow them to medically assist Haitian refugees.
ISL is an organization that works with hundreds of mostly American universities, sending teams of students to assist underprivileged people in the developing world.
According to its Web site, ISL was founded by the Rev. Michael Birnbaum after he witnessed a group of college students snap photographs and leave while workers in a banana field in Costa Rica struggled to set up tents in the rain.
“I know that all of us plan to do many more trips like this,” Hann said. “We all have a heart for helping those in need.”
They will arrive in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and work their way towardHaiti. The nurse’s will be working in clinics, as well as orphanages.
The Dominican Republic and Haiti both experienced centuries of imperial rule at the hands of the Spanish and the French, and are currently mired with poverty. According to the CIA World Factbook, in 2004 42.2 percent of people in the Dominican Republic lived below the poverty line.
In 2003, 80 percent of people in Haiti live below the poverty line, and 54 percent live in “abject” poverty, making Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, according to the factbook.
Conditions were made worse on Jan. 12 by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that left much of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince in ruins.
Though traveling as part of an organization, the student nurses must pay approximately $2,000 out of pocket. Fundraising efforts are underway to help alleviate the financial burden.
A table will be set up in front of the University Library today to accept donations. People can also donate online at cnsahaititrip.bbnow.org. The students are accepting medical and other supplies as well.
According to their donation Web site, the students have collected about $5,500 thus far.
The nurses would appreciate anybody willing to donate, though Hann conceded.
She said, “Us poor nursing students are rich compared to those living in Haiti.”