The doctor said the fast-growing cancerous tumor in her chest is why she had trouble breathing.
Lexi Svoboda had just started to get involved at Grand Canyon University in her freshman year of 2023 with new friends and new plans, including attending a couple of meetings about an educational mission trip to Madrid, Spain, the following summer.
That was the least of her worries after she heard the news.
She left college, went home to Southern California and fought hard through six months of chemotherapy, at times having to stay in the hospital because doctors so aggressively upped her dosage.
It worked. By the following fall, her tumor was knocked out. Svoboda returned to campus a different woman.
“I just had this traumatic life event. It was challenging for me as an extrovert and a go-go-go person,” she said. “I had to relearn how far I could go with staying up late or doing things.”
She also got an unexpected email from Dr. Shawna Martino, a College of Education assistant professor, who had a gift for Svoboda from the women who went on the Spain trip that she missed – a jewelry box.
And money they had left over from last year's mission – to go toward Svoboda’s trip this May.
Svoboda cried. Students she barely knew had gifted her a trip.
“It was tears of thankfulness for their generosity; they could’ve got that money back, but they decided to put it in a scholarship.”
She didn’t waste their kindness. The educational mission led by Martino and attended by seven College of Education students in May served to help a nonprofit community center teaching English to North African immigrants and assisted at a Christian school that serves missionary families working in Spain.
“These kids really do go through a lot,” Svoboda said of being uprooted from friends to a foreign land. “It’s like going through a traumatic event. They don’t feel at home.
“The trauma, wow, I know what that feels like, even though this is different. I know what it feels like to feel different and on the outside, abnormal.”
One semester she had made friends and a campus life, and the next … “poof gone. So I could relate to them.”
The experience of teaching an immigrant population, mostly from north Africa and primarily Muslim, is valuable to GCU students, who may be teaching language to a large Latino population in Phoenix if they decide to stay in Arizona after graduation.
“Many students haven’t been out of the country,” Martino said. “It’s a culture shock to go to a place where they don’t hear their language spoken. And they experience cultural differences. Some children are wearing burqas, and they can’t have boys and girls together.”
In their 10 days between nonprofit Friendship House and Evangelical Christian Academy, students’ training from GCU begins to click, Martino said.
“You see them start to figure it out: What do I do to help them understand the word I am saying or the concept? They would try different strategies and talk afterward,” she said.
After a turning point in her own life, Svoboda soaked it all in. The incoming junior in secondary education/mathematics, observed teachers who “are absolutely on fire for what they do.”
“And just to see what the missionaries are doing there and how it impacted the community, it really made me want to look into working at a missionary school,” she said.
That’s what happened to a fellow student.
Sarah Mullisen raised money for the Canyon Global Educators trip that provides students a worldly lens to service. But as a young woman who had been homeschooled, she was nervous.
Yet when she got to Spain, the small community at the school “felt like home.” The elementary education major got to teach a third-grade class of a GCU alumna, Hailey Pawley.
And the singer for Canyon Worship at GCU led a session at the Friendship House by singing “La Salvacion Es De Nuestro Dios” ("Salvation Belongs to our God"), a song by Petra, one of her father’s favorites. She even joined a street singer in Madrid for “Fly Me to the Moon.”
Then she was called in to meet the principal of the Evangelical Christian School.
“We love your character, and you are the type of person we like to hire,” said Mullisen, recalling the conversation. “We would love to have you teach in the spring.”
The decision had its downsides. It’s unpaid, so she’d have to raise money. And she had been told that with her singing chops, she would have a shot in Nashville signing to a label.
“I prayed. … It was perfect timing. God definitely opened this door,” she said.
So after finishing her student teaching in Tennessee this fall, Mullisen will await her January stint at the Spain school. She’s already looking forward to helping with the school’s spring musical.
“But I think the highlight of the trip was seeing children that, no matter what country they are from, there is always a way to reach them through education,” she said.
Grand Canyon University senior writer Mike Kilen can be reached at [email protected]
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