The next time Adriana Baggio starts getting stressed and cranky about the amount of studying she has to do, she’ll try to remember her friends in Nicaragua.

Along with about a dozen other students, Baggio travelled to a tiny village in the Central American nation this summer through an innovative exchange program called Students Offering Support.

Their mission was to help build a new classroom for high school students, and while the days were long and the work was gruelling, she met a large number of children who opened her eyes to the reality that there are many underprivileged students around the world who crave the opportunity to go to school, rather than resenting it like so many North American kids do.

“We take our education for granted here,” says Baggio, a second-year kinesiology student and president of the Windsor chapter of SOS. “It gives you an entirely different perspective on education. I will never complain about school again.”

Through SOS, students in need of academic assistance pay $10-20 an hour for tutoring services known as “Exam-Aid” sessions, which are conducted by fellow student volunteers and held before mid-terms and finals when they need help the most. The proceeds are used to pay for sustainable education projects in developing countries in Latin America. Other SOS volunteers pay their own way to travel to those countries to perform the actual labour for those community improvement projects. The organization’s motto is “Raising Marks. Raising Money. Raising Roofs.”

Ronnie Haidar travelled to Peru through the program last summer and joined the group in Nicaragua for his second tour of duty. This time they went to San Jeronimo, a tiny village of about 300 people northeast from the capital city of Managua. Like Baggio, he was amazed by how content the villagers seemed despite their obvious lack of modern conveniences.

“They have so little, but they seem so much happier,” he said.

Most of their work over the two weeks they spent there involved clearing away trees and brush to make way for the classroom. After that was done, they built a foundation and managed to get at least one wall constructed. A lot of the work was done by hand with machetes, shovels, crowbars and pick axes.

“It really makes you realize just how much we have here,” said Sean Power, a second year biology student. “You walk around campus and see all the construction that’s going on here and see how much modern equipment they have to work with. They don’t have any of that there.”

Though the job wasn’t finished when they left, the students knew that another SOS chapter from another university would soon follow in their footsteps to complete the project. The more difficult part was leaving behind the young students they had bonded with.

“It was a sad departure because we felt so connected to them,” said Haidar.

The Windsor chapter of SOS currently has about 40 volunteers, but Baggio says they’re looking for more. If you’d like to get involved, send an e-mail to recruiting.sos@gmail.com.