11 Months of Preparation

My team and I have been preparing for this trip for about 11 months (some less than others). Alot of people think we will do "mission" work on this trip, but one of the very first things I learned (during my interview, actually) was that we will not "better someone's life" in two weeks. There is nothing we can do to make an impact or change in the places we will visit. This idea was reinforced during our first "Training Workshop" in January which was an All Team-Cross Cultural Awareness Workshop. We spent an afternoon together will all of the International Service Immersion Trip participants learning about the particular social justice issues we will study while in India. Our trip specifically focuses on the Dalit issue; although the Caste System is outlawed in India, it is still very much implemented in society, and it has very negative effects on the Dalits, or "Untouchables".

In February our team sold Chai tea at Canisius's International Fest to fundraise a bit and promote our team at a cultural event. International Fest is probably one of the best events on campus, and it was so much fun to participate! Plus the food is great :)

In March our team attended a presentation by Jim Keady, founder of the Team Sweat organization. He and his wife spent several months in Indonesia trying to work at a sweatshop that produces Nike products and to live on the wages the Indonesian workers made. Needless to say, they weren't successful in their task. The wages workers are paid in Third World countries are so low that the workers must work overtime on top of their already long hours just to get by. And I would hardly call their lifestyle "getting by". Jim Keady's biggest point was that Nike is one of the wealthiest companies in the world yet it does not pay it's hardest working workers fairly. Keady pointed our that Nike sponsors Tiger Woods with a multi-million dollar contract just for playing golf. At the end of the presenation Keady had us send postcards to Tiger Woods asking him to visit the workers in Indonesia. Now that Woods has produced the largest scandal in the history of golf, I'm not so sure how all of this is working out. Perhaps it is what the Indians would call "karma", no? Anyway, Keady's second point was that Catholic instituitons, including Canisius and the Catholic University of America, have contracts with Nike for apparel of sports teams - how can Catholic instutions ignore such violations of social justice issues and support Nike? For more information about this, visit www.teamsweat.org.

In April our team went on a "Plunge into Buffalo" to visit and explore different progressive organizations in Buffalo that are doing something about the justice needs in our own community. This was BY FAR my favorite training session! It was so much fun to travel through Buffalo and discover ways to support local businesses, as opposed to large corporations. The places we visited included The Nickel City Co-op, The Lexington Food Co-op, Urban Roots, El Buen Amigo, Habitat for Humanity Restore, Guercio's, Sweet Tooth, PUSH Buffalo, and Sweetness 7 Cafe. On that day we learned about the difference between free trade and fair trade. Drink the FAIR TRADE coffee people!!! :)

Over summer break we met several times to plan our lessons, crafts, and our performances. This provided some nice team bonding time. This past semester our wonderful director, Lu, graciously invited us into her home where we had a few more meetings to re-focus on why we were taking the trip to India. There are four stated purposes to our trip:

"The purpose of Canisius College's International Service Immerision trips is to increase our awareness of the world, so scandalously unjust, so complex to understand, and so hard to change."

"The purpose of this trip is to fall in love and grow in solidarity with the people of the world and especially the poor, to let their stories become our stories, to ler our voices speak for them."

"The purpose of this trip is to challenge ourselves to live simply, to value relationships that we make, to engage our faith and spirituality in the experiences we have and to dig fo the truth behind the injustices."

"The purpose of the this trip is to be open to letting our experiences transform our lives so that we can become part of the solution, so that we can become men and women for others".