Journey: Learning Beyond the Classroom in El Salvador

It’s hard to wrap your brain around El Salvador.

Even Lonely Planet, which has built an empire writing guides to less traveled roads, seems unsure what direction to take with this country. “Falcons and hawks fill the skies above fabulous food festivals and bomb craters,” the online guide states with awkward cheer. “Friendly locals like to chat, diverting your gaze from the gangs and refugees to beautiful broad valleys.”

On the way to work the last day in El Sitio. Pictured clockwise from left: Franciso Peguero, Jeff Pomponi (hidden), Luis Castillo, Yanitza Medina, Megan Cullen, Dean Grubb, Derek Lomba, Kaitlyn Winegardner, Valerie Gonzalez-Crisci.

Suffolk junior Jeff Pomponi wasn’t quite sure why he decided to go to El Salvador for S.O.U.L.S. Alternative Winter Break. “I just wanted to go somewhere different because I knew over the winter break there wouldn’t be anything to do, and I wanted a change,” he says. “Once I got to El Salvador, I realized I’m supposed to do this …. I had a reason to be there that I didn’t know going in.”

Inspired by a legacy

Over the first two weeks of 2008, Pomponi is one of a dozen Suffolk students and five faculty and staff members living and working in El Sitio, a poor rural town in El Salvador’s mountainous north, trading time at home between semesters for a service learning project far away. Their primary assignment is to complete construction of the Concha Acoustica (acoustic shell), an outdoor stage and arena for community gatherings, before El Sitio’s annual Festival for Peace and Social Justice. Read more