Metro-East Lutheran Students Travel To Costa Rica For A Week Of Service

EDWARDSVILLE – A break in the regular school schedule at Metro-East Lutheran High School allowed Shanna Covarrubias, Spanish teacher at MELHS, to take a group of students to Costa Rica to both immerse themselves in the language and serve the community.

Covarrubias led a team of 21 students and five adults who traveled to San Ramon, Costa Rica, for a four-day service trip organized through Pura Vida, a mission organization based in Costa Rica. The group divided into three teams and spent a week hosting day camp programs for children in six different neighborhoods in San Ramon.

“One team would go to a park, one would go to a basketball court, one would go to a soccer field, and we would do VBS (Vacation Bible School)-type programs for three hours,” Covarrubias said. “Then we would have lunch and then go to different locations in different neighborhoods in the afternoon and repeat the same program.”

Through these weekly day camps, Pura Vida builds relationships with families in the communities and then offers additional support to any families in need through a sponsorship program that can provide financial support or help with education, housing or other needs. Covarrubias said in total about 75 to 100 children attended the day camps while the MELHS group was in Costa Rica.

“We partnered with the mission group because they know what the people in these communities need on a day-to-day basis,” Covarrubias said. “And we were able to help them because they would not be able to put on these camps every week if they didn’t have groups coming from the United States to serve.”

The trip was one option that MELHS students could choose to participate in during the school’s annual Interim Week. During Interim, regular classes are not held but instead each teacher prepares a week of theme-focused fun, educational activities. For example, Interim Week offerings have ranged from cake decorating to film making to baseball history to barbecuing. Along with these types of classes, each year students have the chance to go on educational trips, either domestically or internationally. In addition to the students who went to Costa Rica on the service trip, another group of MELHS students traveled to Spain and France during interim week, which was at the end of March.

Every MELHS student, sometime during their four years in high school, must volunteer for one Interim Week in the service group, which spends the week volunteering at local community organizations and churches.

“Interim Week gives students a chance to expand their horizons and learn new things beyond our regular classroom teaching,” said Dr. Jay Krause, MELHS principal. “It also gives both students and staff a chance to give back to the community through week-long service projects.”

The Costa Rica interim trip not only provided students a chance to serve but also pushed them to expand their Spanish language skills. All the students who went on the trip have studied Spanish in Covarrubias’ classes.

“For me, it was really exciting to get to see my students evolve their language and find the words and phrases they needed to communicate in the moment,” Covarrubias said. “It was great to watch them use the language they had learned in class to accomplish the tasks they needed to do.”

Covarrubias led a similar mission-focused trip to Puerto Rico for MELHS students in 2019. She said she has been looking forward to the chance to introduce her students to this kind of immersive service experience once again.

“As a Spanish teacher I am very passionate about experiencing other cultures,” Covarrubias said. “I love these opportunities to travel and do service work, and to get to share that with my students is very special.”

For more information about Metro-East Lutheran High School, which has been providing academic excellence in a Christ-centered environment for more than 40 years, go to www.melhs.org.

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