Engineering students among hundreds going on Spring Break missions

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Engineering students at Lipscomb University are among hundreds of students who have spent many months preparing for Spring Break mission trips around the world.

 

The group of engineering students are heading to next week to spend their Spring Break setting up a radio repeater they have built to go on top of a mountain in the country. The repeater will allow medical clinics in the mountainous regions of Catacamas to communicate with the main PrediSan health clinic in the area. Communication usually requires walking or driving through incredibly difficult terrain, sometimes taking days to cover approximately 40 miles of land. For the smaller, remote clinics, this sometimes means losing a patient’s life if necessary supplies are not attainable in time. 

 

  The Lipscomb students decided to focus on this problem for this year’s Spring Break mission, hoping that by using their engineering skills to build the radio repeater, lives can be saved with efficient communication. The group, along with adult supervisors, has spent months preparing for next week’s trip. They had to figure out exactly how tall the repeater needs to be, which mountain top will serve as its best home and whether the farthest reaching clinic will indeed be able to communicate with the addition of the tower.

 Running on solar energy, the group also had to figure out how large a battery is needed to maintain solar power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even during monsoon season. 

 The engineering students join more than six hundred students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends traveling throughout the and the world this Spring Break with missions as their goal. The participants will be going to thirty different locations, with nine domestic (Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Fran, New York City, Miami, Panama City, Richmond and East Tennessee) and 21 international destinations. The number of participants and number of trips are both record-breaking this year.

  Participants will be spread throughout nine foreign countries (, , , , , , , and Whales) and six states (Tennessee, , California, New York, Florida and Virginia ).

  Purposes for the trips include working with medical teams, evangelistic efforts, manual labor, orphanages, extremely poor and impoverished areas, schools, inner cities, urban areas and rural areas.

 The five new trips this year are to Jellico, Richmond, City Beach, San Francisco and the A Cappella Singers going to Baja. The longest running trip is to the City of Children in , this being the eleventh year.

 "There is a lot of excitement and enthusiasm on campus this week as students and team leaders are planning and preparing for the numerous trips,” said Mark Jent, coordinator of missions development at Lipscomb. “The groups have been preparing since September. It is amazing to see the hearts and willingness of each team member to serve others with their break when there are so many other things they could be doing. Our hope is that the lives of people our students come in contact with will be positively impacted while our students also learn that whatever profession they choose or wherever life leads them, they can be the hands and feet of Christ each day of their lives.”