by Alexandrea Gayda

Alas, it has already been more than a week, but many students are still trying to get over spring’s big tease. En route to summer lovin’, spring lust has caught many of us with our pants down.

But while you were taking ¾-naked photos poolside in Cabo, other Trojans were out there trying to save the world. And among the proverbial fruits of such labor: Facebook photos of Mary plowing the fields instead of Mary riding the mechanical bull.

After having served on an international electoral observing delegation (essentially to ensure fair and free presidential elections in El Salvador), I ran into some familiar-looking faces on the flight back to Los Angeles. With the exception of one person whom I actually knew, it was a composite of gringo accents, tinted with hues of cardinal and gold. Christ, I thought, another one of those alternative break groups.

On the Volunteer Center’s website, part of the description of the Retalhuleu [Reu], Guatemala trip reads: “It is important that students who live in a wealthy country such as the United States understand that poverty is a serious issue around the globe.”

In other words, keep the Uggs at home. When paired with a miniskirt, the net monetary value is enough to feed a refugee camp in Uganda (conveniently there’s another service-learning trip scheduled there in the summer).

“The impact of seeing poverty first-hand does not compare to reading about it in the news.” In between bouts of “Montezuma’s revenge,” you can take plenty of pictures next to all of the brown babies just like Brangelina.

“In addition to learning about poverty, students will be engaging in a cultural exchange with the Guatemalan people.” Unlike Facebook westerners, the other does not fake a smile in front of the camera. Nor do they say queso.

Later I learned from a friend of a friend that the Guatemala trip was cancelled at the last minute, supposedly because of security issues of some sort. Vice President of Student Affairs Michael Jackson did, after all, caution students against touring any of the border cities – apparently the playground for drug cartels. Dodging bullets at Señor Frogs, while in flip-flops, seems quite the endeavor. So in the event of a wartime contagion effect, maybe it was the legal obligation to extend this State Department warning beyond the mechanical bull-riding "SCitizens" of the southwest.

At any rate, that mutual friend ended up poolside.

Other trips this year included volunteering in health care clinics in

Baltimore; invasive plant species removal in Death Valley; and trail-building in Moran State Park on Orcas Island in Washington. And as far as the run-in at the airport, they were the USC Global Water Brigades on the tail end of another packaged, life-changing experience in Honduras.

And yet, while arriving in San Salvador this last time, I writhed in the fact that on this 160-person delegation, they actually put us in a hotel. (And by us, I mean lawyers guilds, Washington D.C. college students, resurrected hippies from eras long gone, and so forth.) And not even a hotel, but a facility with running water, flushing toilets and showers.

The audacity! As an anti-establishment traveler and descendant from the third world, my street cred was being infringed upon by an ostensibly large-scale gringo tour. I’m safeguarding Salvadorans’ constitutional rights, dammit. As such, I should be deprived of at least 70 percent of my basic human rights, too.

And so to compensate for this pseudo absence of the gritty and legit, I immediately reverted to hopping from one bus to the next, eating street food and drinking the water in between.

The night before Election Day, I woke up around 11 p.m., then again at 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. Jackson was right. A contagion effect had occurred. The Mexican drug war had spilled over a third southern border – its latest battlefield being inside my gut and spilling once more into the toilet. At 4 a.m. we were to commence enforcing passive-aggressive, international policies of note-taking nonintervention. I’m fine, I contemplated on the toilet, I have bowels of steel.

Despite everything, I was able to eat electoral fraud for breakfast. Or at least establish in my intimidating 5-foot-2 presence that I was ready to do so. But, in between loose stools, I was persuaded by my delegation coordinators to donate one of them to science. And so, an empty Gerber’s jar was “sterilized” in Hotel Alameda’s kitchen for me.

Doctors there revealed that the X number of parasites and bacteria (both adults and eggs) were leftovers born anew – originally deposited when I had lived in Central America last year. Accordingly, I’ve been medicated, purged and intestinally reconstructed via Activia yogurt.

Still, looking back, not once did I enjoy such comforts of gringolandia.

… Maybe just a little.