It was another foggy afternoon in San Francisco and 50 elementary school children were jumping, running and climbing all over the play equipment at the park. Their shouts and laughter flooded the otherwise unkempt, but quiet neighborhood.

Celeste was crying again, this time because Brian called her “mean.” Steve Schwartz, a credential program student, reached over to give her a hug as she covered her face with her hands.

“Welcome to chaos,” Schwartz said as he released Celeste. “Our job is to make sure that the kids don’t kill each other by the end of the day.”

Schwartz, along with 10 other Sacramento State students, is part of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a nationwide college campus ministry. They participated in a six-week experimental learning program called Bay Area Urban Project during the months of July and August to learn about the relevancy that culture, social justice and racial reconciliation have on their Christian faith.

The purpose of the project is for students to get out of their usual environments to experience poverty, broken lives and a life of service, Josh Harper, the project director, said.

The program took place in the bay area with about 50 students divided into teams, dispersed in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose. The majority of students came from Northern California universities including Stanford, UC Berkeley, San Francicsco State and Sac State. A small group of students traveled from several universities in Texas.

The structure of the program was simple: to learn through the means of living in community, studying and working together. The students were divided into eight teams and each team was assigned a volunteer site along with living arrangements nearby. The only times that all the teams met were Wednesday nights, for dinner and speakers at the Fruitvale Presbyterian Church in Oakland.

While one team was assigned to live and work in a recovery program in a homeless shelter, most of the volunteer sites had to work with the youth. The Sac State team was assigned to volunteer at a summer day camp at the San Francisco Christian Center, a predominantly black church, nestled at the edge of Daly City, bordering San Francisco.

To emphasize community building, Schwartz and his teammates were assigned to live in a two-bedroom apartment that is owned by the San Francisco Christian Center. Each person was allotted $15 for food and $5 for laundry per week.

Convinced that she was going to starve at first, Alyssa Chavez, a gerontology major, said that the group soon figured out that the only way to survive was for everyone to pool the money together and create a community budget.

The group created community meal plans and each person took turns taking on the responsibility of either cooking or cleaning for the team during each meal.

While it was hard to give up the freedom of being picky with what she ate, Chavez said that she learned to eat foods that she didn’t like for the benefit of the group.

Aside from learning from community building, each student was assigned about 800 pages of reading ranging from Biblical studies to articles on issues of society, peace, justice and racial inequalities.

Chavez, who is Filipino and Mexican, said that while she is no stranger to racism, she was surprised by what she learned through the readings, lectures and her experiences with the children.

Chavez recalled a time during the camp where they took the children out camping for a week. She noticed a drastic difference in the way that the staff at the campsite treated kids from her program, who were mostly black and Latino, and kids from other summer programs, who happened to be mostly white.

“They were just being kids, but before they could even do anything, they were already labeled as ‘rough’ or ‘bad’ kids by the staff there,” Chavez said.

For Schwartz, the whole experience was interesting because, as a Caucasian male, for the first time in his life he got to experience what it’s like to be a minority.

“I learned about being a minority in a different culture by submersing myself in it,” Schwartz said. “It takes a lot of humility and a lot of willingness to examine your own values-.You have to learn to accept what happens around you and try not to change it or cast judgment on it,” he said.

During his three years of being the program director, Harper said he has seen the program grow steadily each year. This year had the largest attendance since the program’s inception in 1993.

“This generation is dissatisfied with the lure of consumerism,” Harper said. “From this generation you will see changes. You will see people dream impossible dreams and see them accomplished for the good of fellowmen.”

“One of the main goals of InterVarsity is to see students transformed, see campuses renewed and develop world changers,” he said.

Two weeks after the program was over, Schwartz sat at home considering changes in his lifestyle.

Although San Francisco is within driving distance from home, Schwartz compares his experience to a mission trip. After learning to live simply, cooking every meal and doing everything as a group, Schwartz said he’s experiencing “reverse culture shock” upon coming home.

Schwartz said that he has talked to his roommates about having community meals and perhaps canceling satellite TV.

“Things in my life have to change to reflect what I learned this summer,” Schwartz said.

Mary Chou can be reached at [email protected]