Chaplain Mark Wm. Radecke: "Marjorie López, a very special friend from the Centro Infantil Cristiano Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Christian Children's Center) with me, standing in front of La Catarata Tacares (Tacares Waterfall) in Costa Rica, one of the side trips the SU CASA 2005 group made on its way from Costa Rica to Nicaragua."

Chaplain Mark Wm. Radecke, the leader of the annual trip, shares his reflections:

Each year when I return, exhausted and exhilarated from the trip, I ask myself, "Are you going to do this again?"

Organizing and leading these trips is more work than most people imagine. Even though our partners with the Center for International Service Learning in San José take care of many of the local arrangements, we are in constant communication to make the preparations as complete as possible.

The logistics of arranging air, land and water transportation for 28 people; providing safe food and potable water at all times; arranging for lectures and worship and recreational opportunities; doing homestays with local families; staying within budget; and doing construction, medical and educational work at a total of nine different work sites in two different Spanish-speaking countries are staggering.

And then I read the journals and papers and evaluations that the student participants are required to complete as part of the academic component of the trip. I hear them talk about the impact of the trip on their lives. And they remind me that this is why I got into ministry in higher education in the first place: to help students discover and make connections between faith and life and learning.

And I announce the dates of the next trip.

It will take most of the students -- and most of the adults, myself included -- years to weave the threads of the experience into the developing tapestry of their lives. We encounter some things that are difficult and upsetting: that children die of preventable and curable diseases; the enduring effect of America's shameful misadventures in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration on the lives of orphaned children we meet and work with; the inequities of an immigration policy that permits Americans to visit Nicaragua with a minimum of difficulty while making it virtually impossible for the average Nicaraguan to visit us in the United States. (It costs US$60 for Nicaraguans just to get an appointment to see an immigration officer at the U.S. Embassy in Managua, and the money is not returned if the application for a visa is denied, as the vast majority are.)

But we also witness and experience the vitality and centrality of the Christian faith in the lives and communities of the people we meet, people poorer than most of the students could have imagined. We see how an abundance of material possessions can actually be an obstacle to joy instead of a pathway to it. And we are always humbled by the willingness of poor people to share what little they have with visitors from the north.

Students go on these trips expecting to change the world. They return and find that their world has changed.

SU Today asked SU CASA participants to describe in their own words some scenes from the January 2005 trip to Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Here are a few.

Alex Jones '07:"The computers are for a program the church is doing, teaching their members (who are Nicaraguan immigrants in Costa Rica) how to use computers, so that they can become more desirable to employment agencies. I helped set up the computers and was letting the kids play pinball and solitaire while I was working. The Susquehanna University community donated the computers."

Carey Schneckenburger '06: "A normal day in Pavas ... the three students (including myself) rotated between taking vital signs, as I am doing here, taking medical history, as Alli [McMullen '06] is doing, and filing the very unorganized charts. It was a rare occasion that a child would scream or cry when you tried to take his/her temperature, weight, or listen to their hearts. I was astonished at how well the children behaved compared to American kids today."

Chelsey Puskaritz '06: "We were working with the younger children in Vacation Bible School ... The crayons were considered a luxury to them and because of that they could sit and color for hours and never get bored! Working with the children at Pavas was an amazing experience, even though it was hard communicating sometimes; they were just so happy we were there and didn't really care if we understood what they said or not and vice versa."

Lauren Bush '06: "I painted a roof in the 90-degree heat in Nicaragua, taught Vacation Bible School in a foreign language (and I don't know much more Spanish than "si" and "no"!), and built concrete block walls .... I learned so much about the culture and history of Central America that I never knew before. It's amazing how much we don't learn here in the United States about what impact our government's decisions have on the people down there."

Chelsey Puskaritz: "This picture was taken at the orphanage where we stayed and worked on Ometepe in Nicaragua .... I believe this part of the trip made me realize what I can do when I put my mind to it; it pushed me to do things I wouldn't normally do and it opened me up to a lot of new things that changed my life .... I know that I am not the same person today as I was before the trip."

Becky Rowe '05: "[This is] Cat [Rutherford '06] and me shoveling sand to be used for mixing concrete. We learned how to mix concrete in the middle of the street. The concrete was then used to sink steel footers into the ground as support beams for the church."