Since he returned from a service immersion trip to Guatemala in July, Ross Imbrock, a senior at St. John’s Jesuit High School, has been thinking twice about what he throws away.
“I need to finish this or else I’m wasting food. Or I need to save it,” he said, describing his thought process at the end of a snack or meal. “I felt obligated not to waste anything.”
Ross was one of 18 students in his class to spend a week serving a community that lives and scavenges for a meager income at a massive garbage dump outside Guatemala City, accounting for his newfound consciousness on waste and recycling. It’s one of numerous ways he and his classmates said the experience has stayed with them now that they’ve returned to their comparatively comfortable lives in Ohio.
As they now encourage their junior classmates to apply to serve in the same way this summer, they and others are reflecting on a landmark anniversary for the organization that coordinates their annual trips to Guatemala City. Ann Arbor-based International Samaritan, a nonprofit dedicated to raising the standard of living in garbage dump communities around the world, traces its roots and its expanding international footprint to St. John’s Jesuit.
It all goes back to a wrong turn in 1994, when a group of students were in the country with their school president, Father Don Vettese, to volunteer with another nonprofit. When they found themselves unexpectedly in front of the same garbage dump where the current crop of seniors just served – taking in the same sights and the same smells – they were moved to act.
“These kids told Father Vettese, ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’ ” said Phil Skeldon, the high school’s administrator of pastoral ministries and outreach.
International Samaritan this year sent 21 service teams, a total of 315 volunteers from high schools and colleges around the country, to serve garbage dump communities around the world, according to Andrew Pawuk, vice president of operations for the nonprofit. They address health care, housing, education and early childhood care in the intensely poor communities, he said, counting among their successes the individuals they see breaking cycles of poverty and securing jobs away from the dangerous dumps.
International Samaritan estimates that 2,000 recyclers, or “guajeros,” scavenge at the garbage dump in Guatemala, selling their recyclable finds for just dollars or cents a day.
International Samaritan is active in five countries aside from Guatemala, three of which they’ve only implemented since 2015, Mr. Pawuk said. That’s Honduras since 2007, Nicaragua since 2010, Ethiopia since 2015, Paraguay since 2017 and Jamaica since 2018.
Mr. Pawuk said they’re working to be active in a total of 10 countries within the next three to five years.
It’s a long way to come for an organization that started 25 years ago with a group of concerned teenage boys. Their experience at the dump that year so affected the students and their school president that they worked to raise funds and awareness upon returning to Toledo, an effort that eventually led to the establishment of Central American Ministries under Father Vettese, who would later leave the high school to head it. He retired in 2018.
Central American Ministries changed its name to International Samaritan in the 2010s, reflecting its growing international footprint.
St. John’s has consistently sent teams back to Guatemala through the nonprofit since its establishment, reflecting a particular commitment on the part of the high school to the garbage dump community.
Mr. Skeldon and Mallory Cabrera, the director of the World as One International Program at St. John’s Jesuit, who accompanies the students on their international trips, said they continue to see the experience moving the students toward action 25 years later. Often, they said, they see returnees become more engaged in service and advocacy locally.
“If we have a kid, for instance, who comes back from Guatemala and says, ‘I’m blessed to be born into the family and the place where I am,’ that’s not enough,” Mr. Skeldon said. “From a Jesuit perspective, it’s about creating people who are committed to doing justice. And these opportunities have been the seed to lead kids to advocate for people who are in the situations that they are, people who can’t speak for themselves.”
International Samaritan sets up its service immersion trips with both the impact on the garbage dump communities and the volunteers in mind, said Mr. Pawuk, who is himself an alumnus of St. John’s Jesuit. He participated in a different international service trip through the school in 1995.
He speaks from experience in saying that an experience like this as a teenager can broaden one’s worldview in a positive and productive way.
“It really opens one’s senses to the degree of poverty, witnessing and accompanying people who live on less than $2 a day,” he said. “And to witness the adverse living conditions of a person living under cardboard, plastic, with no running water, a dirt floor, will mark your heart forever and will be a memory that will never be forgotten. It really opens one to having a better understanding of the world, and it helps one to become a citizen of the world.”
Zayyan Ali is another senior who participated in this year’s trip to Guatemala. He listened to the same sort of presentation in his junior year that he and others recently shared with the current junior class, encouraging them to apply for this summer’s service immersion trip before a deadline later this month. He said he thought he knew what to expect.
“Everyone was like, ‘Oh, it’s terrible, it’s terrible, words can’t describe it,’ ” he said. “But that phrase really comes to life when you see it. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.”
His classmates described similar reactions, sharing stories of the conditions they saw, the people they met, and, often, the kindness of the children and adults who welcomed them into their homes to visit and into their school and nursery to volunteer.
In line with the intent of International Samaritan and St. John’s Jesuit, they said they’re still thinking about the experience months after they said good-bye to the community there. And the ways they feel its continued effect go further than a consciousness about waste and recycling.
For Zayyan, it helped shape his thoughts on the career he plans to pursue after high school. He said came to see and appreciate the potential in the medical field.
In a point that several of his classmates echoed, Brody Gill credited the trip with affecting the way he looks at the world around him.
In the United States, and in Toledo, he said, it can be easy to ignore social justice issues.
“I think an experience like this is really important for opening your eyes to all bad situations in the world,” he said. “Now that I went on this experience, and I see how people live, I know that it’s super important for me to help out, because at the end of the day, helping others, for me, that’s my No. 1 goal. And I feel like for a lot of people, that should be one of their top priorities.”
First Published October 19, 2019, 11:00 a.m.
