When most college students look for a summer job, they search for something that will earn them lots of money, give them a directed start for when they step out into the competitive world and at the same time allow them a fun, laid-back summer.

Then there are the students who decide to do back-breaking manual labor at a place called "the pigsty" in the most polluted city in the world and pay $800--plus airfare--to do it.

No, they are not crazy. They are participants in the Summer Service Project, and according to the program's director Theodore S. Wills, the participants will have "the summer of their lives."

Wills runs this three-year-old project that recruits American college students to go to Mexico City and work with and for the poor. Each year the program concentrates on a different social service project. Last year, the group built a public area for children to play in, and this year, the participants plan to teach English to the poor.

The project is sponsored by Elmbrook University Center, located halfway between the Quad and Harvard Yard. The center, which is not affiliated with Harvard, serves as both a student center and a dormitory for an organization called the Prelature of Opus Dei which strives to incorporate religion into public life. The project is all-male because Elmbrook is for men only.

Although the center is affiliated with the Catholic church, the nine students who worked last year with Wills and Mexico's poor included Jews, Protestants and Catholics not affiliated with the center. The participants also represented five colleges, including Harvard and MIT.

While Elmbrook sponsors the program, the New York-based Association for Cultural Interchange--a group that tries to get teachers to go to the Third World--pays Wills' salary.

The summer project's main focus is not religious and the student participants say that what they liked most about the program was interacting with the poor people they worked with.

The program gets students to make an investment of themselves, so that they're not just helping another Third World country, says Wills, a Dartmouth graduate. "What they get is the friendship with these people. It's not just grime and sweat," he says. "That's as simple as that."

Diarrhea and Housing

Bruce S. Miller '90, one of four Harvard students who went on the service project last year, agrees. He says he found his stay in the Mexico City slum very disagreeable but in retrospect, he felt the project was a worthwhile experience.

"Everyone hated it," he says, "we all had diarrhea, we hated the housing, and we hated the food." But he says he appreciates the interaction that took place with "the people in such a different culture. It had a big impact on me."

Two things in particular made the experience worthwhile, Miller says. First was the size of the task that the group undertook and completed. "It was a very ambitious project," he says. "Finishing it in a month was amazing. We turned a neighborhood that was going to the pots. We really did something for changing [the neighborhood's residents] lives." The other was giving up his summer for "being able to interact with these people. [In this sense,] I didn't give up the summer; I received as much as I gave," he says.

Elmbrook Assistant Director Dwight Duncan '73 agrees with Miller's evaluation: "It's a lot of work, but students in previous years have felt that they got more out of [the project] than they put in."

So do many of the programs direct beneficiaries. One child recently wrote a letter to Wills--in Spanish--in which he says, "Ted, you are more than a friend to me because you taught me many things and how to face everything. Thank you for your friendship Ted, it's the best thing we all have."