The Murray State News

Issue date: 8/22/08 Section: News

Jason Morrow
Online Editor

For many students, the summer means having a full-time job, taking a road trip or perhaps just spending quality time with the family. For others, it means traveling the world and visiting the many various cultures it has to offer.

Courtney Crain, junior from Louisville, Ky., spent part of her summer Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. During her two-week trip to Costa Rica she did an internship through a non-profit organization called Edge Outreach, which is dedicated to short-term missions and global partnerships.

She went to Costa Rica for two weeks. Both trips were designed to implement a water purification system for various groups of people and to teach them how to manage them.

"It was a great learning experience working with people from another culture," Crain said. "It was great helping them understand how to make their community healthier."

Clay Brigance, junior from Beechmont, Ky., spent two weeks in Japan. Brigance went through the International Mission Board for college outreach and ministry.

He and a group of people went to the University in Fukuoka and ate lunch with local students to make friends and build relationships with individual people.

Clay said he made three close friends while he was there and was able to even enjoy his very first Japanese barbecue.

"When I was there I realized that we are all people wherever we are," Brigance said. "Whether we're in Japan, Korea, Europe, we all have the same desires and that's to be accepted by other people, to love other people and to be loved by other people."

Jeremy Grace, senior from Greenville, Ky, spent two weeks traveling through South Africa with an organization called Do Missions and helping various areas make irrigation systems for area crops.

The purpose was to dig trenches to help fertilize and water the plants in the area's greenhouses, which the group also built. The project took Grace and his group one week, but would have taken the natives at least six months to do.

"These were two feet deep, meter-wide trenches," Grace said. "Heavy ditch digging."

When Grace was not digging trenches or working with the greenhouses, he got to spend time with many children who had lost their parents to AIDS.

"It was a great eye-opening experience I think everybody should have," Grace said. "It's one thing to see on television, it's another thing to have the relationships, the memories. I think that's what changes lives is the relationships."

Jason Morrow can be reached at jason.morrow@murraystate.edu

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