Another “Appalachian Experience” has come and gone, and with the so-called “APEX high” lingering on the St. Joe’s campus, many students question whether people do service trips for the right reasons, or if service trips are even important at all.
It’s tempting to sign up for a trip like APEX to get more involved, make new friends, or even to get a good Instagram post. But service trips, especially ones that St. Joe’s offers, provide something far more valuable than all of that. They provide opportunities not only to give, but to learn.
Although I am a huge advocate for service trips, I’ve often questioned whether going on a trip like APEX or the winter and summer immersion programs is even worth it—not necessarily for the participants, but those who they are serving.
We come back with new friends and a feeling that we did something good for the world, but what do the people we leave behind get? A new porch and the same situation they were in before we came. We pay $400 or more to drive down and serve people who make less than that in a month. Is what we do important? Does is actually help anyone? Why do we travel all this way just to build a porch? Why us?
We go to listen to their stories and bring them back with us. We go to immerse ourselves into a community that differs from ours. We go to face the harsh realities of other parts of the world that are not as fortunate as we are here in Philadelphia. We go to build relationships.
The reality of service trips is that it is not about what you are doing for the people you are helping; it is about what you are doing with them. The project we work on is the bridge that connects us, college students from Philadelphia, to people who may live a completely different lifestyle than us. We go to stand in solidarity with them and to support each other.
Service experiences put things in perspective, make us aware of our privileges and inspire hope to make the world a better place.
A service trip’s importance doesn’t lie solely in the porch you build, the walls you paint, or the roof you fix. The people you encounter, the stories you hear, the community you are invited into—that is the important part of service trips. It’s about bringing the lessons you learned back to your own life and using those lessons to make the world a little brighter each day.