by Steve Waldhauser ’70
“In the late evening hours of September first, when most of our soon-to-be classmates were enjoying their last few nights of the comforts of home before heading off to college, we were deep in the Minnesota woods, running for our lives.”
First-year student Ben Birks of Sioux Center, Iowa, together with 11 of his new classmates and their group leaders, had traveled that night to Camp Iduhapi, on the northwest edge of the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, so that they could take part in what was called the “Cambodian Killing Fields simulation”—part of a voluntary social justice immersion organized for incoming students by the Community Service Center staff at Gustavus Adolphus College. Divided into small groups, they traveled through the Minnesota wilderness as if trying to cross the Cambodian frontier of the 1970s, which had been a terrifying ordeal, filled with booby-traps of all sorts and guarded by ruthless contingents of Khmer Rouge guerrilla fighters.
In the end, out of the 14 participants, two escaped while the rest were captured. The group was quick to understand that, had this been real, their lives were now in the hands of their captors.
“This wasn’t a silly game we were playing in the midst of a field trip to a YMCA camp,” Birks noted in a chapel homily he and four other immersion participants presented this past spring, reflecting on their experiences from the previous September within the text of the Beatitudes. “It was an intense, full-fledged manhunt which tried to give us wide-eyed, eager college freshmen a small inkling of what persecution really means. . . . Through the simulation, we were trying to learn from that old adage about trying to stand in someone else’s shoes and walk around in them. And really, that’s what this whole thing called social justice is all about, putting aside our own ignorance so that we can figure out where other people are coming from.”
Pre-orientation immersion programs are becoming more common at colleges and universities. They give participants a chance to come to campus early, start building a core group of friends, and ease the transition to college. In the case of programs like Gustavus’ “Service and Justice Immersion,” they also challenge participants to begin the task of critically reflecting on their values and actions in the world. As they try to negotiate the streets from the perspective of a homeless person; or see first-hand the neighborhood-to-neighborhood socioeconomic differences in one small stretch of Lake Street in Minneapolis; or hear the stories of immigrants and refugees; or observe the connections in our treatment of the earth, animals, and each other, they are engaging in what author Terry Tempest Williams calls “ground-truthing—walking the ground to see for oneself if what one has been told is true.” As they proceed together, encouraging and challenging one another, old stereotypes fall away, new actions and commitments rise to the surface, and they begin to feel who they really are and how they are connected to others.
Another scenario presented to the Gustavus group during their six-day experience was one aimed at conveying the impact of homelessness. “We were split into groups of three or four,” Courtney Covey, a first-year student from Felton, Minn., explained in her homily, “and given a bus pass, a set of envelopes containing directions for our day, and an identity. We were all homeless; one group had the identity of a woman, another a homeless teen, another a family. My group was given the identity of ‘Roger,’ a father who had been laid off and evicted, and was separated from his family.”
For eight hours the students tried to follow the directions in their envelopes, struggling to find their way across Minneapolis, to keep appointments, to find a shelter to stay for the night, to find employment agencies, to find healthcare and mental health facilities, to find a food pantry where they could get a free lunch. Their person’s fate depended upon what they as a group could accomplish in that day. “In the end,” Covey admitted, “through no fault of his own, ‘Roger’ did not have a place to sleep that night because there were no available shelter spaces. The experience of being homeless and unemployed was shocking, because it forced us to realize that even though the meek in the world are abused and ignored, they are not weak. It takes an incredible amount of strength to continue living in the face of seemingly insurmountable hardships.”
Participating students had varying reactions to the immersion. Covey noted that “we as humans are very good at not seeing things that we don’t want to see.” Christa Saeger, of Maple Grove, Minn., concluded that most of the world’s problems are caused because someone refuses to listen or someone feels they cannot be heard. “While at the House of Charity I met Lewis, who had lost his job, causing him to lose his home and family practically overnight. He talked about how this nation gives so much to people across the world, but said this country has forgotten its own people. He said he felt forgotten. He asked me who would take the time to hear what he had to say? All I could think to say was, ‘I will . . . for what it’s worth.’” She did, and now she’s convinced that listening is one of the strongest peacemaking tools we have.
Two of the participants experienced conflicting emotions as they stood in a soup kitchen line. “It didn’t feel right, being on the receiving side of the House of Charity line,” admitted Kristen Burston, who is from Lincoln, Neb. “What gives me the right to be walking through this line? I mean, I didn’t really need this food, but certainly other people in the line that did. How could I in good conscience accept this charity when so many others were truly hungry?”
Fellow immersion participant Nicole Blake of Canton, S.D., felt the same way. “If I didn’t eat,” she remembers thinking, “would it look as though I thought that I was above eating with them? Then a feeling of anger overtook me. I was upset that I was not the one standing behind the counter handing out the food. That was what I had expected to do on this trip. I had expected to help others out, not to be put in this awkward situation in which I felt both trapped and unsure of myself.”
Later that day, during reflection time, Blake told immersion leader Kari Lipke how upset she was. Lipke’s reply to her concerns was one she says she will never forget. “She asked why I hadn’t just enjoyed my opportunity to have a meal with another human being. Suddenly I understood why we had gone. We had gone to be humbled. As ashamed as I am to admit it, I had gone into the situation feeling slightly superior to those who were on the streets. Not that I thought that I was more important than them—it was something different. The best way to describe it is this: I wanted to help others out, but I was too proud too be put in a situation where others helped me.”
“For immersion planners, it is gratifying to hear students make the kinds of connections Blake made,” says Lipke, a Gustavus graduate who is both a program coordinator in the Community Service Center and a pastoral associate in the Chaplains’ Office. “To see them test their own thoughts and feelings around concepts such as service, justice, faith, and community; to observe them as they begin to understand these values in a deeper way, honoring the pluralism and complexity of our world.” Another goal of the experience is to encourage students to make good decisions about their co-curricular involvements at college—how will they make choices that influence the common good, and how will such choices enhance classroom learning and, ultimately, their civic engagement throughout life?
“As all of us know, this kind of social justice isn’t always an easy thing to do, but we have to start somewhere,” concluded Birks in his homily. “To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t exactly sure where to find this starting point until I was reminded of some words spoken by the late Robert F. Kennedy to a crowd in Cleveland, Ohio. He said, ‘We know what we must do. We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.’”
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