FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Tucked away in the corner of a small, bustling coffee shop on the University of Arkansas campus, undergraduate students Colleen Boardman and Bryn Martens chatter onward, scrolling through an iPad slideshow of images and sipping on Starbucks coffee. It’s nothing out of the ordinary for the average middle-class undergraduate college student, but no one would expect that less than a year ago, Martens and Boardman were working in developing schools, shadowing doctors in local hospitals, and scraping paint from construction site walls in Dangriga, Belize.

Today, they look back on their time through a series of photographs and blog posting, to the monthlong trip where fixing the hotel toilet, living without regular access to wifi, washing clothes in the bathtub amid geckos and various bugs, and not being able to walk the streets alone was part of the big adventure, what Martens calls the quintessential “opportunity of a lifetime.”

More photos can be seen on the Colleague website.

Boardman and Martens were two of more than 60 students who took the opportunity to live in Belize through the Study Abroad community development summer 2013 program. The faculty-led program allowed University of Arkansas students in many majors, from creative writing to engineering, to spend three weeks in Dangriga, a city of 10,000 on the Caribbean coast of Belize. There, students worked on a variety of community development projects, from building protective structures to house drums to teaching nutrition and exercise in schools.

Bart Hammig and Jean Henry, who teach in the community health promotion program, and Erin Casey, who teaches in the childhood education program, were the faculty members from the College of Education and Health Professions who accompanied students.

 “We worked in teams of 12-15 students usually, the bigger groups being the literacy and business teams,” said Boardman. Teams worked on large-format projects to better communities and assist in hospitals, schools and local businesses. Both Martens and Boardman, who worked on the public health and literacy teams, respectively, spent the majority of their time in the schools, offering services to both teachers, students and locals, while immersing themselves in Belize culture.

Martens, a kinesiology major, took part in the public health team work in Dangriga, specializing in clinical care and primary education during her time. In addition to shadowing medical staff in palliative care and radiology units, Martens brought medical supplies from the United States to host community drop-in centers with her group, offering free health screenings to the public, from body-mass index measurements to blood pressure exams. In addition to her preparation before the trip, Martens also visited a local eye clinic and learned how to give eye exams, a routine that she would follow twice a week while in Belize.

Through church-funded schools such as Gulisi and Christ the King in Dangriga, Martens and the medical team also taught nutrition, cardiovascular health, personal hygiene and the importance of exercise to students aged K-7 U.S. equivalent. And, while the opportunity to work in developing medical centers was what originally led Martens to sign up for the trip, her future plans changed from the opportunity to teach and utilize her medical skills and knowledge in the classroom.

“I loved doing all of the medical stuff, and I was going to go to med school after graduating,” said Martens. “But after I had taught so much in the schools down there and saw my love for teaching and my strengths in it, I decided to go into education and teach science.”

Martens recently took her Praxis examination and now teaches at Springdale High School during the week.

For Boardman, the calling was slightly different, as was the workload. Her hours were spent teaching poetry, music, literature and creative writing in various classrooms of students ages 5 through 14. However, Boardman’s efforts to teach in a country where many of the students didn’t speak English, were illiterate or needed additional attention in the classroom, didn’t come without a variety of boundaries to overcome.

“It was really hard to teach down there because the kids just really didn’t want to listen to you. One of the classrooms hadn’t had a teacher for a couple of weeks and just had a substitute, and so they were getting a new teacher that they had never met when they just had a couple more weeks before the end of term,” said Boardman. “Because down there, there is a lot of holding kids back in grades, we each had a tutoring group of students whose teachers thought they were not standard in their classes.”

For Boardman, though, the challenge was one of excitement and moving forward. The literacy team that she worked on built an entire library for Epworth Methodist school, transforming a storage unit given to the group by the school principal into a thriving center for students to study and read.

“The principal had a storage room that was filled with stuff like broken computers and broken blackboards, and she asked us if we could clean it out so the kids could have a place to read and have study time,” said Boardman, showing photos of the transformed space. “The kids were really interested in it, and we would have to go as far as to close the door (while we were working) because we would turn around from painting and there would be more kids in there. We would have to ask them, ‘Shouldn’t you be in class?’”

Complete with a jungle theme that the team handpainted, and bookshelves built through a collaborative effort with the engineering team, the hard work and heavy suitcases from transporting more than 300 books for the newly placed library paid off, as Boardman and the literacy team ended their trip tutoring in the space that they had created.

In addition to teaching and offering services around the city, students of the 2013 excursion had the opportunity to explore Belize and immerse themselves in the surrounding culture. A trip to the Mayan Ruins at the Xunantunich Archaeological Reserve, living in a jungle hut in a 130-degree heat index, trying different cultural cuisines, snorkeling and traveling around the surrounding islands were just some of the learning experiences that students returned with.

Outside the work week, the trip to Belize was what both Boardman and Martens described as a life-changing way to experience the world.

“It was definitely an experience,” said Martens, commenting on both the highlights and the hardships of her time in Belize. “More than anything it was a life-changing experience, in the aspect of culture, and being outside of your comfort zone. It was hard, but it was an amazing opportunity.”

The summer 2014 community development trip to Belize will be held May 12 - June 7, 2014, with projects currently being planned for fields such as anthropology, business, ecology, engineering, health professions, literacy and creative arts, and social work. Students can get more information about the program through the Office of Study Abroad and International Exchange, or at studyabroad@uark.edu.

By Emily Rhodes