Feb 5, 2009 -- Armed with pickaxes and shovels, a group of undergraduate students dug ditches, cut trees and leveled the earth in the Nicaraguan community of San Juan del Sur over winter break. The 16 students prepared the land for construction of a bridge, but they also helped clear a path to more education and better health services for the villagers of Boca de Las Montanas. The American Jewish World Service (AJWS) sponsored the trip, which ran from Jan. 11-18. It was one of three winter service missions organized by the Center for the Jewish Future and subsidized by a grant from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. “We built a bridge both physically and emotionally with the community at large,” Eric Behar, a junior at Yeshiva College, said. The bridge will lead to the site of a new school purchased by the hosting non-governmental organization, Servicios Médicos Comunales, which supports community-based development initiatives in the area and provides free education to adults. “It has been shown that with increased literacy rates in Nicaragua, the disease rates go down,” Stern College senior Annie Wasserman said. The group learned about Nicaraguan culture and history, global poverty and the Jewish values of tikkun olam [repairing the world] in sessions led by AJWS staff. They awoke at dawn, ate beans and plantains for meals and slept on the floor of a three-room building located on a farm that had electricity and a communal toilet but no running water. “There are many ways to battle poverty. Education is one of them—on our side and theirs,” Wasserman said. Rabbi Zvi Schindel, senior rabbinic intern at Congregation Beth Shalom in Long Island, and Chaviva Fisher, CJF director of operations, accompanied the group and taught daily Torah lessons. Students visited neighboring villages where people earn less than two dollars a day and they participated in an opening ceremony at a one-room schoolhouse. They also attended a health clinic with only five doctors serving 18,000 people and an eye clinic staffed by volunteer American optometrists who offer free eye exams to thousands who travel from near and far. Shabbat was spent eating simply, singing, learning and praying as the locals watched in awe. They joined together for an outdoor communal Havdalah ceremony after Shabbat. “I’m proud that I did something of worth with my time, happy that I spent my winter break, not for myself this time, but for others,” YC junior Yitzchak Ariel Schwartz said.