International service

I am forwarding this message for a staff member in my office. Please
respond to me or to her directly.  Thank you.

Hello,

My name is Shelley Errington and I am the Assistant Director for Community
Involvement at Rice University. For the past four years, our office has
coordinated an International Service Project held the last two weeks in
May. In the past, we have traveled to Haiti, Guatemala, and the Mexican
Yucatan. Our goal is to develop a strong relationship with two service
sites, that alternate every year. Thankfully, we have this relationship in
Guatemala and in Haiti.  Unfortunately, it looks as if the Univeristy will
not allow us to travel to Haiti this year, because of safety concerns.
Therefore, I am currently doing a site search for our 2001 project. We are
not interested in working with U.S. based programs that coordinate
"volunteer vacations".  Rather, we would like to work directly with a
service site.  Some of our sites, inlcuding last year's trip to San Lucas
Toliman, Guatemala, had an office based in the United States and a service
site in the destination country. This model worked very well but so did our
trips to Haiti, when we were working directly with the site in
Port-au-Prince. We will be taking approximately 13-15 students and one to
two staff members.

We currently offer Alternative Spring Break trips to San Pedro Sula,
Honduras and Reynosa, Mexico so would
like to work in a different country. We are flexible on the nature of the
service work, but would
prefer to not work with housing construction as this is the focus of many
of our trips.  We are currently looking at the following areas: Nicaragua,
Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Our past trips that have
been most successful have involved working in a more human service
capacity, as the emphasis of this trip and the semester long preparation is
awareness of world poverty issues.

I would appreciate any information you may have regarding programs or
experiences that you have had or recommend. As we need to do extensive fund
raising and group education, the participants are selected very early in
the year and we are looking to have a site confirmation no later than
October 31.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

Shelley Errington
Assistant Director
Community Involvement Center, MS-527
Rice University
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, Texas  77251-1892
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~service/


Phone: (713) 348-6044
Fax:   (713) 348-6165
E-mail:shelvis@rice.edu

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Heather C. Syrett, Director
Community Involvement Center - MS 527
Rice University
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, TX  77251-1892

Phone:  (713) 348-4970
Direct: (713) 348-6163
Fax:    (713) 348-6165
E-mail: heathers@ruf.rice.edu
www.ruf.rice.edu/~service
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