What do Summitville, IN; Columbus, GA; Huê, Vietnam and Udine, Italy have in common? Each location was the site of a service project undertaken by a 2017 STM Summer Ambassador! After submitting a proposal and a detailed action plan, each Ambassador received grant money from STM to fund a project focused on ministering to an underserved population, both in the United States and abroad. Brantley Butcher '19 and Adriana Embus Figueroa '17 returned to their hometowns to give back to the communities which nurtured them; while a world away, the beneficence of STM was brought to Italy by Anna Marra GRD '18 and to Vietnam by Ella Henry '20. STM asked each Ambassador to keep a journal. Portions of their journals are excerpted in the following pages.
Brantley initiated a food delivery service in Summitville to assist families with school age children who are eligible to receive meals at their elementary school during the academic year. In the summer months, residents have difficulty accessing healthy foods because their small town (population 991) lacks a grocery store. Also lacking is any public transportation to a larger urban area where supermarkets are located. Brantley writes in his journal: “My program addresses the needs of the area by removing the obstacle of transportation for the most economically disadvantaged in our area.” He worked with the First Christian Church of Summitville to deliver supplemental groceries, and with Summitville Elementary School to identify families who could benefit from the program. In all, eleven families with a total of twenty-three children opted to participate and received four grocery deliveries—once every other Saturday—purchased and delivered by Brantley directly to their homes. Over the summer, Brantley began to feel a deep attachment to those he served as he explains, “I am always hit with a wave of joy at the end of each delivery knowing I made a small but real impact on the lives of the families I’ve grown to care about.” Brantley continues, “More important than the experience I gained in project management, the growth in empathetic understanding. . .is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life… Even though I had grown up with the same people I was helping, I had never fully realized the need that was present in my community… Feeding the hungry is what Christ called us to do."
Adriana, cognizant of the formative role that Girls, Inc. played in her own development and preparation for a Yale education, partnered with that organization “to implement a four-week college preparatory program for thirty to thirty-five under-resourced girls of color.” She created syllabi and taught courses in leadership development, career planning and college preparation. As an alumna of the center, Adriana found her work “even more rewarding,” and considered it a “privilege to be able to work with girls at such a wonderful stage.” In her journal, Adriana writes: “The girls immediately engaged with me during my classes and fed my energy. They demonstrated initiative, asked a million questions and kept me teaching wayyy longer than I should be.” She challenged her students to work toward college and to strive for more than their parents had achieved. The reason she pursued this fellowship was “to ensure that my girls, many of whom are from my same exact neighborhood, would have a more equal chance at social mobility…” Highlighting the summer workshop were visits to five area colleges: Spelman College, Savannah College of Art & Design, Clark Atlanta University, Mercer University and Wesleyan College (Macon, GA). A final celebratory “Let’s Go to College” luncheon was attended by several graduates of Girls, Inc. who served as inspiring role models for Adriana’s students. Reflecting on her summer experience Adriana comments that “I noticed God at every step of the way.”
Anna, a graduate student from Udine in Northeast Italy, used her fellowship to help alleviate the suffering of immigrants and refugees in Italy by working with traumatized children in creative and uplifting activities, and also by providing basic necessities to those displaced, perhaps forever, from their homelands. Her goal was to “work for a better integration and understanding of the immigrant’s situation in Italy and alleviate the conditions that immigrants’ children face every day” in collaboration with La Carovana Artistica and Ospiti in Arrivo, two local non-profit organizations. Anna participated in the STELLE (STARS) art project that works with women and children and “focuses on collecting signs…and stories to comprehend and tell the condition of a multitude of people in transit along the Balkan route.” The Balkan Route is a transit route followed by men, women and children to enter the European Union from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. It is currently a place in humanitarian and legal crisis. For Anna’s project, children were asked to draw a star and then were invited to tell their story. With other volunteers, Anna created a video featuring the drawings made by children in Jordan, Greece and Serbia. The video was later screened at the Invisible Cities Festival in Gorizia, Italy. Anna also worked with the non-profit organization Equipe di Strada, to collect and distribute blankets and other essentials for refugees and to provide them with information necessary to the asylum application process. Anna used grant funds to purchase books and artistic materials for the refugee camp in Athens, Greece.
For Anna's project, children were asked to draw a star and then were invited to tell their story.
Ella, a native of France, worked with a French Scout team from her home country on the Brevet Scouts du Monde project (comparable to the American Eagle Scout project) which involves organizing a humanitarian project in a developing country. Her team chose to focus on disadvantaged Vietnamese children, collaborating with the Franco-Vietnamese organization Les Sampaniers du Vietnam. Her goal was to reconstruct the playground of the elementary school outside Huê and to tutor the children in French and English. She found the manual work difficult—the playground is “a big pile of dirt that needs to be flattened and then tiled.” Ella says she “gained a lot of respect for the men and women who do such physical labor daily, especially those who work in developing and emerging countries. . .” During her time in Vietnam, Ella became very attached to the children in the orphanage and teaching French and English lessons allowed her to learn more about them. As a result of her service project, Ella gained a new appreciation of her privileged status and her bilingual and multicultural identity. The presence of God was revealed to her as she worked alongside her Scout teammates rebuilding the playground as well as in her interactions with the children she taught.
STM Summer Ambassadors have taken to heart the insistent call of Pope Francis to “encounter” the other, especially the poor and marginalized, by their graced responses to those in need. In a video address on the feast of San Cajetano, Francis declared, “We ask only one thing: that you reach out! And that you go and seek out and encounter the most needy.” If you know a current Yale student who is eager to “reach out” to the most needy in their community, STM will begin accepting applications for the 2018 Summer Ambassadors program this spring.
