Fellow Stories

Not a Mexican Restaurant

Tessalyn Morrison

2011-09-22

View from the Spanish classroom As fellows we were all asked questions before we left about why we were taking a gap year. In my house it was “Will this experience be worth it?” If I had already been abroad for a year in Germany, then was I wasting time before starting my career? After my first week...

My Intimate Relationship…with Portuguese

Henrietta Conrad

2011-09-20

Some words are pretentious. I see them once and they all of a sudden think they can  invite themselves into my mind, bursting down the mental door and ostentatiously announcing their arrival. These are the famous words; everyone knows their names. I see them everywhere: in magazines, on billboards, and on TV. I know everything...

What Would You Do With a Year? Video From Brazil 2012

Annie Plotkin

2011-09-20

The Glorious Worldview of Clams

Welcome Frye

2011-09-19

Although I’m currently working on a new blog post, I thought I’d post up one of my journal entries of one of my favorite days so far to give my readers an idea of what I’m up to. This is a massive entry, so consider yourself warned!   09/18/2011 My family in Santa Rita, Napo,...

My Baby Steps

Lucy Blumberg

2011-09-16

I am like a baby: I can’t eat without assistance, I can barely speak in complete sentences, I won’t sleep through the night, and for the first few days here in Dakar I couldn’t walk two blocks without my feet catching on a stray piece of concrete or rubbish. All of my senses were assaulted...

How people turn nothing into something

Albamarina Nahar

2011-09-16

First of all, I just want you to realize that I am in another world.  Of course I don’t mean Mars, but I mean my view is the only one that you can look through. So bear with me, while I slowly unfold what I see. It amazes me that here, in Bahia people are...

“It’s Great”

Erica Anderson

2011-09-16

In the process of keeping sporadic correspondence with my family and friends at home in the States, a lot of people have been asking me, “so how is Senegal?” There could not be a more unanswerable question; it feels approximately equivalent to being asked “what is the meaning of life?” Sometimes I choose to respond...

Flight

Priyanka Rao

2011-09-15

Here we are in to Atlanta – flying over it at the moment.  “Starting our descent.”  Left at 4 am this morning to the extenuating circumstances of leaving 31 soul-mates that I met last week.  I am awake to say the most of this situation, since I have been falling in and out of a doze...

Why We’re Here

Priyanka Rao

2011-09-15

Training hit hard.  Standing over my 28 lbs suitcase, I only think “I didn’t pack for this.”  I didn’t have the shorts, the appetite or the expectations for two beautiful weeks inStanford University, California. Training hit hard.  It hit with the punch of 56 different personalities from across theUnited States, gearing up for a year...

Live in Your City, Don’t Just Inhabit It

Henrietta Conrad

2011-09-15

A utopian city would be divided into equal blocks, the streets would be paved from north to south and east to west, and there would be sufficient parking, an efficient sewage system, and verdant public parks. Salvador is not a utopian city, but it feels like home; a place where you can put your feet...

A Corazón Abierto

Galen Burns-Fulkerson

2011-09-15

Eleven days ago, as I settled in for my first night with my wonderful host family, I sat down with my two sisters to talk. As I stumbled through some barely cohesive Spanish sentences, they listened patiently and nodded their heads in encouragement. After a mostly successful conversation about our respective high schools and pets,...

Reciprocity

Holli Sullivan

2011-09-15

Nature is so smart. How can you take a big green coconut ball and fill it with clean, fresh, delicious drinkable water? Don’t ask me, but geez, está muito bom. So anyways…Here I am on the patio in Rio Vermelho (Hee-oh Veh-mel-yoo…who’d have thought right?), soaking in the Bahian sun and finally writing my blog....