Fellow Stories
True gap year stories from Fellows abroad!
Check out the latest blogs from Global Citizen Year Fellows in Brazil, Ecuador, and India!
Category
Class Year
Country
A Driving Force
Peyton Foley
2013-01-04
Life can get tough but I try not to let it get me down. What I mean is that life can’t put you down as long as you choose how to view it. I must admit however that it is really hard to deal with life when I can’t talk to someone about it. Living in Ecuador...
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It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World
Ely Kadish
2013-01-04
…But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl. Before arriving in Ecuador I read and was told many stories about the culture I would be living in, and one concept that constantly recurred was the idea of Machismo. In short it is the practice of a largely male dominated society — unequal work...
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Happy new year
Nathan Edwards
2013-01-04
Happy new year!! I hope everyone is doing well and had a great holiday season! The holidays here were very nice and much different from that of the U.S. Christmas is not as big a deal here as I thought it might have been, since about 98% of the country is Catholic. On Christmas Eve,...
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Getting the Hang of Thursdays
Danielle Livneh
2013-01-04
Guamote has but one claim to fame. It is the only reason the small Ecuadorean town gets a sentence in “The Lonely Planet Travel Guide”, or receives any hits on Google. It attracts locals from all over the Southern Sierra, and even the occasional gringo. Every Thursday hundreds of vendors, buyers, and livestock inundate the streets of Guamote for the...
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Clear Moment
Aidan Holloway-Bidwell
2013-01-04
Day 98 in Ecuador 12/05/2012 Every so often the sun breaks the neutral gloom of the cloud forest haze. The perpetual fog is suddenly chased off, rays of yellow sunlight at its heels, and one feels as if under a hole carved in the clouds. To all sides, miles away, the huge, fluffy, floating beasts...
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Gringo
Josh Thompson
2013-01-04
One thing I expected living in Ecuador was to be treated like a foreigner. When people laugh while I walk by, stare without responding to my “Good Morning” or yell the only english words they know in my direction (“I Love You”) I’m not surprised. If an Ecuadorian wearing a feather hat and wool poncho stumbled around my town...
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Choice
Bijan Sanchez
2013-01-04
Hello, my name is Bijan Sanchez, and I would just like to recount some of the reasoning’s behind the choices I have recently made that have eventually brought me here to the Andean, indigenous community of Morochos on my Global Citizen Year. The choice, the choice was always there; such a simple yes or no is granted for me...
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Life in Chimborazo, Ecuador
Fikrte Abebe
2013-01-04
So for the past two months I’ve been living with a completely indigenous family in the community of Mancheno, about an hour away from Riobamba, Chimborazo and working in an INFA center as well as a school where I teach English. I love my family; especially my grandmother who does a great job of making me feel like a...
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El Triunfo: A Drive Through the Tropical Side
John Villanueva
2013-01-04
It’s actually been a while since that time on the Ecuadorian coast: October 14, 2012, the day I made it to Guayaquil, the largest and most modernized city in Ecuador. My supervisors and I at Fundación UTOPIA attended a three day agro-ecological forum in Guayaquil that highlighted the Food Sovereignty Movement in Ecuador. It was inspiring: I soaked in...
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