extraordinary sensitivity. One SST student expressed her frustration with

being able to help friends in need back home, but not being able to do the

same thing in international settings "without fostering dependence,

perpetuating stereotypes of powerful white Americans, and doing more harm

than good."⁴⁰About the time Goshen's SST program was initiated, Ivan Illich

gave a provocative address to the Conference on Inter-American Student

Projects at Guernavaca. In the speech, titled "To Hell with Good Intentions!,"

Illich told his listeners to voluntarily "renounce exercising the power which

being an American gives you (as 'vacationing do-gooders') to impose

American benevolence on Mexico."He entreated his audience to "use your

money, your status and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to

look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do

not come to help."⁴¹In 1997, Goshen's Study-Service Term students in

Dominican Republic took a four-day excursion to the neighboring country of

Haiti, where they heard Mennonite Central Committee workers speak about

development. MCC's country representative evoked the memorable image of

"cowboy missionaries," who enter a country like Haiti "with their six-shooters

a'blazin'."The MCC service worker reminded the SSTers that they could not

truly help their hosts in a brief, six-week period and charged them to "serve"

by helping those in their villages believe in themselves, and in what they can

accomplish by working together as a community. Following the trip to Haiti,

40_{Rachel Eash, SST Journal, Summer 1997. Most of the student journals I'm}
drawing on here are from the Dominican Republic, where my spouse and I
have led four Study-Service Term units, two in 1989 and two in 1997. I draw
from this material because it is most recent and most familiar to me, but many
other sources from student journals over the past 30 years confirm the basic
trajectories and sensitivities noted here.

41_{Cited in Alexander Kwapong, "Some Reflections," 16.}

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