Nepal, the strip of land squeezed for breath between the masses of China and India, is where thick-skinned elephants and the Himalayas run rampant. Even for those who know where it lies, Nepal is usually relegated to the realm of the indistinctly exotic—a vague otherworld surfacing sometimes in a travel magazine or as the answer to a trivia question. Adopted from Nepal as a baby from the Bal Mandir orphanage, Arun Storrs, TC ’08, spent her childhood years in Oregon. After Yale gave her a grant to work with refugee children in Nepal in 2007, from which she paid a visit to the orphanage she had been adopted two decades ago in an attempt to discover this overlooked country.

Bold are the bruises on the backs of Bal Mandir babies, for they are rarely held, and instead lie immobile in their cribs. Neither do they have the leg muscles to crawl. Diaper rashes redden their skin, but the diapers are too few for the orphanage to change them every time they soil. This was the birthright Storrs found. The next year saw Storrs at Bal Mandir again, with other Yale students in tow.

Yale’s convenient two-week spring breaks have sent Yale students like Storrs globetrotting through time zones both ways—most notably through “Reach Out,” the student-run organization that organizes service trips abroad. Since eight Yale students, trying to institutionalize their international service trips, began Reach Out Yale, the program has grown: There were over 120 participants on 2011’s spring break trips. Some trip leaders, such as Djeniffer Melo, SY ’12, of Cape Verde, and Ananya Hemvijitraphan, SC ’12, of Thailand, wished to show Yale students their homeland and its culture in a two-week show-and-tell panorama of their countries. Victoria Rogers, JE ’12, co-president of Reach Out, says the organization has grown mainly due to word of mouth. The infallible self-advertising that circulates from tanned and happy returning Yalies helps to make Reach Out an increasingly popular option every year.

But on a trip supposed to be about changing the world, the trip participants did not spend the full two weeks providing service in third-world conditions. Are the glamorous, touristy portions of the trips necessary hooks to entice applicants? If so, do such trips qualify as service trips in the fullest sense?

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After trekking Tibet’s Hou Mountain with a monk in red and gold robe-garb with beads around the neck and machete in hand and dancing with Bolivians in a shaman’s potato field, the latest round of Yale students have returned to the university’s bubble with newly-acquired worldliness. It is possible that these two-week forays were just that, though—a mere fourteen days to execute all the goodwill of American privilege. Can anyone really make a difference in two weeks?

Many Reach Out participants don’t think so. “We went in with the understanding that we’re not making a tangible change,” says Marissa Caan, SY ’13, who traveled to the Dominican Republic through Reach Out this March. Justine Kolata, MC ’12, who led a Reach Out trip to Bolivia, says, “It’s arrogant to assume that you can help anyone in two weeks.” Even though they do believe that there is limited long-term impact of another shed built or another field planted, the relationships forged between third world children and Reach Out participants, the cultural exchange, and the translation of human experience and human contact will mold the lives of both Yale students and the people they meet.

There certainly were powerful constraints on how much help Yalies could provide. Labor tasks, like construction or farming, would have been more efficiently executed by community members who needed the jobs and knew the village and its needs, according to Sasha Ginzberg, TC ’14, who traveled to the Dominican Republic through Reach Out. Kolata adds, “The local people know best. We’re helping people who know how to do things a lot better in their own country.”

Even English lessons may go to waste with lack of opportunity for usage. But the trip participants believe that they inspired many children they met overseas to pursue higher education. Even on trips whose main goal involved physical labor, such as building a vocational training shed for Rwandan students, the indelible effects of cultural exchange held most value. “Sacrificing a small bit of efficiency [by having college students build the shed] was worth it,” says Sophia Clementi, SY ’14, a Rwanda trip member.

Most of the trips spent one of the two weeks providing service to a select rural village, and the last week touring the country. The students on Storrs’ trip to Nepal hiked through the Chitwan jungle and rode elephants—“really touristy stuff,” she says. Those on the Reach Out trip to Thailand sunned themselves on beaches and toured Thai vineyards. Sri Lankan trip participants cheered in the stadium of a Cricket World Cup match. Many believe that these more touristy excursions are as educational for Yale students and the third world communities they visit. After leaving the rural villages, the Rwandan trip participants discussed African politics with the country’s president; in Cape Verde Yalies visited the island’s Department of Education. Many trips developed students’ academic interests, whether in east African politics and genocide studies or in monastic life in Tibet. The tourism was more about education than service for both rural villagers and Yale students. For the latter, touring the cities of a country is necessary for beginning to understand its entirety.

Participants were adamant, however, that Reach Out trips are not just excuses for Yale students to create photo albums from tropical climates. Ginzberg saw the far-flung effects of Haitian discrimination and the Dominican Republic government’s corruption, while indigenous Bolivians taught Kolata their environmentally conscious farming practices. Storrs believes that it is normal for the students on the trip to get more out of it than the children they help.

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“These Nepalese orphans are used to seeing people come for a week, give them balloons and bubbles, and leave,” Storrs says. The bruises from a lack of being held disappear from the babies’ backs as they grow up, but the orphans remain as starved for human attention as ever. So do trips like Reach Out’s simply perpetuate a continuous cycle for the orphans of being left? Do Yale students “drop in and see what’s happening,” as Storrs puts it, and return to their merry lives an ocean away?

To counter poverty tourism, she returned to live in Nepal and began what’s called the Kumari Project, a nonprofit providing basic health, education, and job training via a fair trade women’s cooperative in Nepal. It also includes a small eco-fashion line made from organic and recycled materials that is carried by several stores in the states, including Kerin, a store in New Haven that closed last summer. Storrs still thinks there’s a role for Yalies in their short visits—she leads annual spring break trips for Yale students to make crafts with and teach English to Bal Mandir orphans and to hold its babies.

Interestingly, the children who often live in poverty are now furiously emailing and connecting on Facebook with the Yale students they’ve met. Rwandan children whose families were killed in the genocide remember the faces they learned to like and keep memories of Yalies’ visits fresh in their minds through the invisible strands of the Web. Too apropos is the quote from the movie The Social Network: “Bosnia? They don’t have roads, but they have Facebook.”

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When one imagines all the Pampers diapers for Nepalese orphans that could be purchased with the sum just one trip participant spent, it’s easy to wonder whether a direct donation to charity would do more good than a ground-zero sighting. (Between the cost of airfare, vaccines, insurance, ground transportation, and lodging, the cost to one participant of a Reach Out-type trip is sizeable, costing from 900 to just shy of 2,000 dollars.) Participants rejected this idea, however. To Caan, the firsthand experience is necessary to instill the worthiness of the country’s cause in the trip participant herself; in some ways, the thousands of dollars paid for the trip is also an investment in continued future involvement. “No amount of money could have created what actions will follow,” says Clementi. For Storrs, annual trips to Bal Mandir are necessary to ensure that the donations are not funneled into the wrong hands. Melo, who led the Reach Out trip to Cape Verde, adds, “How would you convince people to donate 1,300 dollars to a place they haven’t heard of?”

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In their haste to flee the impoverished city that they temporarily call home, Yale students set their sights across continents for the next rural village to volunteer in and forget the plight nearer home. Alexandra Brodsky, DC ’12, co-coordinator of Dwight Hall, says that international service holds a “certain exoticism that trumps sending emails to organize weekly service events in New Haven,” and that the cultures between domestic and short term international service doers are often quite different. That is to say that it isn’t the service, but the flashiness of cultural capital that often motivates Yalies to go abroad with Reach Out.

Participants see it another way. Many view these trips primarily as educational experiences for themselves and for the villagers rather than singular community service missions. Community service “is not the point of Reach Out,” stresses Rogers. According to Thomas Smyth, SY ’12, who led the Sri Lanka Reach Out trip, the cultural exchange from service trips abroad cannot be gained in New Haven, and even as New Haven is in need year-round, other countries can only beckon during the “window of opportunity” that is spring break.

Furthermore, Rogers says that many of the Reach Out trip participants return with a renewed eagerness to get involved in New Haven social service. After a Reach Out trip, Kolata says, “Next time you see a homeless person in New Haven, you don’t ignore them.”

Whether Reach Out trips are meant to reconcile “the absurdity of our privilege and the moral necessity to do something,” as Brodsky puts it, or to foster firsthand learning, Kolata says she will always remember the ritual ceremony her Bolivian host family used to welcome her, the hike at dawn to an archaeological site, the burning of llama wool, candies, and coca leaves, and a libation of wine in tribute to Mother Earth. Nor will Caan forget the sewing sweatshops in the Dominican Republic choking with hundreds of people at their machines.

Storrs paraphrases Spiderman: “Yale students have a responsibility to use their power for good.”