Transborder Service Learning: New Fronteras in Civic Engagement

Hour after hour, box by box, and bag by bag, the team of students transferred the thousands of food items warehoused in a second-floor conference room at the Fletcher Library on Arizona State University's West campus. Employing techniques they had developed over the six weeks of a campus-wide food drive, they formed a chain, tossing food back from the conference room to a waiting cart, then down an elevator, to a 16-foot rental truck waiting at the library loading dock. There, another student team, most sweating profusely in the 95 degrees of a spring day in Phoenix, rolled the items into the truck and stacked them. Ultimately, the truck would sag under the weight of tens of thousands of food items beginning the first leg of a journey to a community center that serves hot lunches to children in some of the poorest shantytown neighborhoods of Nogales, Mexico.