Health & Fitness
An Alternative Way to Spend College Spring Break
Local Seaford college student goes on service trip in New Orleans during spring break with Molloy College.
Many college students spend spring break in a variety of ways. Whether it's going on a trip to the Bahamas or Europe or just catching up on schoolwork and resting for the week, college students have many things they could be doing during there time off. I chose to go on an alternative spring break trip with my college.
My name is Megan Gaskin from Seaford and I am currently a junior studying Communications at Molloy College. Molloy College has a department on campus known as experiential learning. This department runs a variety of programs and trips for students at Molloy to participate in. The trip that I went on was a trip to New Orleans to help those in need.
I was a part of the New Orleans area Habitat for Humanity in a program called "A Brush With Kindness", which is an exterior home preservation service that provides painting, landscaping, and minor repair services for homeowners in need.
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Throughout the week myself and 13 other Molloy students worked on seven houses doing a variety of jobs. There were also college students from other schools working with Molloy as well including Merrieta College, the University of Virginia and Whitman College.
The jobs that we were tasked with doing involved painting the exterior of homes, creating new driveways, building fences and beautifying the outside of these houses. I found that through working on these houses me and the other college students were making a difference in people's lives.
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I was able to meet some of the homeowners whose houses we were working on. There was one homeowner who stood out to me who was able to have her family come back to New Orleans because of the work we were doing. She told us that because we were fixing up her house she was able to have some of her family come back and live with her in the house again. This really touched me because such a small thing can have such a big impact on a person.
As just college students working on someone's house for even just a day can change the homeowner and neighborhood for the better.
