When Larry Reed ’80 decided to run for student government president at Wheaton College, he didn’t know that he’d spend the next year so busy with planning a service project in another country that he’d earn “incompletes” in all of his courses. But he also didn’t know that Hurricane David would blow through the Dominican Republic (the DR) that year, devastating the small Caribbean island and killing more than 2,000 people.

That hurricane not only changed the trajectory of Larry’s life—he later went on to make a career of international development—it also precipitated a student-run service project which became known as “Honduras Project.” This year, Honduras Project (HP) will celebrate its 40th year.

Back in 1979, Larry did indeed become Wheaton’s student body president.

He and running mate Ted Moser ’80 ran on a “Catch the Vision” platform, with an aim to mobilize students to meet the world’s humanitarian needs. After the hurricane hit, Larry connected with Dr. Wayne Bragg ’53, M.A. ’57, the first leader of Wheaton’s Human Needs and Global Resources program, and Dr. Samuel Shellhamer hon, then the dean of students, and they decided to organize a service project in the DR, which would take place over Thanksgiving break.

When Wheaton students heard about the project, their response was “overwhelming,” according to Larry. In fact, there was so much interest that Larry decided to expand the project to two cities in the DR: Jarabacoa, where 62 families had lost their homes to the floods, and Nigua, which had also been leveled.

There were just two problems. The leadership estimated the group would need tens of thousands of dollars for the trip. And they had just six weeks to raise the funds.

Generating that kind of money in such a short amount of time would be challenging for full-time fundraisers, let alone a few dozen college students with full academic loads.

“But what happened was the whole campus got behind it,” Larry says. The team did the usual things, like writing up a sample letter that students could send to their families and churches, asking for support. But they also got creative.

“They went to the director of SAGA and asked to close it down for the day,” says Lydia Griffith ’20, one of the student cabinet members for this year’s project. He was hesitant, but the team persisted and asked Wheaton’s students to vote: Would they be willing to forgo the dining hall for one day if it meant that Honduras Project would receive the funds SAGA would’ve spent on food?

“They needed 85 percent to vote yes, but 98 percent voted yes, so they closed SAGA for a day and had a campus-wide day of fasting,” Lydia explains. They raised $3,500 that way.

Incredibly, the team ended up making its funding goal, though the challenges were far from over. After touching down in the DR, the 60 students split into two groups, one led by Ted and the other by Larry. In Nigua, Ted’s group found that the wood they’d been promised for constructing homes had been sold, leaving the team without the necessary material. In Jarabacoa, Larry’s team found that the families, who were sheltering in the local schoolhouse because their homes had been destroyed, didn’t want Wheaton students’ new shelters.

“The people were afraid that once they left the schoolhouse, the government would forget about them and not provide the food that they were getting,” Larry says.

To alleviate their concern, Larry and Wayne traveled the 90-some miles to the capital city of Santo Domingo to get pledges from government officials that the aid would continue, even after the community moved out of the schoolhouse and into their temporary dwellings. That convinced them. Back at Nigua, Ted’s team used their spare time forming relationships with the locals, and fortunately, another shipment of wood came in just a couple of days later.

Still, one day, in the late afternoon, Larry got word that the Nigua group was short on supplies. Larry and a friend decided to make the trip up the mountain to bring new supplies, fording streams, and bushwhacking trails along the way. Night was falling by the time they reached Nigua, and Larry recalls telling his friend, “How are we ever going to make it back in the dark?”

“And then it turned out to be this clear night and the stars were out,” Larry says. “It was just starlight that lit our way back and it was such a beautiful experience to just feel a part of creation like that, and to see how God’s love and God’s beauty shines on everyone.”

During that 12-day trip in November, Wheaton students built 130 corrugated plastic houses, roofed 50 houses and two churches, and constructed a schoolhouse and a cannery. They’d raised $95,000 to do it all.

Several years after graduating from Wheaton, Larry traveled back to the DR, and he saw the location where he and his friends had constructed home after home of corrugated plastic.

“It had become a thriving community,” he says. “People had built their own homes, the kids were in school, parents were working, and it was because our trip there … was a catalyst for a long-term intervention.”

The Chicago Tribune covered the trip on November 13, 1979, with the headline: “Wheaton College students to aid Dominican hurricane rebuilding.” So did United Press International (UPI)’s wire service: “Hurricane victims are provided plastic homes.” The Dominican government paid attention to the project, and other international relief programs took note as well.

“That really was what convinced me that God really loves people in need,” Larry says.

Several years later, in 1982, a new Wheaton College student government representative by the name of Peter Clark '84 took office. Peter grew up in Honduras as a missionary kid, but at Wheaton he was mostly concerned about performing well as a midfielder for the Wheaton College soccer team. But when “you get elected, you have to do something or it looks bad,” he jokes.

One day, Peter was digging through student government files in the College archives when he came across a binder that Larry and Ted had put together. Peter said it was fascinating to read about how effectively they mobilized the campus to raise money for their 1979 trip.

Around that time, Franklin Graham came to campus, having recently stepped into the role of CEO at Samaritan’s Purse. He suggested that students organize a service project oriented around the refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon.

“We got all excited about that,” Peter says. “We actually started raising awareness and recruiting people and it was gathering momentum.”

But then Israel invaded Lebanon, and massacres started occurring in those refugee camps, and parents started calling Peter, saying, “My kid is not going to Lebanon—not with a war on.”

They were back to square one, but Peter said the team never thought about giving up on the idea of a service project. He met with executives at World Vision, which was then located just up the road from the College. A chance encounter with the Latin America director eventually led Peter to develop service projects at three locations in Honduras: building adobe houses in Choluteca, which had been hard hit by tropical storm Aletta; constructing a milking barn in Escuela El Sembrador in Catacamas; and working in the eastern jungle at the Mocorón refugee camp.

“Looking back, I think we really had conviction that this is something we should do—a very innocent faith that God was leading, and a commitment to pray over each step in the journey,” Peter says.

This time, the group was a little larger: 70 students ended up going on the trip, out of a pool of about 250 applicants. The fundraising goal was bigger too, but the team ended up surpassing their $120,000 goal a week before their flights were scheduled to take off for Honduras.

“I think God honors real faith, and I think we just had that starry-eyed ‘we want to do something’ feeling, and we prayed a lot as a team, as a board,” Peter says. “We just felt that this was something we needed to do, and I think we also really emphasized that we were going to learn, going to serve, and going to love.”

Peter and his team didn’t see themselves as saviors to the people of Honduras, but rather as co-laborers: “It’s not about how great you are—it’s about what God wants to do with and through you and what you can learn and what you can do together to improve the lives of those who might not have the same level of resources you do but who are fully created in the image of God and have a lot of potential and character and vitality.”

In Choluteca, Wheaton students took instruction from local Honduran leaders about where and how to build houses. Thomas Smoak ’86, M.A. ’03, was a freshman on this trip. He had grown up in Colombia as a missionary kid and remembers getting down into a pit alongside Honduran work partners, stomping straw into mud and slapping it into a frame to make adobe bricks.

“It was hard work,” he says. Each brick weighed 50 to 60 pounds, so it would take two people to lift them to form a wall. This trip also had its challenges. Thomas recalls several students getting very sick on the trip, including one woman who suffered a 105-degree fever. Because the nearest clinic was an hour away, the students tried to get her fever down by submerging her body in the cool water of a creek in the middle of the night.

Being in Honduras also provided some very poignant moments. Dr. Jeffry Davis ’83 was a senior on the 1983 trip. He recalls one Honduran woman making a meal of tortillas for him.

“Situations like this—where I was honored by people who gave things to me not from their abundance, but from their scarcity—moved me deeply,” he says.

Thomas shared Jeffry’s experience and would, years later, go on to name his first daughter “Lillian” after one such “giving and precious” Honduran woman. “It was a transformative experience for many of the students,” Peter says. It was so transformative, in fact, that many students became involved in development work in their careers, says Sam, who was on the project’s faculty advisory committee until he retired in 2008.

After Peter graduated, Honduras Project made a connection with a Honduran engineer and coffee farmer named Arnoldo Alvarez, who was working to bring gravity-fed water systems to communities around the country.

With Arnoldo on board, Wheaton’s Honduras Project became a water project—and it was a “perfect partnership,” Lydia explains, adding that Arnoldo knows how to implement the water systems in the villages, the locals know how to dig ditches for the water pipes, and Wheaton students know how to fundraise and bring encouragement.

Dr. Noah Toly ’99, M.A. ’12 participated in Honduras Project in 1998. He remembers watching from his seat in the airplane as Tegucigalpa’s lush hills and the Toncontín International Airport’s runway, which threaded between them, got closer and closer. Then suddenly, bang! “The plane landed so hard, it felt like we bounced,” he says.

The rough ride continued as Arnoldo transported the team in a flat-bed truck from Tegucigalpa to the small community of Betania, located hours away. The Honduran sun beat down and they stopped along the way at a watermelon stand for refreshments.

When they arrived at the site of the project, the students joined up with local Hondurans to dig trenches for the PVC pipe that would carry water from home to home.

“It became really clear to me that those experiences were not primarily about me bringing my gifts or talents to some community on the other side of the world, but were primarily about me serving alongside and learning from and listening to our partners in those communities,” Noah says.

At mealtimes, students cooked alongside their Honduran hosts. Each evening, they would join the locals in a worship service.

“It is a moment of communion—of fellowship together—across ethnic, national, and linguistic divisions,” Noah says. “But it is also a moment during which the Wheaton team has to wrestle with what it looks like to be a good guest. What is the right way to come alongside a worshiping community that is not your own, for a short time, and in a display of Christian unity, rather than a display of ethnocentrism (subtle or not so subtle)? What ways of service and collaboration in worship are glorifying to God?”

A particularly gifted guitarist, who Noah remembers had two gold stars on his teeth, taught them a song, “This Is How We Worship God,” which became the anthem of Honduras Project for years.

“Traveling out of your comfort zone, and having significant experiences with other human beings, people from places very different than what you would call home, has the potential to mark your soul for life, especially if you do not dictate the terms of interaction,” Jeffry says. “A genuine liberal arts education should move you, quite literally, to become humane. You cannot develop this capacity, however, unless you practice intercultural engagement. Every serious student of the liberal arts should plan a trip to another part of the globe, with a conscious openness to learning from others. In so doing, students may be surprised to discover something important about humanity.”