In the summer of 2008, three college students are mounting an expedition to create a documentary about young people on the Camino de Santiago. The clear majority on the Camino are older people with greater resources, but there is a growing interest from college aged youth and younger. The team, headed by former pilgrim Trey Comstock, hopes to capture this voice on the Camino and see what it means for the future of the pilgrimage that we hold so dear in our hearts.
The project grew out of Trey’s experience on the Camino in the summer of 2006. He went with a group of 9 other college students from the College of William and Mary. So, he got to see first hand the profound effect that the Camino can have on young people, and each of the William and Mary students had to conduct academic research while they were on the Camino, as part of Prof. George Greenia’s pilgrimage class. Trey studied people’s motivations for embarking and spoke directly to variety of both old an young pilgrims. From these conversations, he began to see differences and similarities between the generations and was inspired to study this further.
The project has two main focuses: research and capturing a voice. The first side is academic. How are the younger different from the older pilgrims? How are their motivations different? What infrastructure do they want to see on the Camino that would better serve them? These are questions that need to be answered and taken into consideration if we want the next generation to get as much out of the Camino as this current generation has. The Camino can be an amazing and life altering experience for both young and old alike and should meet the needs of everyone who wishes to experience it. To do this, we need to first discover what the needs of younger people are, and the project hopes to do this and present the information to relevant authorities and organizations.
The other focus is capturing the voice of the young people on the Camino and telling their story. A quick survey of any book list on the Camino de Santiago will tell you at least one thing. The only voice that is being heard, the only stories being told are those of the older generation. Trey Comstock and his team think that young people have valuable and life changing stories to tell and insight to offer too. They plan to capture and portray this growing, evolving, and equally valuable voice that has up to now been reasonably silent.
The thing with meaningful projects like these is that they take a cast of hundreds to get underway. The team is eager and skilled but in desperate need of assistance. Although they have already received a Monroe Scholars grant from the College of William and Mary, a project of this scope (filming for 5 weeks or more on the Camino, including living expense, flights, and equipment) is expensive, so they need the pilgrim community to give what they can either through money, advice, encouragement, or prayer.
