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!