Fellow Stories
True gap year stories from Fellows abroad!
Check out the latest blogs from Global Citizen Year Fellows in Brazil, Ecuador, and India!
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Class Year
Country
The Pink Mirror
Brooke Donner
2015-10-24
In the Kedougou region of Senegal, in the neighborhood of Lawol Tamba in Kedougou City, in my hut in my host family’s compound, hangs a pink mirror. It’s small, no bigger than an ordinary paperback book, and it hangs at just the right height that if I turn towards it as I walk out of...
Read MoreThis Is Life
Mason J. Sedlack
2015-10-07
I wrote this poem during our last week of ICO. I don't know how to preface it, but I hope you'll enjoy. I also haven't listened to the recording so it will be a surprise for all parties. Peace be with you all. This-Is-Life.m4a
Read MoreThis is Life- Transcript
Mason J. Sedlack
2015-10-07
Forgive me- I changed a few words in the reading There will come a time in your life when the world around you seems to crumble and fall. The sky will crack, and in the minute before it breaks, and tumbles down on your head like a million shards of blue-stained glass speckled with grey, you will hear...
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The Talibe
Jackson Harris
2015-10-01
On Understanding My Purpose in Senegal Written on September 28 Hold out one of your hands. Spread your fingers apart. Collapse your thumb, ring finger, and pinkie. What do you see? If you did it correctly, you might be thinking of long-hair, San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, or The Beatles. Let’s try again. Hold out one...
Read MoreRoad to Ibel
Janet Sebastian-Coleman
2015-09-29
At five in the morning on September 19th Abby and I hustled through the dark streets of Dakar. We crossed the familiar highway, now void of the car rapides, taxis, horses, and buses that usually zip by as we make the trek to school and the office. Abby and I reach the office early and sit on the stoop...
Read MoreAnd I had a name and it wasn’t Tubaab
Armi Katariina Kauppila
2015-09-29
When at night I grab the small plastic teapot that lives in my room and walk to the water place at the backyard to fill it up for my last visit to the outside toilet of the day, I can see stars. According to them the world continues outside of my house. I was cleaning...
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And there were dreams in the island
Armi Katariina Kauppila
2015-09-29
This morning I woke up giggling, for I dreamt that a soap opera made an episode about filling up the shelves of a supermarket. I couldn’t recall where I was for a while. Then I found myself in a mosquito net castle. Airplanes fly over our house so near I’m sure if the windows had...
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And the puddles were actually parts of a soup
Armi Katariina Kauppila
2015-09-28
I open my computer with a purely voluntary intention of reaching my parents, and pick up the piece of paper that drops on my hotel bed from between the lid and the keyboard. But the note, written by that polite man at the reception, sees daylight only to find itself useless. For the two, maybe...
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This is Senegal.
Josue Morales Vivas
2015-09-20
As I listen to my favourite song, and sit on my rooftop contemplating the endless sky coloured by the sun almost like on fire by all its energy around it, I decided to write my first post for you all. It’s almost been three weeks since I left Stanford, on an cold but promising morning,...
Read MoreA Glimpse Into The Life
Allison Douma
2015-09-19
To my family and friends I am sorry if I am not able to describe my experience here in Senegal so far. It’s been crazy, fun, absurd, difficult, and amazing all wrapped up into three incredibly short weeks. Just know that we are were we are supposed to be and we may not know the...
Read MoreEmpathy: singing and dancing in holes
Brooke Donner
2015-09-18
It happened immediately. As soon as I stepped outside of the gated parking lot of the airport in Dakar, a young boy approached me. He held out his hand with his palm facing up toward the cloudless sky of a hot Senegalese summer morning. In his other hand he carried a tin can that rattled...
Read MoreStretching
Mason J. Sedlack
2015-09-12
Never before has two weeks felt like two months. The days whip by but I can only feel like I've been here much longer than 15 days. Never before have I had so much to drink in, to absorb… Not even in those last 2 weeks leading up to IB exams. I have learned so...
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