When Matt Brum ’10, arrived at URI as a freshman, he didn’t expect to make two trips to Nicaragua, or to help build an orphanage for disabled and abandoned children there. But that’s just the kind of global outreach we like to do at URI—and that’s the kind of outreach URI’s Newman Club does over winter break every year.
“Human interaction doesn’t need a language. All the children want is love.” – Matt Brum ’10
This January, the Newman Club went back to Nicaragua, where 27 URI students worked at the Diriamba orphanage, run by the Mustard Seed, a Roman Catholic organization dedicated to helping handicapped and abandoned children around the world. The Newman Club needed $40,000 for the nine-day trip, and with the support of nearby Christ the King Church, they held pancake breakfasts, pasta dinners, and letter-writing campaigns to raise over $50,000. That means the group was able to make the trip and donate more than $10,000 to the orphanage.
The Newman Club had three big goals in mind for this year’s trip. First, bring supplies and relief to the more than 3,000 locals who live in unimaginable conditions in the Nicaraguan Garbage Dump. Second, begin breaking ground and construction for a new chapel at the orphanage. And finally, spend quality time with the children there—reading and playing, helping with physical therapy, and providing medical care alongside the physician missionaries.
Within an hour of Matt’s first trip to Nicaragua, his fears about being in a foreign country, unable to speak the language, and spending time with children he couldn’t communicate with, disappeared. “Human interaction doesn’t need a language,” he said. “All the children want is love.”