The Daily Northwestern

Many Northwestern students spend their summer lounging on the beach and working on tans that will last through the bleak Chicago winter.

Weinberg junior Misuzu Miyashita ended up living amid trash for five weeks.

Miyashita, with 11 members and two directors of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, lived among the urban poor in Mokattam, a village of garbage collectors on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt.

“We thought it would be a great opportunity to … let these people know that even though they work collecting garbage, they are all still worthy of God’s love,” said Miyashita.

The students lived in St. Simon’s Monastary and spent their days volunteering with Egyptian college students. The InterVarsity group split into teams and rotated between the St. Simon’s Handicapped Ministry, Mother Theresa’s Sisters of Charity orphanage, the Boys’ Recycling Center and the local hospital.

McCormick sophomore Valerie Concepcion, a student on the trip, said she enjoyed the work, but adapting to the conditions of a garbage collectors’ community was rough.

“It was difficult from time to time because there was no air conditioning,” she said. “Piles of garbage were pretty much everywhere and the smell was really bad.”

Students primarily taught English to the Mokattam residents and worked to promote Christianity, but they often helped with manual work such as laundry at the orphanage and bottle collection and sorting at the recycling center.

“We humbled ourselves by doing some menial work, which was very difficult because it brought up questions like ‘am I really making a difference?,'” said Miyashita. “But it says in the Bible that the small things count just as much as the big things, and that kept us going.”

Other students said the experience caused them to view poverty in a different light.

“I was immersed in such extreme poverty that I was forced to question my beliefs about society and even justice,” said Weinberg junior Andy Kim, a former Daily staff member who went on the mission. “I had gone on these types of trips before, so part of me was expecting to be involved in evangelizing. But it was different than I expected because I had difficulty accepting such poverty and such injustice.”

A few of the students applied lessons learned from their studies at NU to assist the Egyptian organizations.

At the Boys’ Recycling Center, the group had difficulty getting bottles to a compression center, so Concepcion used skills from her engineering class to build a cart that helped speed up the process. The center earns money from recycling old shampoo, water and soda bottles, and uses the funds to provide children with English and Arabic lessons, computer classes and opportunities to attend camps throughout Egypt.

“I was surprised that my engineering classes, which I thought weren’t very useful, helped me make something better for the community,” Concepcion said.

Many students said the bonds they formed with the neighborhood children they met were what they valued most about their experiences.

Communication sophomore Emlyn Torres said these friendships made leaving difficult at the end of their five-week trip.

“Street children that had to deal with poverty every day of their lives were actually crying because we were leaving,” she said. “We realized then that the relationships we had built with these people had become very deep.”

The trip was organized by InterVarsity’s Global Urban Trek program, which sends college students on urban development and Christian faith missions to cities around the world.

Although students had to fundraise to pay for their plane tickets and housing, Torres’ past missionary experience in Kenya made her want to share her faith with others a second time.

“The more time we spent with (the residents), the more overwhelmed we felt by their hope,” Torres said. “They were all so happy to have us, and the fact that they had such strong faith in the face of everything that was working against them was simply amazing.”

Reach Allan Madrid at [email protected].