From Skeptic to Convert, from (Short-Term) Service to (Long-Term) Witness: Toward Pedagogies of Witnessing on International Service Trips

In January 2003, I traveled as a faculty coleader with the director of community partnerships at Sarah Lawrence College, Irene King, and 13 students on what would be the first of many trips to Nicaragua. Slipping out of New York City in a predawn ice storm, leapfrogging through Miami, we landed a few hours and two worlds later into the Hollywood-cliché decrepitude of a Latin American airport, passing broken-down Soviet planes and helicopters as we taxied to the terminal. Our in-country contact ushered us quickly through the airport and into the heat of Managua and waiting taxis that hurried us away. The caravanning cars quickly crossed town, cutting a path through the heat rushing over us from open windows, the acrid fog of burning garbage, a chaotic melee of street vendors and window washers that flooded our cars at each stop, the bleating of horns, and clouds of black diesel exhaust. We apprehensively absorbed a cityscape still bearing scars of a decades-old earthquake and revolution. This, it seemed, would be the adventure to write home about that many of us were looking for, the travel narrative of exploration and exotic difference that we do-gooders from the North expect when we volunteer as students, mission workers, or aid workers.