Volunteering to Rebuild

“If you could measure the kindness of a people by the food they give you, then Croatians are the most generous people in the world,” said Jeff Bourgeois, Director of Student Programs, who led an Academic Travel to Croatia in the fall of 2008.

Jeff and the 14 Franklin College students who accompanied him on the trip, which was focused on service-learning and leadership, got to know local Croatians and sit around their kitchen tables to hear about their experiences. The students were given a personal view of the country, and that doesn’t always happen during traditional Academic Travels.  Although there are a few trips with service-learning days, the trip to Croatia was the first trip completely dedicated to service for the duration of the Academic Travel. The students were there to roll their sleeves up to help the local economy, in the process becoming friendly with the people, learning about Croatia and the impact of the war in the ’90s and eating – a lot. “We got a more realistic impression of the culture – we were not tourists,” said Alauna Yust ’09, an International Communications major who graduated in December.

After a day in Zagreb, the group travelled to far eastern Croatia to stay in the village of Dalj, which is located on the Danube River across from Serbia. “We went to places you wouldn’t necessarily go to,” said Caitlin Morris ’10, who claimed that as a vegetarian she had never eaten better than in Croatia. “To get to the town we stayed in we had to take a van  after coming to the end of the train line.”

In Dalj, they helped clean up a historic vineyard house and its grounds to prepare it for restoration as a working museum. They were taught how to make traditional mud bricks by a local man who claimed he hadn’t made bricks that way since the ’70s and would need 70,000 of them to repair the house. The students cleaned up old grapevine roots and tried their hands at making bricks. They also visited a castle that the town wanted to list as a tourist attraction in the area and brainstormed along with representatives of an NGO dedicated to rural development with whom they were working during their stay in Dalj.

One of the many challenges facing Croatia after the war that students witnessed is the loss of population in small towns like Dalj. Families who left during the war have not returned, and the group saw rows of empty houses. Only smaller clusters of an older generation of people have decided to return or remained during the war. While in eastern Croatia, the group visited the city of Vukovar, one of the towns hardest hit during the conflict, which remains virtually a collection of destroyed buildings and bullet-pocked houses.

Despite the destruction, the Croatians are determined to revive their country, and the students’ service work sparked a great amount of interest in the country. In fact, while in Croatia, the group was featured in four newspapers and two television shows including “Dobro Jutro, Hrvatska,” or “Good Morning, Croatia.” They met with mayors of small towns and were frequently approached by people on the street who wanted to talk to them and knew who they were and why they were there. “It was less about what we did and more about what we represented,” said Jeff.

The community groups the student met and worked with are trying hard to get Croatians to embrace the idea of community service and volunteering after the days of Communism left a bad association with social service in the minds of many.

The next destination was on the opposite side of the country on an island near the city of Zadar on the Dalmatian coast. In the town of Preko on the island of Ugljan, the students worked to clean the grounds of an old monastery to help the priests there with a project to remake part of the monastery into a hotel. The students pruned palm trees, trimmed bushes and cleared land to finish in two days what would have taken the priests a much longer time. “Everyone was excited to get their hands dirty,” said Alyssa Roland ’10.

In between the two large projects of the vineyard and monastery cleanup, students also visited a women’s traditional weaving collective which was struggling with cheap-cloth competition from China; an apple orchard to pick apples and make a local liquor, rakija, and vinegar; and an olive grove to pick olives and press them into olive oil. Every day also started with a large breakfast, and then the group would stop work for a full lunch. Many times at the end of the day the students would spend the evening around the dinner table talking to locals who had invited them over for a meal. “It was very satisfying,” said Alyssa. “The focus was on connecting with other people, and we got more of a sense of place than seeing the sights in every major city would have given us.”

Jeff’s background is strong in service learning and leadership, and he had organized many smaller student trips for the First-Year Experience so leading an Academic Travel was a natural extension of his interests and abilities. The trip took almost a year to plan and was constantly evolving as Jeff delved into the intricacies of service groups in Croatia. It was also difficult to gauge the progress on many projects to determine where the group would be needed once they arrived. As he planned, Jeff’s goal was for the trip to be as fulfilling as possible with a lot of interaction with local leadership and to provide varying experiences in different parts of the country.

By the end of their travels the group had spent almost every waking hour together for the two weeks working on community service projects and getting to know each other. Jeff was enthused by the success of the project and has proposed it again as an option for next year. Alauna concurred, saying, “It was a fantastic trip. I think they should have service leadership every semester.”

For more photos see our Photo Gallery.

February 2009