With spring break approaching, most students are looking forward to a much-needed and much-anticipated week off. But a handful of students were planning on going on one of Campus Ministry’s spring break immersion trips. This year though, all the trips have been cancelled due to health and safety concerns, leaving some students with more time on their hands than they previously planned. 

At the beginning of the year, five trips were planned for spring break: one to Kansas City, one to the Appalachian region, one to Philadelphia, and two to the Kino Border Initiative at the Arizona and Mexico border. But keeping SLUH’s safety protocols while traveling proved to be too difficult to guarantee.

“Traveling right now is uncertain, and not a necessarily smart choice during a pandemic. We did hold off on canceling them until we got closer and we got a sense of where our world was at,” said math teacher Stephen Deves. “Three of our spring break trips are by plane, two of them are by bus or by car, and at this point as a school we still don’t feel safe or comfortable sending students on a plane, or putting a bunch of students in a car together.”

Every year, Campus Ministry holds these trips so that the students who participate can learn about, and connect with, the people they are helping. 

“The biggest difference in my mind between a service trip and immersion trip is meeting the people that you are serving, and interacting with them and getting to know them,” said Deves. “Doing an immersion trip really helps students experience the act of meeting people that are different from them, and maybe sometimes you're serving them, maybe sometimes you're helping them but more importantly, you're humbling yourself and getting to know them. I think that's a powerful life lesson”

Since these trips cannot happen in person, some groups, such as the Kino Border Initiative, offered to host a virtual experience for SLUH students. But the same support for a virtual version of the trip was not there. Other plans were suggested, but nothing had the same impact on students as the actual trips themselves. 

“I think, understandably, some students are a little Zoomed out. And they need spring break to get off their devices. I don't blame them for that. So the idea of, on your spring break doing more Zooming and more meetings type stuff was not appealing and I get that,” said Deves. “We've thought about trying to do a local St. Louis immersion, which some schools do. But again, I think ultimately, it just came to letting students have a break and hopefully revamping and rejuvenating and coming back stronger.”

Junior Danny Phillips was planning on going on a trip, and was not overly excited to spend his spring break in St. Louis instead of abroad, but wasn’t surprised the trips were cancelled. 

“This year, with the school year and everything starting out shut down, I kind of always expected the trips not to happen. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise but it was still sad to see,” said Phillips. “Every year since freshman year, my plan was to go on one of these trips every spring break. But now I’ll probably just stay in St. Louis and work instead.”