Students seeing the world thanks to UPEI Catholic Studies fundraiser

By Daniel Brown

Oct. 26, 2018

Elizabeth Iwunwa was cleaning a nun’s house in Honduras.

She and her fellow students were halfway done when the nuns stopped them because it was time for tea.

Iwunwa was confused.

“We just had this like five seconds ago,” she thought.

Rest and community are taken seriously in Honduras, Iwunwa learned.

This is just one story that came from the Blessed John Henry Newman Dinner.

Lorelei Kenny, Robert Dennis, and Elizabeth Iwunwa hold a portrait of Blessed John Henry Newman, the dinner’s namesake. Daniel Brown photo.

The dinner is an annual fundraiser for UPEI Catholic Studies. This year it’s happening tonight, Oct. 26, at the School of Sustainable Design Engineering.

The funds support experiential learning classes. That means students get to go to places they’re learning about, like New York, Rome, Honduras, and next year, Montreal.

Robert Dennis founded the dinner. He’s a religious studies professor at UPEI.

The dinner is an opportunity to celebrate the Catholic tradition, he said.

“It’s a chance to come together as a community, to celebrate our Catholic heritage, and to help support global learning initiatives for students.”

It’s an evening for Catholics to gather on the secular campus. The classes are for Catholics who want to experience the intellectual side of their faith, Dennis said.

“Or for students who are just interested in the tradition. We have a lot of students in Catholic Studies for example who are not Catholic.”

Lorelei Kenny is a Catholic student. She went to Rome instead of just learning about it in a book last year.

Now, she’s chair of the dinner’s organizing committee. Being where the early Church began made its history more tangible, Kenny said.

“It seems so far away from us now. Two thousand years of just being there.”

Experiential learning is more engaging. The information is given to you first-hand, rather than being relayed through a professor, she said.

“You can absorb using your eyes and your ears.”

Kenny’s class met people in Rome to learn from them. Leaving the classroom means you’re always immersed, she said.

“Even if you weren’t in a lecture or on a tour somewhere, you were constantly learning.”

The dinner’s funds support other Catholic initiatives on campus. It’s helping send students to a Catholic conference in Ontario next month, Dennis said.

Earlier this year, it helped send students to Honduras. Iwunwa didn’t pay anything for the trip, she said.

“It made me wonder why more people weren’t applying to go.”

Her group helped around the community, but most of the experience was just being there. Travelling makes you more open to learning, Iwunwa said.

“It’s one thing to read about a place from a book, it’s another to breath the air there.”

Catholics are taught God loves everyone. Iwunwa learned that encountering people around the world challenges this belief in a good way, she said.

“To see and enjoy the beauty God has made, I think that’s something we owe ourselves.”