Written by Amanda Toye
Spring Break is next week for Harding students. The school loves to support students’ desire for service by helping them lead and attend mission trips over break.
Joy Tittle is the director of Harding’s Spring Break mission trips and teaches students how to lead their group.
“We have a total of eighty-five students going to six different locations,” Tittle said. The six different locations students are traveling to are New York, Nicaragua, Cozumel, New Hampshire, Texas and Arizona.
“The groups are completely student-led,” Tittle said. “No faculty or staff go with them. They are trained to lead with the whole purpose of spring break missions is for the students to feel comfortable leading a team after they leave Harding. They come and meet with me about once a month starting in the fall and we start planning. They work on a budget and itinerary and we talk through fundraising and booking flights and then coordinating with the missionaries at each location as to what they need them to help with.”
For these mission trips, students work hard to fundraise between $500-$2,000.
Sophomore Cassie Swartz will be traveling to New Hampshire to work with a new church plant for the second year in a row.
“I’m going to Laconia, New Hampshire,” Swartz said. “There’s a small church plant there. The Dutiles, they used to church-plant with the Williamson’s, they just started a church plant in New Hampshire a couple years ago so we’re just gonna go support the church there and the community. It’s a pretty small church and there’s not a lot of churches of Christ up there so the biggest thing we’re doing is going to encourage the church and see how they’re making the whole community a light with Christ.”
Swartz said she is excited to go back to the church this year and continue the relationships she began to form during her last trip there.
Freshman Ali Mills will be traveling to Guatemala with Health Talents International for a more medical-based mission trip.
“Basically you go and provide healthcare to people who don’t have access to it or can’t afford it.” Mills said. “We’re going with dentistry week so a dentist will be going on our trip. We’ll have a couple of mobile clinics and also be working at the permanent clinics. I’ll just be helping out with whatever since I’m not a licensed healthcare provider, but there will be PA students there and we’ll get to observe.”
