WINGDALE, NY RESIDENT TRAVELS TO POLAND
FOR SERVICE IMMERSION EXPERIENCE
BUFFALO, NY – Nicole Fusco ’16, of Wingdale, NY, was one of eight Canisius College students who recently returned from a three-week service immersion trip to an orphanage in Zmiaca, Poland. Fusco is a senior chemistry major at Canisius.
From July 12 to August 4, Canisius students lived and worked at the orphanage that primarily serves children in foster or ambulatory care. The group arrived for the second-half of a six-week summer camp where they lived and worked with children ages two to 14. Campers are split into groups based on gender and age and volunteers at the camp become surrogate “aunts or uncles” to these children, caring for them day and night.
Completely responsible for the children’s day-to-day care, the Canisius students organized activities such as hiking, sports, crafts and daily English lessons. The group was also in charge of organizing large-scale activities for the children such as a scavenger hunt, World Cup soccer and a fair. Each night, the students also put on different song and dance performances for the camp. The group also had an opportunity to explore Czestochowa and Auschwitz among other important historic sites in Southern Poland.
Selected in the fall of the previous year, students went through rigorous training prior to going on the trip. Training focuses on the four cornerstones of values; simplicity, spirituality, social justice and solidarity as well as instructing on political issues that people of Poland experience daily, specifically at the orphanage. “We try to put students in situations and ask them to go with open hearts and open hands,” says LuAnn Firestone, associate campus minister, who coordinates the trip to the orphanage “We’ve had students come home from this trip and decide they want to go into social work and work with kids.”
Part of the training also prepares the students for the barriers they will face once they arrive to the orphanage, most notably, that most of the children, including the regular camp counselors, do not speak English. “All of these barriers make it really hard on all of our students and then we ask them to make this close personal connection,” added Firestone.
Canisius College is one of 28 Jesuit universities in the nation and the premier private university in Western New York.
