And it's begun!

On Friday, January 11th, I left my little yellow house on the hill with my suitcase and backpack and headed to Washington DC where I will be spending the first 2 weeks of my semester abroad. The program I'm on is an International Honors Program (IHP) called Health and Community: Globalization, Culture and Care. We will be looking at the different facets of public health in Brazil, Vietnam, and South Africa, spending about 5 weeks in each country. There are 30 students, 2 professors, and one "fellow" or advisor who will be traveling with us to all three countries, and then one country coordinator in each country. Most of the time we will be in home stays, but there are a few days in hostels when arriving and leaving each country. Our wonderful faculty will be teaching 4 courses over the whole semester, and focusing on each country in that topic when we come to it.

I'll be honest, I was a bit nervous about being a part of an honors program, especially once I saw that there were students from Harvard, Yale, and Brown that were also coming on the program. However, all of my fears disappeared as soon as I met them all. Everyone on the program has such interesting stories and backgrounds to share, and the chemistry (so far) is amazing! Students majors' range from Public Health to Neuroscience, from Anthropology to Computer Science. Some of them have been traveling their entire lives and have lived in some of the countries that we're going to, and others have never left the United States. One of our professors is even from South Africa! There are a few other students that took gap years, one who is in the Air Force, and ne of the students even speaks Danish! So I realize now that there was no need to worry :)

We've completed our first 3 days of classes, after we had orientation and did some of community building activities. Although we still have a few lectures and lots of reading, most of the educational part of the program is experiential learning. We will be going into these communities and learning hands-on through interviews, tours, guest lecturers, and personal experience about the health care systems. That's my kind of learning! Some of the students aren't bringing any sort of laptop or tablet with for the semester, and our faculty said it's not required that we do so because we will not need the internet for doing any research, and it's not guaranteed that we'll have internet access everywhere we go. However, I will be bringing my laptop because it will be easier to write papers this way, and as a way to charge my iPod and camera (I tend to take a lot of photos...)

We are currently staying in a hostel just south of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. We walked past the Library of Congress and the Capitol each day on our way to the World Learning Center where we previously had our classes. From here on out, we will no longer be using the WLC because we will be doing NGO visits, guest lecturers, attending the Inauguration, and visiting different sites in DC. I'm very excited to see what this semester will bring.



-Heidi