THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 13, 1995 TAG: 9503130062
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
May Talman spent spring break '94 nowhere near a beach. There wasn't even a store in sight.
For seven days last March, she and 11 other University of Virginia students slept on wooden planks inside an abandoned sewing factory in Dungannon, an old mining town in the mountains near the Tennessee border.
No keg parties; no tanning lotion or bikinis. They spent long days sweating in the sun repairing some of the town's dilapidated houses.
``It was beautiful there,'' said Talman, who is helping coordinate 10 alternative spring break programs U.Va. offers this year.
For Talman and an increasing number of college students, sun, suds, sand and surf hold no allure for spring break.
Sonja Lewis, director of campus chapters for Habitat for Humanity International, said more than 5,000 college students have signed up for Habitat's national Collegiate Challenge program this spring.
Collegiate Challenge, the nation's largest alternative spring break program, sends small groups of students from 260 colleges to 104 different work camp sites across the country. Students may find themselves helping people recover from earthquakes in California or clearing land hit by floods in Georgia, Lewis said.
``This is the opportunity for them to do something really productive but also broaden their horizons,'' she said. ``This really is a big year for us - the biggest thus far.''
This spring, hundreds of Virginia students are participating - some of them even traveling overseas - through the auspices of such organizations as Habitat for Humanity.
Virginia Tech and U.Va. offer some of the more unusual programs:
About 20 Virginia Tech students will camp on a Choctaw Indian reservation in Sasaskwa, Okla., cook and warm themselves by an open fire and help clear a ceremonial dance ground.
Five Tech students are traveling with the YMCA to Tijuana, Mexico, where they will live and volunteer at the Home for Migrant Workers.
Ten U.Va. students are heading to Belize, a small nation on Mexico's southern border, as volunteer workers at several different health clinics.
Twelve more from U.Va. will spend spring break in inner-city New Orleans tutoring disadvantaged students.
Other programs keep students closer to home. Thirteen students at Sweet Briar College, for example, will spend their break dry-walling a Habitat house under construction in Amherst County. Student organizer Nancy Weikle said she and the others from the exclusive women's school will help finish a house intended for a family of six who now live in a trailer. by CNB