Clarksville, TN – In May Pen, Jamaica, a tiny girl named China ventured from her elementary school down the street to Bustamante High School, a two-story, concrete building with open windows, intermittent power, and water failures.
There, a woman who cleans Bustamante’s halls watches China until her mother can pick her up late in the afternoon.
Bustamante also is where China encountered Megan Schneck, an Austin Peay State University (APSU) education student who traveled to Jamaica for a week in January on a special service-learning, study abroad trip with several other APSU students and professors.
“She loved playing with my hair,” Schneck said about China. “A lot of the kids liked my hair because it’s long and straight and blonde, and they asked if it was real and if they could braid it. China and I, we hung out the whole time we were there.”
Every day as the Austin Peay State University students painted two classrooms at the school, China was near, sometimes upset that Schneck couldn’t play with her. On the last day, with the painting done, Schneck readied to return to the United States.
“She was so sad. She wouldn’t let go of me,” Schneck said. “She had my shirt. She was sobbing. She wanted me to come back.”
Stories like these will become core memories the students who made the trip will carry for the rest of their lives.
“I feel like you can say, ‘Oh, this country is going to be eye-opening and humbling,’ but once you’re there, you don’t realize how influential it is to get the other cultures and receive just love,” Alaina Chandler, another student on the trip, said.
“I feel like the trip was so overwhelming in such an amazing way because we did so much – our days were jam-packed – and we got so many amazing, heartfelt memories,” stated Chandler.
