Service-Learning in Budapest

I'll try to give a brief account of some of the amazing things I've seen and people I've met while criss-crossing the city over the past several weeks attempting to secure 18 places where the Calvin students can spend several of their student hours per week participating in the life of an existing organization in Budapest as a service-learner. Their learning will be both cultural and intellectual - they will be observing the lives of people who have chosen work that is very front-lines in terms of bringing positive social change to the world. I am excited after having nearly completed this challenge.

I have about half of the students placed in schools around Budapest. The range of these schools is tremendous. One is the Városligeti English-Hungarian Bi-Lingual Primary School, where two students will work with teachers who teach kids between kindergarten and the 8th grade in both English and Hungarian - they will bring lessons in art, singing, English, culture, and much more. The teachers seem excited to have native speakers as classroom helpers in a variety of subjects. Another school is the Baár-Madas Calvinist high school, a school with a fascinating history that includes a four-decade interruption in religious education when the Communist party "borrowed" the school for its purposes between 1945 and 1989. It is inspiring to walk the halls in this school and imagine what it took to bring it back on-line as a school that takes its Calvinist heritage seriously in its teaching and learning. Two students will work with one teacher here, assisting in the teaching of a variety of different lessons in English. Another is a school called the Alternative Secondary School of Economics, a middle and high school that practices a very open style of education, leaving much of the learning to the kids and their own direction. It is another old building, but beautifully renovated recently, with student art hanging on every wall, every ceiling - a very conducive atmosphere for learning. Two of our students will spend time here participating in a program called CircleSpeak, where the students come to an English-speaking after- and during-school club for the purpose of improving their English skills and learning about each other. And finally, a few students will be placed in schools where there are American teachers with the organization teachoverseas.com - here as English teaching staff with a mission to also share the gospel when possible. These are technical high schools geared to children, mostly boys, who have been tracked toward work in the trades and sciences.

Another half are split between organizations that have missions ranging from traditional church missions - outreach and evangelism, or care for refugees, or basic service provision. I have met excited Hungarians, Americans, Romanians, and others who are encouraged by the possibility of having an American college student with open eyes to the work of service that precedes their arrival in Budapest, and that will continue after they leave. Two will work with a coffee shop outreach operated by the Calvary Chapel Hungarian church community on a busy street in downtown Budapest; two will partner with the Scottish Presbyterian mission church in leading a choir and organizing a fund-raiser and teaching English; two will help an international service organization with its social networking and general organization; one will work with an organization that provides outreach to refugee children and works to bridge the gap between the Roma and non-Roma people in Budapest; and another will work with a recent church plant on behalf of the Hungarian Reformed Church in a district known for its diversity and edginess. And finally, one will work with Serve the City-Budapest, a fledgling organization created to organize and publicize service and outreach activities that make the larger city of Budapest just a little bit better.

And while the students spend these many hours in service, their minds and hearts will be at work as well as their hands and feet - we will be examining together the ways in which students have historically played a part in social change and activism; we will wonder with sociologist James Davison Hunter about the role of the Church in "changing the world" - whether this is an appropriate frame of reference or not. And we will seek the wisdom of our newly forming Hungarian friends and colleagues in our wonderings about these and other questions.

It has been a full and rich couple of weeks arranging these placements.

I haven't mentioned that the students, nearly all of them, spent a good part of today harvesting potatoes... This is a much longer story, I'm sure, but now that I've brought it up, a majority of our group, and Julie and Abi, took a weekend trip to Mukachevo, Ukraine, a 5 hour bus ride away, to visit Christian Reformed World Missions missionaries George and Sarah de Vuyst and their kids, and to participate in a fund-raising potato harvest for the work of the Timothy Leadership Institute in Ukraine. A much longer story, but the beginning of the Calvin-in-Hungary students' service-learning for the semester. To paraphrase Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights, "Dirty hands, full hearts."