What I Missed About Thanksgiving While Abroad
Thanksgiving is kind of a weird concept if you didn’t grow up with it, but it was still one of the things I missed the most while I was studying abroad.
El Paso Trip Part Two: The Justice System
Travel journal, Day 1: As I write this, I’m sitting on the plane headed from North Dakota to Texas. We had a long delay due to snow, so it’s been a somewhat stressful afternoon. It probably won’t compare to the difficulty of the upcoming week. I’m trying to emotionally prepare myself for what I’ll see. Moving to another country is always a struggle linguistically, culturally, and socially. I experienced some of these burdens when I lived in Chile last fall. However, I had the benefit of knowing I would return home in a few months, and I had a safe place to live set out for me and a visa…
El Paso Trip Part One: The Colonias
It was a small trailer on a square piece of dirt. It certainly wasn’t what she had dreamed of when she had first come to the United States to stay with her mother, a citizen, but Soledad* owned the land and everything on it. Not ideal, but worth being proud of. Soledad had a quiet dignity that I had to admire. Serving us cookies from an old family recipe, she was insistent that she was the host and that we were her guests, reinforcing was Pastor Rosemary had told us before coming: With this service trip, we are here to learn from the people we talk to, not help them.…
How to Help a Foreigner Speak Your Language
You’d think, given the amount of people in the U.S. who insist they’re no good at languages, that no one would contest the difficulty of learning a new language...In order to help people who don’t have much experience speaking to foreigners, I’ve provided some tips on how best to interact with people learning your language.
Guanajuato, Santiago, and Widening Perspectives
Spending time in Mexico was so much better with my friend than it would have been as a tourist. My four months in Santiago, Chile, were rewarding and difficult
