With art as their main tool, these students adapt what they have learned to best provide support to those living in these developing areas.

According to Lynn Kapitan, one of the program’s team leaders, the group focuses on simple activities because they don’t want to introduce complicated materials and techniques that community members won’t have access to in the future.

“We do a lot of ‘backpack art,’ meaning that we pack supplies like markers, paper and watercolors into our packs and go out into common areas in the community to meet with people and draw and paint together,” Kapitan said. “We often set up on a playground or patio of a community center—we are like ‘art magnets’ that usually attract a lot of kids to paint with us.”

Eventually, these “art magnets” attract more and more families and community members and create a setting in which multiple generations can interact with each other and with program participants. It is there that students are able to get to know the people they are there to help, and they use this time to assess the needs of the community. Students in past years have organized a neighborhood photo shoot and created a large community mural.

No one is left out of the healing effort—students have sought out homebound elders, youth at risk of getting involved in gangs, young children left at home while their parents search for jobs, orphanages and children with special needs. The point is to adapt to the foreign culture and pinpoint exactly what the community needs, encouraging students to understand the intricacies of the social and economic state of the areas visited.

Kapitan earned her undergraduate degree in art education at UW-Madison, her master’s in art therapy at the Pratt Institute and a PhD from the Union Institute in Cincinnati. Now the Chairperson of the Arts & Design Division and Professor of Graduate Art Therapy at Mount Mary College, Kapitan is committed to creating a sense of understanding between her students and cultures that they may otherwise have known nothing about.

“I would describe it as a grassroots form of peacemaking,” she said. “It’s a form of peacemaking that involves local communities in relation to other communities that doesn’t require military or governmental intervention. We’re never going to get peace from military or governmental intervention.”

The students who join Kapitan in Peru or Nicaragua each summer stay for anywhere between three and seven weeks. Although the students at the core of the group are pursuing either an undergraduate or graduate degree in art therapy, the humanistic appeal of the program has drawn participants from other majors like nursing and psychology. Many have returned from the program saying that it changed their lives, and it almost certainly changed the lives of those with whom they came in contact.

“The only way we are going to get peace is if local communities of people get to know each other and care about each other,” Kapitan said. “That’s really what I’m getting out of it.”

Visit www.mtmary.edu for more information about this program.