ORONO – More than 90 University of Maine students, faculty and employees are dedicating their spring break vacations to doing charitable volunteer work up and down the East Coast and in Central America.

It is the largest representation from UM since the Alternative Spring Break program began nine years ago under the auspices of the Office of Student Employment and Volunteer Programs.

Volunteers are working with AIDS patients in New York, building Habitat for Humanity homes in New York and Pennsylvania, helping with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts in the South, cleaning up parts of the Everglades National Park in Florida and building adobe community buildings and churches in Nicaragua.

UM Spanish professor Kathleen March also is going with 26 students and a VISTA volunteer on a two-week trip to Santa Rosa de Copan in Honduras, continuing service-learning projects begun two years ago with students laying mud bricks at a farm site. This year they’ll deliver books to a new library in a town 40 minutes from Santa Rosa. They also are helping out at orphanages, schools, hospitals and nursing homes.

Most of the people accompanying March to Honduras are taking MLC 496, Fieldwork in Modern Languages or the Service Learning in Spanish course, but others are going along just for the experience.

March and her students said that living and working in a Spanish-speaking environment is a better way to reinforce Spanish language lessons from the classroom. The experience puts lessons in context and gives students a chance to help out in regions where educational, medical and many basic needs are not being met.

Students learn indelible lessons through real-life experiences in different cultures and locations, said Mary Skaggs, director of Student Employment and Volunteer Programs.

“Some of the students have never been out of the state of Maine,” Skaggs said. “Some of them have changed their majors because of the experiences they’ve had.”

Working with AIDS or Alzheimer’s patients, or helping in rural, poverty-stricken areas and, this year, helping to rebuild homes after hurricanes and flooding in the South can be life-changing experiences, Skaggs said.

“It’s very much an eye-opening experience … and it’s a great opportunity for them, a great out-of-classroom experience. It makes them realize how lucky they are and it helps them decide if they want to continue to do volunteer work,” she said.

The Alternative Spring Break Program at UM is sending six groups of students and staff advisers to Mississippi, New York and Pennsylvania. The Wilson Protestant Student Center also is sending a delegation of volunteers to help build churches and community centers in rural Nicaragua, and Campus Crusade for Christ is sending students to Mississippi to help with hurricane relief.

In Honduras, March’s service learning and Spanish language students will match their academic disciplines to community needs. “For example,” March said, “a student who’s a nursing major may want to interview people about health care, and a journalism student can film the interview. One with theater training can work at an orphanage and do skits with the kids.”

Jaime Smith, a communication major from Hermon, said she will reinforce her Spanish by working and playing with children in hospitals, schools or orphanages. Trevor Farrell, a Spanish and international affairs major from Weymouth, Mass., will research how banana plantations are portrayed in Central American literature with how they are viewed by Central American farmers, laborers and others.

Jessica Hudec, from Chicago and a dual major in forest ecosystem science and Spanish, plans to do environmental research in Honduras. “It’s one thing to learn the literature and it’s one thing to learn Spanish, but it’s another thing to go to a Spanish environment where you can test what you’ve learned,” she said.

The students are paying their own expenses and, in the case of March’s group, students have raised money for books for a Honduran library through a new student organization, the Central American Service Association, created specifically to help fund the Honduras initiative each year.