Students take field trip to poverty

from The McDowell News

By ANDY FERGUSON

Living in poverty is a daily - and sometimes hourly - struggle for people around the globe.

It’s full of backbreaking work, poor food, exposure to the elements, disease and injustice, as a group of McDowell students and teachers learned firsthand last week.

Using money from a Learn and Serve grant, more than two-dozen students and several staff members from the Accelerated Learning Center, Leap Academy and Early College spent last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville, Ark. living the lives of people from around the world and here in the U.S. who suffer from poverty.

The ranch’s Global Village allows its guests to experience the living conditions in areas where the nonprofit Heifer International provides aid, according to its Web site.

And it placed the folks from McDowell in the thick of struggling to live with practically nothing.

"It was tough. It wasn’t your traditional field trip," said Marcie Lewis, director of alternative education.

"It allowed our kids a real learning experience of how others live. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity (and) they capitalized on it."

ALC student Megan Tassin said she and her peers were aware of poverty when they arrived at the Heifer Ranch, but experiencing it revealed the extremes of living it.

"When you actually go and live like that, it’s 10 times worse than you thought it would be," she said.

The students and teachers divided into groups called tribes and took up residence at the ranch as citizens of Mozambique, Tibet or the Mississippi Delta in different economic classes. They had to give up practically everything modern, including electronics, cell phones and makeup.

"If they didn’t have it in the other country, you didn’t have it," said student Daniel Diodato.

They began their experience in a simulated airport dealing with difficult customs agents, luggage thieves, quarantines and confusing instructions, an ordeal that lasted about two hours.

Then it was off to their homes where they had to collect firewood, learn to cook and eat with what they had, work to earn money and then try to barter and trade for extremely expensive food. Some were assigned the difficulty of being illiterate and had to depend on others to help them with tasks like managing money.

The folks living in lower-class Mozambique slept in mud huts with dirt floors, and like everyone else, dealt with nighttime temperatures in the teens. Their primary meal was fried vegetables and cornmeal and because they had no utensils, they ate with their hands.

They were the poorest of the tribes, explained students Tyler Buckner and John Church.

"Basically, we didn’t have anything," Buckner said.

And then they lost what little they had in a simulated flood. They were consigned to a refugee camp and quarantined for diseases, Church said. It gave folks in the other tribes the opportunity to send them aid.

The upper class of Mozambique came through the flood OK because they lived in concrete-block houses, but student Danylle Cupp said that was one of the few advantages. They had a bit more food, money and livestock, but their accommodations were still so cold that their water froze inside the houses.

For the tribes in Tibet, the work was much easier, Diodato said. They gathered firewood, cooked and tended their yaks, which were actually two large goats. They slept in large, round tents with wooden floors and a small wood stove for heat, but the paper-thin walls did little to hold the heat in.

Their meals consisted mainly of soup, noodles and meat, and the food itself was a learning experience.

"The lesson (ranch staff members) were trying to teach us is how poverty affects people’s diets and how, over time, it could potentially kill you," Diodato explained.

The Mississippi Delta tribe resided in an old rusty school bus with a kitchen added on. They had a recliner to sit in, Tassin said, but no heat, no electricity and basically nothing to do.

When she arrived, the ranch staff told Tassin she was sick and neither she nor her caretaker could work, making it harder on the others. Their main meal consisted of black-eyed peas, cold collard greens and cornbread.

Now that they’ve learned firsthand what it’s like to devote most of their time simply to survival, the students and teachers who visited the Heifer Ranch plan to do something for those who must live it every day. They plan to create a fund-raising presentation and raise money to help Heifer International.

Instead of just contributing supplies or funds to people living in poverty, Heifer reaches out through development, ALC students said. They provide livestock, supplies for farming and other things that can help impoverished people sustain themselves.