Fall 2001

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A New Road to Learning

Feature

A NEW ROAD TO LEARNING Students choose community service over room service on Alternative Spring Break

story and photographs by Ben Barnhart

PACKING THEIR WORK CLOTHES, their music, and their minds: UMass students in New Road, Virginia, last spring. NEW ROAD, VIRGINIA, IS SEPARATED from so much of the world. This impoverished African American neighborhood of about 250 people on the outskirts of the town of Exmore, near the southern tip of the state’s Eastern Shore, is separated from most of Virginia by the Chesapeake Bay. Separated from most of Exmore by a social and racial divide. And separated from many conveniences of modern life by time and neglect. It’s not a place that shouts out "spring vacation," but last March, students from Amherst did find their way to New Road, and to five other Eastern Shore, Tidewater, and Appalachian Virginia communities. Packing their work clothes, their music, and their minds before piling into rented vans for the twelve-hour drive south, these students were part of UMass Alternative Spring Break, a program that’s grown from 17 students in one Virginia town in 1998 to this year’s army of 80 in six communities. (Besides New Road the communities are Ivanhoe, where the program began; Cape Charles; Westmoreland County; and Caroline County. Sixteen students also spent the week close to home in Holyoke, as ASB spread its service to a nearby site for the first time this year). In recent years, spring break community service programs have become increasingly popular nationwide. UMass students met peers from other campuses during this year’s trip, and in New Road they took over projects begun by Boston College and Suffolk University students the previous week. But the UMass program is unusual in that it’s more than a single week of volunteerism. Students must enroll in Anthropology 397, an honors-level course exploring such issues as racism, poverty, and grassroots change. The class is divided into small groups that work together throughout the semester and travel together during spring break. In each town a grassroots organization coordinates the projects and helps provide accommodations for the students. Community and team building, personal reflection, and an active, democratic learning experience are emphasized through the course. Not surprisingly, many students involved in ASB also work in such progressive, student-run ventures as Earthfoods and People’s Market. Besides completing a class project and an extensive reading list, students keep a journal that includes daily reflections during the spring break trip. The journals offer insight to the introspective learning process characteristic of ASB. With their permission, we’ve included excerpts from the journals throughout these pages. "I feel like we’ve poked and interfered with this community as if they are trapped inside a petri dish. But this community isn’t in a lab and it doesn’t exist for the sole benefit of my education. . . . For a student surrounded by outlets for learning and enrichment it is difficult to believe that there are things, concepts I can never grasp. . . . I hate how I constantly mention ‘self’ in my journal. When does it stop being about me?" - Erin Dunham '01, New Road Team IN THE OPINION OF ARTHUR KEENE, anthropology professor and founder of the UMass program, ASB is "transformative in lots of ways." For students, says Keene, it’s concrete learning, an opportunity to see first-hand the conditions of poverty and social injustice they read about throughout the semester. For the neighborhoods, it’s an infusion of labor for projects ranging from home improvements to general clean-up and beautification. Ruth Wise, executive director of the New Road Community Development Group, says the students save her community money. Some $60,000 to $80,000 a year of New Road’s precious block grant funds, she estimates, are saved for other purposes by the donated labor. The students are also positive models for New Road youth, who often do not see college as an option in their lives. Finally, says Wise, the presence of these mostly white college students in all black New Road opens some eyes, if not minds, in racially divided Exmore. Wise is a stout African American woman who talks animatedly about her home community. Her family came to New Road nearly six decades ago to work in the fertile fields of the Delmarva Penninsula and in the oyster shucking houses along the Chesapeake Bay. From May to October, she says, the family survived by picking strawberries, string beans, sweet potatoes, and other truck crops. Then they turned to the oyster harvest, which sustained them through mid-February. From February to May, she says, "we prayed not to starve to death." Wise graduated from segregated Northampton County High School as valedictorian of her class, and breaking the mold that closed around many of her classmates, left New Road to earn her degree at Virginia State University in Petersburg. Seventeen years later she returned with her four children to a house built on her grandparents’ land, and took an administrative job at Eastern Shore Community College. She was struck, she says, by how little things had changed for the people of New Road. Many of the homes in New Road are sagging, ramshackle structures without indoor plumbing or heating systems, owned by absentee landlords who make few or no improvements to the property. In 1960s the community was severed by Route 13, which connects the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel to the beach communities of Chincoteague, Virginia and Ocean City, Maryland. The highway whisks tourist traffic past Exmore’s town’s center, where many stores are boarded shut. The bay’s seafood harvest has declined significantly, while development has consumed much of the area’s rich farmland and inexpensive migrant labor has taken most of the fieldwork that remains. The New Road community was left with nothing. "Religion is such a large part of Southern life, and often is a major uniting force for the people. It can serve as a source of coping and support, and helps to establish and reaffirm hope and faith. . . . I think that this was part of a positive solution." - Jenn Mikkola '03, Cape Charles team. TWENTY MILES SOUTH OF NEW ROAD, 22 UMass students set up home base in the community center of Cape Charles, a quiet port town where the auto ferry from Newport News once brought visitors to the peninsula. In the four decades since ferry traffic ceased the town has quietly withered. Recently, though, a resort developer has moved in with plans to turn the outlying area into a golf course with luxury homes. As a result, property values in the town have soared, and taxes have tripled in three years. The poor and elderly who can no longer afford the upkeep on their homes are being forced out of the neighborhood, says Lenora Mitchell, executive director of the Concerned Citizens of Cape Charles. Thirty families have left in the past two years. So while the New Road coalition concentrates on acquiring properties from absentee landlords, replacing decrepit shacks with modern houses, and completing a sewage system to replace the outhouses behind many of the homes, Mitchell and the CCCC are intent on preserving their community in the face of commercial development. In Cape Charles, home to 1300 people and seven churches, the UMass crew adds fresh paint to the Gospel Tabernacle in the town’s northeast section, a traditionally African American neighborhood trying desperately to maintain itself in the face of gentrification and veiled racism. (Housing prices in the town often differ depending on whether the buyer is black or white, says Mitchell.) When some of the students question the importance of sprucing up a church, Mitchell explains that churches are what this neighborhood revolves around. The CCCC held its first meetings in 1989 in the town’s churches, including its European-American churches. "Our churches are the foundation of the community," she tells the students one night after dinner. "They are meeting places and points of inspiration. "You provide inspiration and motivation," Mitchell says. "Because of your belief in us as a community we can fix up someone’s house, we can keep our property." "We went to see kids today! How fantastic – a whole roomful of three-year-olds. They stopped playing for a minute, then came full force at us like we had been best friends forever." - Katrina Latka '02, Cape Charles team. INTERACTING WITH YOUTH IS AN integral part of the ASB experience, because one of the program’s most important goals is building lasting relationships with host communities. So in addition to swinging hammers and plying paintbrushes students visit schools and Headstart programs during the spring trips, and some volunteer at summer camp in New Road in August. Last spring marked the third trip to New Road for UMass and the second for Manny Okrah, a STEPC major from Worcester. Okrah had worked with the Westmoreland County team in March 2000; that August he volunteered at the New Road summer camp. Returning this year as a group leader, Okrah says he felt more like a friend than a visitor to New Road. "I really, really felt my spring semester would’ve been missing something if I didn’t stay connected," he says. Okrah returned again to New Road this summer to teach computer classes. (Also to use his theater experience – he’s a member of the Not Ready for Bedtime Players, which performs skits exploring social issues here at UMass – to engage the neighborhood kids.) A $2500 stipend from the Citizen Scholars Program in Commonwealth College, UMass’s recently expanded honors program, covered his expenses. As one of the few African Americans in the program, Okrah feels his connection with New Road youth is especially important. "The value of seeing someone who looks like you, someone who’s going to college and doing things that are beneficial to the community – I think that’s inspiring." In a new twist to the program this year, "Reverse Break" brought ten teenagers from New Road and Cape Charles to UMass for a week in April, and Tevin Doughty, an eighth grader from New Road, bunked with Okrah in Cance residential hall. The trip marked several firsts for Tevin, a shy youngster slightly awed by the sheer size of UMass. It was his first airplane flight, his first night in a dorm, his first look at college course work. Tevin is interested in computer animation and toured the new computer science center during his visit. He also met members of the men’s basketball team – "they’re tall, like giants" – and visited the Du Bois Library and the entomology lab. "My mom said before I came up here that she’d like to see me go to college," Tevin says, and that seems like a possibility to him now. He’s leaning toward the University of North Carolina, which would get him out of New Road but not too far away. "My clothes are dirty but my mind feels clean and new. I’ve learned so much, not only from Cape Charles but from everyone in this group." - Kate Billman-Golemme '03, Cape Charles team. NEW ROAD'S OLD COMMUNITY CENTER, a former beauty salon going into yet another incarnation, as as a computer room for area youth, is buffeted by tractor-trailers passing on Route 13 just outside its front door. A graveled parking lot with a lone pay phone under a yellow street light is a popular meeting spot for the few, but persistent, local drug dealers and their clients. But the low, nondescript, clapboard building is freshly painted white and nearly gleams in the midst of peeling, neglected older homes that surround it. Inside, a few donated computers are perched on makeshift desks, and the green-carpeted floor is strewn with sleeping bags and backpacks. This is the spring break dormitory for the UMass crew, and the accommodations are better than what many residents of New Road have in their own homes. Although there’s no shower, the students do get a flush toilet and cold running water. A single kerosene heater in the center of the room hisses against the chilly March night. A daring dash across the four lanes of Route 13 is the neighborhood’s new community center, where the group gathers for meals, meetings, and socializing. A pot-bellied stove keeps the simple, one-room building warm while the students play cards, write in their journals, and discuss the dynamics of poverty, racism, and the unfamilar culture surrounding them. This is also where students are fed authentic southern cooking by community volunteers – pork chops, collard greens, potato pancakes. It’s a frightening menu for the vegans in the UMass group. Adjusting to life in communities like New Road and Cape Charles may be difficult for these students, most of whom come from middle-class homes. But even more difficult, some say, is the return to UMass and the resumption of college life after alternative spring break. Most agree that the trip changes their perspectives and challenges their beliefs and priorities. "It affects you on so many personal and emotional levels – it’s been more than I ever intended to get myself involved in," says journalism major Erin Dunham of the New Road team. She says the trip "turned abstract ideas into reality," and that she’d like to apply what she’s learned to needy neighborhoods in Boston, where she grew up. "I’m thinking a lot closer to home," says Dunham. You don’t need to go twelve hours away to find this – it’s everywhere." "I couldn’t take my eyes off the sky today. It was so beautiful every moment I looked up . . . . It was a fantastic reminder that we are all part of something together and that to judge or harm someone would violate that togetherness." - Cathy DeGeorge '04, New Road team. ART KEENE SAYS THAT ALTERNATIVE Spring Break a success if it encourages students to take a broader view of the world, to think holistically, and to build long-term, sustainable relationships. "I think the things we do in this class are so sorely missing from most students’ lives," he says. "This work often leads to a big bolt of emotion for them." For Molly Moynihan ’00 of Houston, Texas, ASB led to a career in community service. During her sophomore year she joined the charter group of ASB students at UMass on their first trip to Virginia. So moved was Moynihan by the experience that she volunteered to lead trips to New Road and Wesmoreland County her junior and senior years. In New Road, after working extensively with children in that community, she realized that she wanted to teach underprivileged kids after college. "It’s very real," she says. "All the case studies and academics drop away, and you have a face and a name to relate to." With help from Keene, Moynihan took her UMass math and economics degrees to Teach for America, the Americorps program that connects service-minded college graduates with poor rural and inner city school systems. Today she teaches math to 150 eighth graders in Houston. "What I’m doing now is directly related to ASB," says Moynihan. "It was a great, great experience.

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New Road to learning

A NEW ROAD: photos by Ben Barnhart