SAN MARCOS -- A group of local university students on spring break in San Francisco spent Cesar Chavez's birthday Wednesday with an emphasis on serving others instead of partying themselves.

While many of their colleagues gathered at sun-splashed bacchanals during the break, which started Monday at the university, the group of four Cal State San Marcos students and two staff members served the homeless at a shelter in the Tenderloin District.

CSUSM's Laurence Bolotin, who works as a paid member of the student government body, Associated Students Inc., said in a telephone interview that the alternative spring break aims to encourage lifelong community service in the university students.

Bolotin, who organized similar breaks when he worked at the University of Texas at Austin, said they were also a way of "exposing students to a life they're not used to."

The shelter, where the students made 2,800 sandwiches Tuesday for the hungry, is among several San Francisco projects supported by the Glide Church at Ellis and Taylor streets. The San Marcos contingent was among some 35,000 volunteers who every year further Glide's efforts to help the homeless and poor in San Francisco.

On Wednesday evening, they were to sit down and compare notes on what part of their adventure related to how Chavez, the farmworkers' leader who students are told gave a voice to the voiceless, lived his life.

For sure, no one in the North County contingent had run into women before such as the one dubbed "Spit Fire," said Dilcie Perez, of the university's student and residential life office.

The woman, Perez said by phone, made herself conspicuous amid the 200 to 300 people waiting in line for breakfast at a kitchen on Ellis Street after she apparently took a remark by a man in line as disrespectful.

As the students mixed powdered milk to pour over the main course of cereal, security types approached the woman, but backed off quickly when she began darting saliva at anyone who tried to get near her, something akin to an angry llama.

"One man I met went to State University of New York and Columbia," junior Leticia Ramirez said by phone early Wednesday. "He traveled the world. He said to make sure we finished our education. He didn't quite say how it happened (that he ended up on the street.)"

Junior Isabel Velarde said it was not all about people having hard times. She said the trip was also a source of inspiration. That, she said, is the lesson of Cesar Chavez, who died April 23, 1993 ---- that a determined individual with a just cause and a heart in the right place can make a big difference.

Velarde said she met an embodiment of that idea in Joyce Hanes, who against all odds some 30 years ago organized what is now a thriving day-care center for children of people who had veered downhill. Hayes, the student learned, simply refused to take no for an answer when she set out to find food, shelter and schooling for children who were adrift.

"From what I understand that Chavez did, and what I saw this weekend," Isabel said, "one person can have a huge impact on things."

Freshman Luz Castaneda said people such as Hayes were similar to Chavez in that they see what is needed and give no thought to those who say it cannot, and even should not, be done. "These people (at Glide) did not have a lot of help," she said. "They just started, and little by little, it became this huge organization."

Freshman Bob Allen, who said the experience was a way to "put myself outside my comfort zone," learned how good intentions can go awry.

While he said it was not the first time he had helped out a panhandler, it was surely the first time he watched the money apparently go directly into drugs. After Allen gave the man some spare change, he said the man approached the driver's side window of a nearby car and walked away with something that could well have been crack cocaine.

"I was trying to help him," Allen said, "and then I realized it was going for a destructive habit, what I would consider a destructive habit.

"... I guess now I'm more aware that if someone is asking for something, it may not go for a good purpose," Allen said. "If someone says they need food, now I'll buy him food."

CSUSM's Perez said she expected to share her own observations with the students before the trip came to an end. "The people there are just like me," she said. "They are just like me. Either society has failed them or they have failed themselves. They made choices that just didn't work out. And that could be me."