Most college students spend their winter breaks either working, catching up with old friends, or perhaps heading to an exotic locale for some rest and relaxation. For Wagner sophomore women's lacrosse player Casey Lindine, she took the trip option. But the locale was anything but exotic. Instead, Lindine was one of 16 Wagner students who headed for Kenya in an effort to bring some hope and relief to children in this poor country.

A lot of the children there don't have shoes so the Wagner students fundraised beforehand and brought a certain amount of shoes with them. Lindine's selfless trip to Kenya served as inspiration for the Wagner women's lacrosse team to hold a shoe drive to donate new or gently worn shoes to "Soles4Souls," a charity that collects shoes and distributes them free of charge to people in over 125 countries who are in need, regardless of race, religion, class, or any other criteria.

Lindine, who is a native of Easton, CT, was a part of program called Expanding Your Horizons (EYH). The group left on January 2 and returned to the U.S. on January 17. “I always wanted to go abroad but being an athlete it seems like it's really hard to do,” she said. “And I never want to give up a summer because I have to work.”

The Wagner students who headed to Kenya were an extension of a government and politics course entitled Service and Politics Abroad. The course is taught by Wagner professor, Dr. Steven Snow, who is the brainchild of this project and who was making his fourth trip to Kenya.

The course prepared the students for the trip by having them read up on what they'll be experiencing on the trip. The students then met seven or eight times upon returning. At the end of the semester, each student turns in a term paper based on their experiences and they link it up with research.

“I'm actually an education major so, even though the trip was connected with this government and politics class, I was able to make up lesson plans and work with the students,” said Lindine.

“You go and at work in these schools that are run by this woman named Mary. In fact, we actually stayed with her family,” Lindine added. “She created these two centers where children stay for the whole day. They play and they learn English and are fed two meals a day which, in most cases, are actually the only meals they'll have all day.

“Before we went, we read a book that gave us a sense of the children we'd be working with,” she added. “Many of the (Wagner) students on the trip are in the medical field so they worked in that field during the trip because there are a lot of AIDS patients.”

How many among us would choose Kenya over Hawaii?

“There are trips to places like Hawaii but I said to myself, 'why not go to Kenya and help people and just get a different view of the world', which we definitely did,” said Lindine. “Classes started the day after we came back and lacrosse practice began later that week.

Despite the fact that the trip took 17 hours going and 21 hours returning, with a layover in Dubai each way, Lindine found the experience to be so rewarding that she hopes to return to Kenya in the future. “I hope to go back next year or the year after. If I could, I'd go back and work with who we worked with this time,” she added. “There are people who started the two schools that have nothing really and here they are feeding people every day. I think there's like 50 students in one of the centers and around 75 in the other. It's a good amount of children that they're getting off the street.”

“I can't begin to describe what this experience was like,” Lindine said. “It's definitely something that if you try to explain it to people, no one could fully understand it fully. It was a very rewarding experience.”