SPRINGFIELD, Ohio — Inge Williams of Alpena, Mich., Wittenberg class of 2008, was one of 36 Wittenberg students who spent one month of the summer outside her comfort zone. Click Here To View Complete Trip Photo Album!

Special bonds were created between Wittenberg students and children they encountered in Lesotho.

For the third time in the last four years, a contingent of Wittenberg community members volunteered their time and talents in the Kingdom of Lesotho, immersing themselves in a new culture and greeting faces huddled at the gate of their compound every day with “Lumela” (Sesotho for Good Morning) each day. “Pretty amazing” euphemized an experience that Williams said was “life-changing in so many ways.”

In 2006, she was part of a record number of students who participated in the trip. Wittenberg Associate Professor of History Scott Rosenberg accompanied 29 students in 2005 and 22 in 2003 — this year, he was overwhelmed by more than 60 student applications.

In Africa, the group volunteered with construction projects and closely interacted with children in orphanages and a pediatric clinic. They also attended 10 guest lectures at the National University of Lesotho on issues ranging from gender and development to strategies and failures in combating poverty and the AIDS epidemic. However, “service was the biggest component of the trip,” Rosenberg said.

The group spent 10 days with Lesotho’s chapter of Habitat for Humanity, which was its primary contact and bridge to the local community. “We helped Habitat build eight houses together in the district of Maseru in Lesotho,” said Rosenberg, who also serves as adviser to Wittenberg’s Habitat for Humanity chapter.

Thrivent Financial for Lutherans and Wittenberg’s Habitat for Humanity contributed funds to make the service projects in Lesotho possible this summer. Participants paid their own way on the trip, in the process also gaining six credit hours or credit for community service hours required for Wittenberg graduation.

A unique feature of this year’s trip was increased collaboration with members of the Lesotho Work Camp Association (LWA), a social service organization comprised of local young people who were either still studying or were volunteering for regional development. Wittenberg students paired up with LWA counterparts for 11 days of the trip, “digging holes and piling bricks,” Williams said.

Wittenberg students get their hands dirty to help the Lesotho people.

“We would do unskilled menial work that required no special training, like shoving a rock here, a brick there,” she said. “It didn’t seem too hard, and we were actually surprised by how much the landscape moved as we continued our job of building the foundations for houses. Most of us had never used an axe before, and this was our bonding experience — all of us had calluses to take away with us in the end.”

They also visited the Baylor/Bristol-Myers Squibb Children’s Clinical Center of Excellence, the only children’s clinic in Lesotho. While there, Wittenberg students played hokey-pokey and soccer with the children, many of whom are HIV-positive. Lesotho has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, affecting approximately 30 percent of the population.

“To see our students play with terminally ill patients and spend time with children who don’t often get the one-on-one attention that they require, and above all to watch the attachment those kids form with our students, is overpowering,” Rosenberg said. The group visited three orphanages in the Maseru and Mafeteng districts of Lesotho and helped build seed beds, as well as set up farms, plant fruit trees and clear fields.

“A lot of orphanages struggle to get food,” Rosenberg said. “Now they can grow their own food.”

Amazingly, some children befriended by Wittenberg students on previous trips asked for them by name. “This made members of the present group realize what an impact they were about to make in the bonds they were now forming,” said Rosenberg.

The group would return from such visits especially moved. “I was often struck by how deep and profound things were said, and during such exchanges, sometimes tears would fill up in the room, especially with people coming back from orphanages,” Rosenberg said.

Wittenberg students have some special new friends.

The average income in Lesotho averages out to approximately $450 U.S. per year, making Lesotho among the 40 poorest nations in the world. Williams, like her peers, embarked on the trip with six Sunday seminars worth of culture-intensive orientation. The Lesotho experience was nonetheless eye-opening, offering “a kind of poverty I could never imagine without really seeing. The poverty in our heads was different from what the people actually had and didn’t have.”

Williams spoke in awe of “the genuine warmth” of the Lesotho culture. When students made donations of clothes and other personal items, “they really treasured the gifts you gave them,” she said.

Among Williams’ favorite experiences in Africa, aside from the times she “chased” dinosaur footprints with the local children, was the day spent at the Morning Star Village, Rosenberg’s home during his stint with the Peace Corps before Wittenberg.

“The women in that village were quite friendly and offered us beer and warm conversation,” Williams said. “That for me was the most real experience of the Lesotho culture.”

A double major in German and international studies, Williams set out on this trip “without knowing anybody.” The initial college cliques people brought into the group at the beginning of the trip, formed through athletics, sororities or other college friendships, gave way over time.

“People have really bonded, and made connections across different groups of people,” Williams said. “Maybe I’ll go to a basketball game next year, and somebody will attend a STAND (Students Taking Action Now Dammit) meeting in turn!”

Upon the group’s return to Wittenberg, Rosenberg has received an influx of student e-mails telling him of the “tremendous” impact the trip had on their lives.

“It’s a powerful experience to see not just how much of a difference they’re making outside their lives, but also to see how much the students learn, and how they change from embracing these new experiences,” Rosenberg said.

- Arundati Dandapani '07

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