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Eight Nebraska Wesleyan University students left for Guatemala in late May expecting to spend 10 days building a house for an impoverished family.

“We mixed cement, carried cinder blocks, moved piles of sand, and some of us learned how to lay bricks,” said Meera Bhardwaj, a recent NWU graduate and member of the student organization Global Service Learning.

They first planned a service trip to Thailand this summer but political unrest in that country forced members of Nebraska Wesleyan’s Global Service Learning to find another project.

Then the opportunity came to help build houses for poor families in Guatemala.

Justin Iverson knows when he’s a minister someday, Sunday school and church service won’t be the same as it was growing up in his South Dakota United Methodist congregation.

“Sunday fellowship is dwindling,” said Iverson, who graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University in May with a psychology degree. “Things are reshaping. It’s not like it used to be.”

When Sandra Mathews-Benham travels to Kazakhstan someday, she’ll be able to introduce herself, order a meal, and ask for directions.

“She could survive in Kazakhstan,” said NWU foreign exchange student Gulbanu Ibragimkyzy who has spent the past five months teaching Russian to Mathews-Benham.

A Nebraska Wesleyan University student is among 50 college students in the nation selected to receive a Phi Kappa Phi Study Abroad Grant.

Eight Nebraska Wesleyan University students are headed to Guatemala where they will work alongside families living in extreme poverty and build a new place for them to call home.

This week NWU biology students are practicing their diving skills in the campus swimming pool. Next week they’ll put those skills to the test on the northwest coast of Roatan, Honduras where they will experience 30 miles of fringing barrier reefs, seagrass beds, mangroves and shoreline.

Whether they’re writing publications from the four walls of their home, visiting parks and forests along the Pacific Northwest, tracing the footsteps of the apostle Paul in Greece and Turkey, or collecting family stories in South Korea, several Nebraska Wesleyan University faculty are looking forward to upcoming sabbaticals that will inevitably re-energize them as professors.