Despite spending five days helping Virginia’s most vulnerable as part of Habitat for Humanity and Boston College’s Appalachia Volunteers, Ross Jordan, MCAS ’19, was admitted to St. Elizabeth’s for a psychological evaluation after not declaring that his life was changed by the experience.
Citing the feeling of futility after realizing he had only helped one family and that there were still thousands that would remain unaided, Jordan said during his final group reflection that he felt helpless and that the trip was a little “meh,” prompting his Appa group members to turn on him and banish him to a corner on the bus next to the bathroom.
“I like helping people, but this whole trip is kind of boring,” Jordan wrote in a journal he kept specifically for the service immersion. “I mean, Tennessee? We’re not even in Nashville. I thought it was building houses by day and hitting the town by night.”
When the students arrived back on campus, Jordan was taken in a stretcher to St. Elizabeth’s for a full psych evaluation, including, but not limited to, discussing every embarrassing moment that happened in his short life.
Appa members from Main Campus to Newton were traumatized by the discovery.
“You can’t just be involved in something like this and not have it change your life,” Dustin Craft, a two-time Appa leader and MCAS ’16, said. “It’s an incredible bond that you’ll have for a lifetime—not really between you and the people you’ve helped, but the other college-aged people in your group!”
Susan Fletcher, CSON ’18, who loved her experience so much that her first-born’s second middle name will be Ivanhoe, Va., reflected with disgust on the news.
“This kid ruined it for everybody!” Fletcher said. “Can’t we all just do a little work for a week, come away feeling like we can change the world, but still go back to our regular ways of using our perfectly good fake IDs and not caring about any goddamn person for the rest of our lives?”
Still, there are others who are concerned for Jordan.
“Can we have our son back? He’s done nothing wrong,” Emma Jordan, mother of hopelessly misguided Robert, said. “He just didn’t feel as excited and as helpful as everyone else at the end. He thought this was going to be a fun experience!”
At press time, thousands of students were still raving about the quaint little towns they visited over Spring Break, unbeknownst to them that a student was being held against his will in a padded room for the very thing they loved. On the other side of town, St. Elizabeth’s doctors are preparing for a frontal lobotomy when Jordan’s test results come back.
*This story is part of The Depths, a collection of humorous, fictional portrayals of campus life, written in the spirit of April Fools’ Day. Some names of “sources” have been changed to maintain ambiguity and humor.
