Public Employee Press

Member on a Mission
Local 372 Parent Coordinator Taneesha Crawford and a College of New Rochelle team helped leprosy patients in Ecuador

By ALFREDO ALVARADO

Every spring thousands of college students invade the beaches of Florida to soak up the sunshine and indulge in raucous parties for their annual spring break.

The College of New Rochelle has its own spring break program called "The CNR Plunge Team." Every March, a team of volunteers spends a week living and working side-by-side with needy families, often in far-off corners of the world.

This spring Local 372 member Taneesha Crawford, a first-year social science major at CNR's DC 37 Campus, traveled to Ecuador in South America and lived among people living on $1 to $2 a day.

Crawford works as a Parent Coordinator at South Bronx Preparatory, a public school that includes grades 6-12. She volunteered for the trip as soon as she saw a flyer posted on a CNR bulletin board at DC 37.

"The fundamental principle that guides this service trip is the foundation of all Catholic social justice teaching: the belief in the inherent dignity of the human person," said Helen Wolf, campus ministry director at CNR, which was founded by Catholic nuns.

Crawford spent a week with a group of 14 students and faculty at the Rostro de Cristo Community House in the town of Duran, near the major city of Guayaquil.

Crawford, the only DC 37 member in the group, and the others quickly rolled up their sleeves and worked with families in the neighborhood.

She read stories to children in after-school programs in the village of Antonio José de Sucre, where families live in cane huts without running water and many cannot pay the 70-cent price of a three-day can of water.

Social justice is the key

"We ate the same simple meals that the families of the community ate every day," said Crawford. The families could not afford chicken or fish and lived on rice and beans and plantains, and the students ate the same diet.

Condoms cost too much for most villagers, and Crawford met with women at a small clinic who were pressing the government to provide them for free. She helped paint a community center and did arts and crafts and recreational work with patients at Damien House, a free treatment center for people with Hansen's disease (formerly called leprosy).

Crawford thinks the students she works with in the South Bronx would benefit from a trip like the one she took to Ecuador. "They would see that the kids in Duran have a lot fewer resources available to them than the kids here, a lot less."

Domestic violence is a serious problem for women in the villages Crawford visited, "but they have little recourse. This trip made me appreciate what we have here, and I will share the information with students and co-workers," she said. "This was an incredible experience for me."