While many students plan on spending spring break vacationing or lounging at home, nine members of the Interact club will be crossing the border to perform community service in Xicotepec Mexico.

Nine Little Hawks, the largest group ever, will be attending the trip along with Interact Club teacher Carrie Watson.  They leave on March 15th from the O’Hare airport to Mexico City before bussing to Xicotepec. Then, along with the Rotary Club and U of I students, they will perform community service in the town. They return March 22.

Preparation for the trip was extensive.

“We had to go through a series of steps with the application process, and once that happened we had to send in a scanned copy of our passport and our basic information,” Payton Evans ‘15 said.

Along with the individual application process the entire Iowa City group met to discuss the trip.

“They went over all the things to expect and the schedule,” teacher Carrie Watson remarked, “Its very well organized.”

The services that Interact will provide range from medical assistance to building projects.

“One group is going down from the college of pharmacy and they will be doing deworming for children at schools,”  Watson said, “Another group will be going down from the dental school and they will be working on doing fluoride treatments. There is also a fine artist group going to do a puppet show on dental health for kids.”

Looking forward to the dentistry aspect, Ellis Fontana ‘16 said, “One thing we were talking about was dentistry,  because many of the villagers aren’t too great on the whole dental health.”

The Mexico trip is just the latest in Interact’s activities. The club frequently participates in community service on the local scale, but the trip to Mexico will take the club global once again.

This global travel does bring some security and health concerns with it.

“In Xicotepec we can’t drink the tap water because our bodies aren’t used to it,” Evans said, “We are flying into and out of Mexico City, and that’s not the safest place in Mexico.”

But, “There’s not really concern with that because they’ve been doing it for 12 years,” Payton Evans  said, referring to the Rotary Club.

Over all, members are looking forward to a successful trip