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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Alumni Post – Life in the Trenches: Digging My Way Out
JT Su
2015-04-06
JT is a Global Citizen Year alum (Ecuador ’14), and a Gates Millennium Scholar studying Global Liberal Studies, Urban Education, and Spanish at NYU. The following post comes froma presentation he delivered at the Ford Foundation in New York City on April 2, 2015. Six years agoÛÓin the course of working my way through school,...
Read MoreAlumni Post: Finding Balance
Lauren Guido
2015-02-07
It’s a few minutes past 7 a.m., the roosters have been crowing way before the sunrise and the smell of the neighbors burning styrofoam is so pungent that it tickles my nose with every breath. As I open my bamboo-latched hut to see an abundance of tropical fruit trees and lush hills that are rare...
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(Not) The End
Kaitlyn Johnke
2014-08-03
I started crying on the morning two days before I left Gale Neenang Dialamba et Babang Sori, the place I have called home for the last eight months and always will. “Wataa wulu, wataa wulu. A wuli. Yewni.” (Don’t cry, don’t cry. Alright, you’ve cried, enough.) My family, outside the kitchen, was telling me, waiting...
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The Small Work in the Great Work: Homecoming Reflections
Alexandra Ding
2014-07-24
“Iiiiiin West Metro Minneapolis born and raised / on the playground is where I spent most of my days.” Like the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, I was raised on the playground—in cul-de-sacs dotted with sprightly lawns, weather-hardened gravel, and roving bands of kid-cops and preteen-robbers. Time has changed much, but play—discovered in tire-swings and...
Read MoreStripping Naked with Nothing to Lose
Aitran Doan
2014-07-15
Who am I? I am the prep school child, the welfare child and the immigrant child from rural Vietnam. Before my Global Citizen Year, I was scared to share who I was because nothing fit together. I was scared my first-world friends would pity my third world past. I was scared that everyone would think...
Read MoreLos Manos
Aitran Doan
2014-07-15
Hands are a great indication of the work we do and types of life we lead. “Los manos” is also a term used to describe workers, often times those who work in the field. It dehumanizes people, creating the image that these people are born to serve one purpose: to labor all day in the...
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Halugol, Famugol
Kaitlyn Johnke
2014-07-15
(Pulaar to English title translation: To Speak, To Understand) In February, I alone headed out to Dakar to meet my family as they arrived in Senegal to visit me. Being fourteen hours away by car from my host family, I called them on the phone and my host mother, Neena Dialamba, asked “A suusi lootade?”(Are...
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Year In Review
Russell Gens
2014-07-01
The old cliché tells us that a picture is worth a thousand words. As painful as it is to hear this trite little expression, I think that it holds true. As such, I thought that for my last blog post of the program cycle I would throw together a little gallery of some of my...
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False Impression
Shakhi Begum
2014-06-28
Journal entry from March 19th. “Cai añ fi! Ceebujen bi neex na!” (Come eat here! The rice and fish is good!) Obviously I won’t turn this down. I have really good rice and fish in my house. Even my dear fellow friend, Lily, would agree with this. In my host family, there are four compounds...
Read MoreVideo for Capstone Presentation
Shakhi Begum
2014-06-24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfnMbJiPVNU This is the link to my capstone video. I lost most of my videos but compiled a lot of pictures and put them together. This is just a little bit of my experiences I had while living in Senegal. I hope you all like it 😀
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A New Perspective
Aitran Doan
2014-06-02
A week after returning from my eight-month stay in Ecuador, I found myself on Stanford’s campus for the “Admitted Students Weekend”. There I was, wearing my alpaca sweater, my mismatched earrings, and what someone called “cultural necklace” amidst the crowd of over 1,000 newly admitted Stanford students. We were all gathered to explore the campus...
Read MoreProtected: Closure
Simone Fillion-Raff
2014-06-02
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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