March/April 2009

Spring Break: Service Gone Wild

Can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Illustration: Gordon Studer

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For spring break fun, can good deeds and learning compete with wet T-shirt contests and random hookups? You decide.

Rite of Spring: Tequila shots
Righteous Spring: Measles shots. Public health students from the University of Michigan spend their vacation observing a childhood vaccination program in China.

Rite of Spring: Señor Frog’s
Righteous Spring: See more frogs. Life Changing Travel’s Galapagos Islands trip has students building trails, adding native plants, and working at the islands’ research stations.

Rite of Spring: Gaudy cruise
Righteous Spring: Godly crusade. Students spend four days lobbying with the Oregon Right to Life Education Foundation. Highlight: the quiz game “Who Wants to Be a Pro-Lifer?”

Rite of Spring: Contracting stds
Righteous Spring: Preventing them via an AmeriCorps condom distribu­tion and sex ed trip to Charlotte, North Carolina

Rite of Spring: Drama
Righteous Spring: Dharma. A retreat at Virginia’s Radford University includes an ass-numbing 15 hours of silent meditation.

Rite of Spring: Crossing the border
Righteous Spring: Walking the border. University of California-Berkeley students tour the routes used by illegal immigrants coming into the US. ­But instead of following los coyotes, the students are guided by la migra.

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DEMOCRACY DOES NOT EXIST...

without free and fair elections, a vigorous free press, and engaged citizens to reclaim power from those who abuse it.

In this election year unlike any other—against a backdrop of a pandemic, an economic crisis, racial reckoning, and so much daily bluster—Mother Jones' journalism is driven by one simple question: Will America move closer to, or further from, justice and equity in the years to come?

If you're able to, please join us in this mission with a donation today. Our reporting right now is focused on voting rights and election security, corruption, disinformation, racial and gender equity, and the climate crisis. We can’t do it without the support of readers like you, and we need to give it everything we've got between now and November. Thank you.

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