Visiting Groups: Strake Jesuit

This week's visiting group was another all boys Jesuit high school from Texas. This time it was Strake Jesuit from Houston.

Strake Jesuit comes for a traditional service trip; all students are required to complete 100 hours of community service. A weeklong service trip knocks out plenty of hours. Unfortunately for the students, the parish doesn't actually need a lot of basic manual labor to be done. The boys ended up doing a lot of the same playing with students that the boys from Dallas Jesuit did.

There's three things that occur to me after reflecting on what Strake Jesuit wants out of their trip.

1. It's incumbent on organizations to communicate when they DON'T need volunteers. Strake isn't the only group that has come to Andahuaylillas in the last 19 months with the intention of spending a week or two helping out only to find that there's nothing to do. The parish should tell such groups not to come, out of respect for what such people want to do. Perhaps groups that want to help in a short period of time could accomplish more somewhere else.
   
2. Just because it's a poor area, doesn't mean the people need your help. Quispicanchi is a relatively poor area. Peru is a relatively poor country. There are plenty of ways to help build the kingdom here (I like to think that the Jesuits are doing a lot of good work here), but the unskilled manual labor that a high school group offers isn't needed.
   
   I did some unskilled manual labor when I was in high school. I went to New Orleans with my parish youth group and we helped tear down walls and ceilings on ruined structures in the 7th ward. We didn't build anything because we knew nothing about construction, but ripping down a ceiling is easy, and letting high school volunteers do it for free is a big money saver. We helped how we could. Had we come to Andahuaylillas, we wouldn't have been much help. It's very likely that the Strake boys could have completed their community service hours at non-profits in Houston, saving them the cost of flying across the planet, and of having to sit feeling useless for a week.
   
3. If you're taking a group of people to do work in a country that speaks another language, make sure a critical mass of the group speaks the language. Nuff said.