Rising before the California dawn, a Creighton student and her classmates prepare steaming mugs of coffee and breakfast for about 600 migrant farm workers. They also pack the noonday meal for the workers as they head for the asparagus harvest.

By 6:30 a.m., the students, too, are bent alongside the migrants, long knives in hand, to begin the backbreaking work of the harvest day.

Similar stories played out across the farm belt again this summer, as Creighton students walked the path of the migrants in service learning trips. Built on their Stockton, CA, service learning trip last year, this summer’s trips focused on Ohio and the Nebraska panhandle.

In the pre-dawn hours and under the searing sun, lessons of social justice become front and center in the students’ lives. What better way to learn than to team Creighton students with the migrant workers, who know the challenges of a marginalized life, first-hand?

‘The goal,” says project director Ricardo Ariza, “is for the students to understand the sacred story of the worker” and how that story plays out against the backdrop of social justice, especially as a major tenet of Jesuit education.

Organized at Creighton by Ariza, director of Creighton’s Office of Multicultural Affairs, with great assistance from many agencies, the migrant worker service learning program is in its third year.

Ariza and the Creighton students were invited to Stockton, CA, for the first time last year, to work in the cot-lined shelters that house about 600 men. One student, Minh Yen Nguyen, talked about helping in the on-site pharmacy in the Stockton shelter. Now a master’s student in clinical anatomy, the Creighton graduate said she started noticing that most of the medications at the site carried an expired date.

When she asked the pharmacist, he said, “All of our medications are donated, and this is the best I can do. I would rather give the workers the best that I have instead of nothing at all.”

“Now I’m ruined,” confided the alumna. “Now I know I can’t do my profession without working for the poor.”

The first wave of Creighton students this summer journeyed to the Migrant Rest Center in Liberty, OH, one of only two federally funded migrant worker shelters in the U.S.

Here, Creighton students participated in “Bearing Witness: Migrant Community of Ohio,” which focused on leadership development, spiritual development and social justice, all against a backdrop of the life of the migrant worker.

The Ohio program brought together many groups interested in the issue.

The first task was to prepare the migrants’ lodging for the workers, as students scrubbed toilets, cleaned and sanitized the living quarters, and brightened the surroundings with fresh paint.

Fr. Tom Florey, S.J., University of Notre Dame, led the spiritual preparation of the Creighton students.

Fanning out to the surrounding migrant work sites, Creighton students soon were working alongside potato harvest teams, apple pickers, poultry factory processors, and even four dairy farm workers whose job was to milk about 1,800 cows several times each day.

A community question and answer session completed the Ohio trip.

More than once, Ariza recalls, workers told the students they’d “give anything” to have had the opportunity to go to school. Their message was not one of guilt, but simply to remind the students to use their opportunity wisely, Ariza said.

Usually fluent in Spanish, the Creighton service learning participants this year encountered indigenous language speakers, specifically Guatemalans speaking a Mayan language, in at least one Ohio setting.

“How will we manage to understand them? How will we get along?” were some of the students’ anxious questions, Ariza recalls. “Now you know how they must feel, every day,” he reminded the students.

The second journey this summer brought Creighton students to Scottsbluff, NE.

Teamed with four different agencies, students received intensive training on Nebraska labor housing rights.

Then Ariza and five Creighton students gave presentations to the migrant community, knocked on migrants’ doors and offered information on free legal services.

Students also pulled together resources from Creighton, providing toothbrushes, glaucoma screenings, and related services.

One of the happiest outcomes of the whole summer, Ariza pointed out, was the decision by the students to give back to the children of the migrant families.

This came in the form of connecting with a book supplier in Omaha who offered free books for needy children. As a result, more than 10,000 books are on their way to migrant communities in Stockton, OH, and Scottsbluff, but also Alabama and Florida.

Creighton’s Ariza says that the program at Creighton was made possible only by enormous cooperation from the following agencies and groups:

Jesuit Hispanic Ministry Conference; Catholic Migrant Farmworker Network; St. Mary’s Church in Stockton, with Jose Lopez; Ignatian Family Teach-In, Los Angeles; Tom Florey, S.J., of the University of Notre Dame; Bishop John R. Manz of the Archdiocese of Chicago; Farm Labor Organizing Committee; Immigrant Workers Project of Ohio; Rural Opportunities, Inc.; PathStone; Legal Aid of Nebraska; Nebraska Migrant Action Coalition; Nebraska Migrant Education Program; Nebraska Department of Labor; Creighton Latino Students Association, and many other individuals.