BREAKING NEW GROUND

Like many college students, Emily Chow spent her spring break on the beach. But the one she chose wasn’t crowded with masses of beer-drinking, bikini-wearing undergraduates, and her destination – Pisco, a midsize city on Peru’s southern coast – is little known to most U.S. students. See a video

In August 2007, Pisco made headline news worldwide after an 8.0-magnitude earthquake leveled more than 80 percent of the city and killed about 600 people. But by 2010, the international media and disaster response organizations had long since moved on to other tragedies. (more after the break)

Chow and other students shoveled dirt, swung pickaxes, and hauled rubble as they worked on construction projects with Pisco Sin Fronteras, a local organization formed one year after the disaster. “I like traveling with a purpose,” says Chow, co-president of the Rotaract Club of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., USA, who traveled to Peru with a dozen fellow club members on their annual humanitarian trip.

In Pisco, they helped build a playground and a new environmental and community center on the beach, which had become a dumping ground in the disaster’s aftermath. Farther inland, the students toiled long hours in the heat to dig latrines and rebuild a home destroyed by the quake.

Members of the Rotaract Club of Pisco, who hosted the visiting students along with Rotarians in Pisco and Lima, also volunteered at the site.

Later this month, several Northwestern University students will return to Pisco to continue their work with the local Rotaractors and Pisco Sin Fronteras.

Elisa Meggs, the club’s international service chair, is among those signing up for the trip. “All my friends are seniors and are going to Cancun or Florida for spring break,” she says. “But this is a powerful thing to see and be a part of. I think it’s worth it to get your hands a little dirty.”