ABSTRACT
The problematized server-served relationship becomes particularly salient when the service site is a developing country in the “South” and those traveling to serve are from the “North”. The challenge for leaders of service-learning programs, especially in international programs where privileged students from the North are serving in peripheral communities in the South, is to cast light on the differences in social and cultural paradigms working through the “server’s” unrealistic romantic notions and hostility toward the “served,” based on rejection and ethnocentric judgments of the “Other,” and to move gently through reflection, discussion, and growing awareness to a posture of social justice. International service-learning programs such as those analyzed in this chapter may be a key way to tease out the server-served dichotomy as the borders between South and North become ever more blurred.
