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HEAR FROM OUR SCHOLARS

Scholarship Students Worldwide

4 schools of medical care provided on medical missions

Service trips conducted

%

Wealth increase for scholarship graduates

Patients served on Medical Missions

3 service groups can complete a home

FROM OUR VOLUNTEERS

 

I’m so happy that I went on this trip. The joy that people have in Guatemala is incredible. It’s bittersweet: When I went to Guatemala and I was serving people, it was the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be that happy again.

Anonymous, Marian High School

GUATEMALA, February 2019

Medical Missions like this allow you to come home and look at your own patients a different way. I think it’s very rewarding, both personally and professionally.

Dr. Harry Carr, M.D.

GUATEMALA, Summer 2017

We did this exercise where we had to buy a week’s worth of groceries on $7, and it was absolutely eye-opening. It was really hard, and what I came up with wasn’t food that I wanted to eat. But that’s the reality for them. I get a Starbucks every morning that costs as much as their food for their whole family for the whole week.

Anonymous, Saint Michael's Catholic Academy

GUATEMALA, January 2019

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International Samaritan in the News

Learn more about International Samaritan’s press coverage, campaigns, and community involvement.

Note: We are committed to respecting and uplifting our scholars. Due to some stories containing sensitive information, we redact or change the names of the scholars, their parents, their schools, and other details that could compromise their anonymity.

Now That’s a Trip

This is kind of a big year for International Samaritan. Thirty years ago this summer, we were born out of desperate compassion after a priest driving a car filled with high school students on an immersion trip came across Guatemala City’s garbage dump and stopped to ask how they could help.

We will celebrate our 30th anniversary throughout this upcoming summer, and I thought it might be helpful to start with a reflection on how our immersion trips have changed since that first experience 30 years ago. In the year before the pandemic, 25 school partners completed 30 trips, mostly in Guatemala. This year, only 6 schools, 2 churches, and 1 healthcare system will be traveling with us, and I think we are serving our partner communities abroad much more effectively as a result.

Our trips are better now because of a change in expectations. Before the pandemic, our service immersion trips focused on the service. Thousands of students from the U.S. helped to build or paint homes, classrooms, medical clinics, and soccer fields through the years. Our hope and expectation was that those students would go on to make positive changes in our nation throughout their lives in part because of what they experienced with us.

We came out of the pandemic with a much more direct expectation for trips: their life-changing impact should be felt equally among both our travelers from the U.S. and our Samaritan Scholars in the community that hosts them. We reduced the quantity of our partners so that we could enhance the quality of our partnerships over 52 weeks throughout the year, not just during a one-week trip.

Under this new framework, which we call Learn, Serve, Grow, we ask every partner traveling to one of our communities to become an advocate and fundraiser for that community, helping to sponsor at least 10 Samaritan scholars there each year (at an average cost of $30,000). That’s a huge ask, in addition to the $2,500 that it costs each person just to make the trip, but our partners are working hard to make it happen!

We are committed to increasing our church partnerships because they are better positioned to make this financial commitment, but our school partners remain vital to us because their students are the same age as our Samaritan scholars, and those friendships are life-changing too.

Two weeks ago, I joined a team of students from Loyola and U of D Jesuit high schools in Detroit for a week with our Samaritan scholars in Kingston, Jamaica, and I loved seeing how much stronger students from both nations became through working, eating, telling stories, laughing and praying together. This in itself is a great start, but what happens in the months to come matters more. You can read more about our partners, and please let me know if you think your church or school may be interested in joining us. In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy seeing some memories below, from three trips over the last few weeks.

children with water in Kore, Ethiopia

(Left) Jamaican football superstar, Akon, flies past U of D’s Tre and Nick in some American football. (Right) Students from Loyola and U of D Jesuit high schools created a community garden during their immersion trip to Kingston, Jamaica.

“The Jamaica immersion trip was an experience that opened my eyes to the world around me,” said U of D student Domenico Dwyer. “While on the trip, I learned a new sense of humility to my own situation. The memories I’ve made and the new close friends I have found, on top of growing already established friendships, are things that I will cherish forever.”

Scholar and doctor - Ethiopia

Twelve women from Marian High School, located in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, visited our scholars and the communities we serve in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

“The bonds I made with the people living in the community and the team of International Samaritan were so impactful and really made the entire experience,” said one of the students from Marian. “I thought being exposed to that level of poverty was so eye-opening and life-changing.”

doctors-Ethiopia

Fifteen Samaritan Scholars in Kenya visited elephants at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust with our Vice President, Andrew Pawuk, and one of our long-time supporters.

doctors-Ethiopia

My favorite part of our team’s trip was watching the new Bob Marley movie in Kingston, not far from his house.

Mike Tenbusch, President

Mike joined International Samaritan in 2018 after two decades of leading social change in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He’s a University of Michigan Law grad and author of The Jonathan Effect: Helping Kids and Schools Win the Battle Against Poverty. He and his wife, Maritza, have three children who keep them young.

A New Chapter

Elizabeth, age 14, hopes to become a journalist. That looked like an impossible dream just a few months ago as she didn’t have the money to continue with school past the sixth grade.  Money is tight because Elizabeth’s mother is the family breadwinner, and she’s a...

My Resilient Scholars

As the program director in Jamaica, I spend a lot of time praying for the scholars in my program. As I’ve been praying, the word resilience has been echoing in my head for months. Looking at the definition, resilience means “the capacity to recover quickly from...

A Cry With Mary

This past spring, I went on a service trip to Guatemala with 11 other parishioners from the St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor. I had no idea the impact this trip would have on me.  We started off traveling in our minibus to the Francisco Coll elementary school. We...

50 New Chances

Nalubega, a 19-year-old from Kawanda, Uganda, lost hope of pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor when her mother could no longer afford the cost of her school fees. Her mother, a waste picker at the Kiteezi dumpsite, had six other children to provide for too. But...

A Good Day in Their Lives

When you see children working in garbage dumps, it changes you.  You know there is nothing they did to deserve such a punishing life.  You can’t pretend you didn’t see it and just assume that everything is going to be OK, because it is fundamentally not. A person...

Laying the Foundation

I’ve been so happy to watch the construction underway on the new Family Life Center in the El Buen Samaritano (The Good Samaritan) neighborhood! When it’s finished, the scholars and children in this neighborhood, which backs up to the city garbage dump, will have...

Where was the Lord?

This past week, my son, Jacob, launched The Emmaus Podcast, to offer encouragement and advice to young men like himself who are committed to living righteous lives.  His show will feature interviews with friends and others he looks up to for the integrity of their...

Do Unto Others

Here in Ethiopia, we've been gathering our racers, creating our teams, and preparing for this fall's IntSam Global 5K event.  This year's event raises more money for scholarships, and I have experienced the difference that scholarships make for our scholars. An IntSam...

Lost and Found

The most disturbing video about our mission wasn’t made by us.  In 2017, Food for the Poor created this video about Anthony, who was then an 11-year-old boy working in El Ocotillo, the garbage dump outside of San Pedro Sula, Honduras, where we have been serving since...

What Would You Wear?

I stopped by my mom’s house on the way home from work recently, and she ushered me into the living room to show me the design she was working on for the IntSam 5K T-shirt this year.  A pretty stoic woman from the Greatest Generation, my mom was perceptibly proud of...

president’s blog

What Makes Christmas Special?

By Mike Tenbusch | December 16, 2022

We asked our scholars that question, and thought you might enjoy seeing some of their responses and favorite memories from Christmas…

Thank you for being a part of their celebration.

If you would like to make a final gift to our scholars in 2022, donate below.

Family Matters

By Mike Tenbusch | May 6, 2022 This past Friday, our board of trustees made a huge commitment to build a “family life center” in Honduras as one of our four goals this year.  We want to give our scholars a safe and nurturing place they can go to after school to be...

Letting Go of Our Nets

By Mike Tenbusch | April 8, 2022 This past Wednesday morning, I was surrounded by a room of truly amazing women while on a Zoom call with equally amazing women in Ethiopia in a quest to bring the jewelry they make to market here in the United States. It was a unique...

The Challenges of Walking Hand-in-Hand

By Mike Tenbusch | March 11, 2022 Every week, our team members in each nation have one-on-one meetings with our scholarship students or their parents to discuss their lives and their progress meeting their goals.  They record highlights from these conversations (that...

Four Words that Change the World

By Mike Tenbusch | March 25, 2022 Over the last year, I have seen a profound difference get made in the world when somebody says four simple words in earnest.  I shouldn’t be surprised by the impact, because these four words gave rise to International Samaritan 27...

A New Life for A Graduate

By Mike Tenbusch | February 25, 2022 When we started our strategic planning process in 2019, one of the five-year goals we set was to give our scholars the spiritual training and leadership development they need to become leaders in their communities.  I’m writing...

How The 5K Saved My Life

By Mike Tenbusch | February 4, 2022 Last summer, we asked you and everyone else we know across the world to run with us in the Great IntSam Global 5K to give food to 1,000 families battling to survive the undulating challenges of this pandemic. As it turns out, one of...

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International Samaritan is a nonprofit organization with the designation 501(c)(3). Our headquarters is located in Ann Arbor Michigan.

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