2011-07-06
In the 10th grade, I went to Brazil with my grandparents for a month to visit family. While I was there I fell in love with the culture and the language. When I came home, my aunt told me that she learned Portuguese by traveling down the coast and teaching English when she had the...
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Hello, I am Heather Kurtz, a 2012 Global Citizen Year Fellow. When I was told to write about myself I said “Not again!” I am the salutatorian of my class and have had to write about myself many times already. But for you who read this I will do it one more time! I live...
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These days I often find myself on a bus or a train, alone, absorbed in my thoughts, yet my eyes and ears opened to the surroundings. I pick up a bit of a conversation in Spanish here, a mother talking to her young baby there. I look out of the windows over the neighborhoods of...
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“You’ve moved 12 times and you’re how old!?” That’s pretty much the general reaction I get when I try to explain why I still have moving boxes in my closet after living in my house for a year. I am from almost every little town just north of San Francisco. Although the population is under...
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When I was a little kid, I can remember watching shows like Taboo, where viewers are exposed to the peculiar cultures of other places in the world. One thing I can vividly recall is how mesmerized I found myself staring into the television, a prepubescent boy, with little more to his name than big dreams...
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You might ask what brought me here. What made me decide to take a gap year? To be honest I wasn’t quite sure of the answer when I first applied to become a Global Citizen Year fellow. I wasn’t quite sure this nerdy, debate-loving, music listener, high school graduate could handle a gap year. I...
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So how does someone end up putting off college for a year and going to a country thousands of miles away? Well, each fellow here has their own reasons, but here are mine. I’ve always been a person who likes to gather knowledge about the rest of the world — its history, its geography, and...
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