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Introduction

Social Work students from Grand Valley State University travel to El Salvador for two weeks to learn about the social issues that exist as well as the social programs that have been created in another part of the world. They visit a variety of social service agencies, both governmental as well as non-governmental, to learn a broader perspective of social injustice. Each student spends several days volunteering a mini-internship with a specific agency. This gives them the opportunity to view the agency as well as the social issue at hand (whether it be related to poverty, orphans, sex workers, youth, community organization, gangs, or women’s issues) and to begin to understand the action being taken and progress being made toward that specific issue. The students also share a variety of other experiences such as the Workers’ Day March, which is a celebration and demonstration of organized laborer. The entire country shuts down and empties into the streets for a demonstration of community solidarity, demanding basic human rights for laborers and criticizing governmental and corporate forces that stand in the way of such rights. Later in the trip, the students move to a remote village in the countryside with no running water, paved roads, or indoor toilets. Here they spend a long weekend learning about the civil war including the death squads, massacres and mass rapes, and their effects on a small village. They learn of the flight of this particular village into Honduras where the people learned they could only rely on each other. In what ended up being more than a decade spent in refugee camps, the people of Santa Marta become a community in the truest sense of the word. The lessons learned during that time of trauma and hardship are still evident today, years after the villagers moved back to their village.

I have created this website to chronicle the experiences of students throughout this unique adventure in El Salvador. It is one thing to read about places and what happens there, it is another to look into the journals including personal thoughts and feelings, of those who were there. Though one can not understand the depth and breadth of such a journey without actually having the experience, I hope that this site will help excite some of the passion and interest in this El Salvador trip for those of you that have never been, that is shared by those of us who have. I have included an FAQ section in order to present factual answers to important questions as well as recommendations made by previous participants. The pinnacle of this site, however, remains the Journal Entries section, wherein past participants share excerpts of their journals kept while in they were actually in El Salvador. Enjoy!

Images of El Salvador