Cardinal Mooney soccer grad spearheads Jamaica service trip

Isabella McDevitt found the door locked.

The recent Cardinal Mooney grad and soccer player was in the Riverton City section of Kingston, Jamaica, on a June 2015 trip with Pivotal Directions, a service group founded by Jeff Wenzler in Milwaukee, Wisc., where McDevitt used to live. The group was visiting an orphanage that day, and McDevitt noticed there was a back room where one child, a 17-year-old girl named Carie, was forced to stay. The orphanage gave McDevitt, 16 at the time, no explanation.

McDevitt’s heart shattered for Carie, so while all the other children and volunteers played outside, she spent the day inside with Carie. They read books together. They talked. They generally made each other’s lives better, filling them with joy, at least for one day.

Then McDevitt left. The group went to a different part of town the next day, and when McDevitt returned to that Riverton orphanage in 2016, Carie, now an adult, was gone.

It’s one of the memories that stick with McDevitt the most. She’s gone ever since her eighth grade summer, her first in Sarasota, when she was old enough attend with her sister, Emma.

“It’s such a different culture,” McDevitt said. “These people have nothing, but they’re so happy. You gain perspective when you go and hang out in their community. I want other people to get that (experience), too.”

McDevitt is more than just talk. During her junior year, she started recruiting other Cardinal Mooney students to go on the trip with her, and asked Wenzler to talk with interested students and families about how it all works. He did. 19 students and their families listened to his pitch, and 19 signed to go on the trip.

“I just want to keep going and making a difference,” McDevitt said. “I can’t reach everybody, but I want to reach as many as I can.”

This year, that number increased to 24, with two students from outside Cardinal Mooney joining as well. Fifteen of those 24 were Cougars athletes. The group left on June 4 and returned a week later, and the trip was as impactful as ever. The volunteers did whatever was necessary to make the people of Riverton City’s lives easier, including helping to fix homes, delivering meals to those in need, building sustainable vegetable gardens or simply playing sports and games with the children of the Riverton Meadows Early Childhood Centre.

“It’s the interactions with people,” Rees Swink, a rising senior on the Cardinal Mooney football team, said, of his favorite part of the trip. Swink has gone both years, and said he plans to go again as a senior.

“You learn so much about life,” Swink said. “I want to keep experiencing that. It’s cliche, but it’s life-changing. You don’t realize how lucky you are. There’s a lot we take for granted. The whole world isn’t the USA, there’s more out there than country clubs.”

Riverton City is a landfill community. In March 2015, it was the site of a major fire that sent more than 600 people to the hospital because of smoke inhalation. It’s not any easy place to live, McDevitt said. That’s why the people there welcome Pivotal Directions’ arrival each year. McDevitt said she keeps in touch with some of the kids she met through Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. That way, those relationships can be maintained more often than once a year.

McDevitt may have graduated, but the Pivotal Directions trips aren’t leaving the area high school scene. McDevitt handed the organizing role to Melissa Staikos, a Cardinal Mooney rising senior. The hope is that Staikos will also pass the torch when she leaves, so area high schoolers will always have a group representing them. McDevitt herself is off to Marquette University, where she’ll join her sister. The two of them plan on starting a Marquette group, too. McDevitt’s freshman orientation was the day after she returned to the United States. She told people in her session about the trip, and a few seemed interested, she said, wasting no time in recruitment.

“I just want to keep going and making a difference,” McDevitt said. “I can’t reach everybody, but I want to reach as many as I can.”