Teens on a Mission: What a Trip

Some of the slackers tried to track down liquor, Kusek says, but found it impossible. Not only were the students warned that they'd be sent home if caught drinking, but villagers were asked to cooperate by refusing to sell whatever homemade brews were on hand. Group leaders said there had been problems in previous years, Kusek says, but that supplies had dried up.

Of course, many of the students are serious about their commitments.

For 15-year-old Lucy Britt of Blacksburg, Va., for example, a trip to Rwanda this summer reflects her long-term concerns about genocide. Two years ago, Britt and several friends produced a movie about the genocide in Rwanda and entered it into a competition called National History Day. Last year, she entered a project about the Holocaust. Meanwhile, she has been demonstrating against genocide in Darfur and is working to form a chapter of the Anti-Genocide Coalition at her high school.

During her visit to Rwanda, she will spend a week in the capital talking with officials and genocide survivors, then head to a small village for three weeks to work on health-care projects. That portion of the trip will also include a journey to a national park to see endangered gorillas.

Britt would not have considered a trip that was merely fun. There are enough teens like her that even established exotic travel companies have had to adapt their programs in recent years. ActionQuest, for example, has been taking teens on water-based adventure trips since 1986. A few years ago, the tour organizer added a program that focuses on community service. During these journeys, teens work with disabled orphans in China or in national parks in the Galapagos or with slum kids in Thailand, to cite a few examples. Mike Meighan, one of the company's directors, points to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as one impetus for the trend toward trips that have both a purpose and a destination. "It shook everyone's sense of the state of the world," he says.

Shumlin also sees the impact of those attacks. At first, he says, parents simply worried that major European cities were targets, and wanted something rural and remote for their children. That helped develop an appetite for off-the-beaten-track journeys. The trend was further spurred, he says, as the attacks created a sense that the world needed to be better understood and needed saving.

Then, of course, there's students' desperate desire to stand out, as competition to get into the best colleges spirals ever upward.

"We all recognize that the phenomenon is on the increase," acting Harvard admissions director Marlyn McGrath says, referring to application essays that focus on such trips. "In the past several years, we began to observe it's relatively common."

Shaun Abbott of the Stanford University admissions office agrees that he has seen a "proliferation" of these types of programs and a "pattern of students from affluent backgrounds doing service in exotic locales." Stanford, he says, "tends to be sensitive that for many students, being able to study or work in a foreign country is not part of their reality." Still, he worries that such opportunities could "raise the bar of competition."

Both McGrath and Abbott emphasize that although the trips can supply grist for a good essay, they're not tickets into the Ivy League. "We try not to make it the be-all and end-all," Abbott says. "An applicant with a summer job in retail can write an essay just as compelling as the kid doing service in Senegal."

Cristan Trahey, acting director of admissions at American University, says that AU places a high priority on community service and an international perspective, so such trips suggest that a student might be a good fit at AU. On the other hand, "they don't replace strong grades and recommendations, and students can show their spirit in other ways."

Some programs, including Putney and National Geographic, have scholarship funds for children from low-income families. Even so, Edward R. Christophersen, a clinical psychologist at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Missouri, worries that the trend is so pronounced it may create pressure on middle-class families "who have to knock themselves out to send their kids on such a trip." A candy striper at the local hospital might indeed be able to write a stellar college admissions essay about the experience. But helping subsistence farmers repair a temple in Nusa Penida, Indonesia, has a certain natural zing that's hard to match.

Then again, Christophersen adds, providing such a trip beats giving a teen an expensive car or throwing a lavish graduation party. If it opens a child's vision and increases his or her sense of compassion, the money has been well spent, he says. "Otherwise, it's just an expensive trip."

Changed Forever

Travel to distant lands for an extended period is expensive, and trips that include community service often include the added expense of project materials. Jenna Kusek's trip to Tanzania, for example, cost nearly $8,000, and money was an obstacle. In fact, her parents turned her down the first year she begged. By last spring her pleas became more sophisticated, says her mother, Jody, who takes frequent trips to Africa working on HIV/AIDS issues for the World Bank. Jenna told her parents that she needed to learn about the world outside Bethesda and reminded them they'd always told her she should make a difference in the world.

"She played into my value system," her mother says during an interview in the family's living room. Jenna, apparently listening in on the conversation, pops into the room grinning and says, "I definitely pushed all your buttons."

Jody Kusek says she realizes that the money the teens spent traveling would have gone further if donated directly to the village. But sending your teen to a village and donating to a village is not an either/or proposition, she says. She adds that she feels the money was well spent "helping to create a new person whose life now is more about awareness of others; she has been forever changed."

Even simple things opened new vistas, Jody Kusek says. "It never would have occurred to her that a village couldn't get a teacher unless you provided a place for a teacher to live. There is no question she was enriched as a human being."

Shumlin says his goal is "to get young people at a vulnerable time and give them a perspective on the world and their own country and how they live."

His personal gratification sometimes comes in surprising places. For example, he says, he recently was sitting in a cafe in Rwanda and began chatting with a young American expat, Elizabeth Davis. She was shocked and excited to learn that he was co-owner of Putney: In 2001, as a high school junior, she had taken a Putney trip to Costa Rica, her first trip abroad. During the trip, she had helped build a water tower, volunteered at a local school and decided to spend her life working in the developing world.

She subsequently spent four years at Vanderbilt University and, after graduation in 2006, headed to Rwanda. She's now with a grass-roots organization that educates orphans and street kids and works with student leaders to foster healing of the psychological scars of the genocide there.

Davis, 23, moved from Rwanda to Washington a few weeks ago and registered the organization, Amani Africa, as a charity, so that donations will be tax-deductible for U.S. citizens. She plans on living here long enough to raise funds to build a school in Rwanda, then return. Said Davis in a recent telephone interview: "Like most of my friends, I grew up in the comfortable American bubble and really had no idea what life was like for people in the developing world. That high school trip played a huge role in making me the person I am today."

She may one day run into Jenna Kusek. This summer, Kusek will be working to save money for college. But after graduating from college, she intends to return to Africa. Before her trip last summer, she had ruled out the Peace Corps, thinking the organization's two-year tours of duty seemed like forever. Now, the Peace Corps is her goal, and Africa is where she intends to volunteer.

"I'm not saying I might go back," Kusek says. "I'm saying I will."