Ian Sykes ‘28
Opinions Editor
This spring break, I had the privilege to participate in the Spring Break Immersion program. If you haven’t heard of it, Spring Break Immersion is a program where hundreds of students forsake their week of sunny leisure time to immerse themselves in a wide number of in-need communities around our country. There are L’Arche sites (special needs living,) urban sites, special sites, and my personal favorite: Appalachian sites.
The Appalachian sites vary in location, but they are all loosely based around the Appalachian mountain region, which is a historically impoverished part of our nation. My freshman year, I went to Whitley City, Kentucky, a town of <1,000 mired by an aging population and decay, but also spirit. This year, I went to Roanoke, Virginia, a city of ~100,000 with a large unhoused population and a brilliant community. At my first site, I stayed in a service dorm, helped build a house, and got to know Kentucky and its people. In Virginia, I stayed at a YMCA, volunteered mainly at a shelter and ministry for the unhoused, and likewise learned more about Virginia and its people. Despite their differences, I found similar experiences between the two areas: there were people with stories, places with histories, and testimonies worth listening to.
One person I remember distinctly from my Kentucky trip was one Father Gary Simpson, a portly pastor with a PhD who decided to stay after a potluck in our service dorm to converse with us students. When I talked to him, I asked him about topics like why people in his area behave politically in the way that they do and how he feels about service trips being patronizing. For the first question, he answered that people in his home have felt left behind by the U.S. government and by the world in general as evinced by decaying industry and by extreme poverty. As such, they’ve survived by their own will perfectly fine, and they feel like government doesn’t work. That is why they answer so strongly to President Trump: because he makes their feeling of disaffection feel heard. As for the second question, he said that he personally does find it patronizing at times, which struck me. While we were warned before departure that this experience was not meant to be “poverty tourism,” I can only hope that other students didn’t make it out to be such a thing. I certainly didn’t, and as someone who grew up feeling poverty, I know it isn’t something to romanticize. It is brutal and it kills people. Certain parts of the country, especially the Appalachian area, feel left behind due to this poverty, and because they find that they can only count on themselves to get by.
Another important interaction was from my second trip to Virginia, where I met an unhoused man named Jamie. He and his friend Curtis circled my group while we ate outside the shelter, and while it was a sketchy encounter at first, after talking to him I became enamored. He spoke in esoteric terms about cosmic alignment, divine intervention, the cyclicality of good & evil, mass extinction events, and how we must “respect our dinosaurs.” But other than that, one truth he spoke was particularly telling: that people on the bottom like him don’t matter to the people who control the world. Even though my conversation with him was a blur, his sentiments struck a chord with me, and given how he was someone who certainly felt left behind by the powers in play, I can’t blame him for feeling that way.
For both of these people, I understood that the point of our pilgrimage there wasn’t to “fix problems”—the point was to listen. I entered these experiences reflecting on what chaplain Marty Kelly said before we left my first year, “America isn’t red, nor is it blue. It is purple.” As the school of purple itself, we must come to terms with this fact as a community. We should start listening to people more rather than talking at them, for I gained a lot by just shutting up and hearing what people had to say, agreements notwithstanding. The story of every person in this country matters, and some are particularly telling. So, if you feel called to change your life and your attitudes of your own country, do what I did, and go on a Spring Break Immersion trip. You won’t regret it.
Featured image courtesy of the Kampgrounds of America Foundation
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