We have hit the ground running here with the Latin American
Studies Program! All our students arrived to San Jose with no issues on Tuesday
September 2nd and took off to live with their families (and test out
their Spanish) less than 24 hours after their arrival! We really desire for
students to form deep connections with their host families and to see them as
their primary source for support and cultural understanding.
Our first week consisted primarily of orientation
activities. Students spent the day on Thursday the 4th learning
their way through downtown San Jose. This included exploring the bus system,
public telephones, finding the market, trying an unknown fruit and much more! A
lot of these activities can be very empowering for students when they successfully
figure out how to manage something that would be easy to do at home but becomes
challenging in a foreign environment with a different language.
After spending a weekend with host families, we jumped into
classes with our first sessions of Core Seminar. This six-week seminar is
designed to expose students to key topics that characterize Latin America and to
encourage students to reflect critically on these issues through interactions
with numerous guest speakers. We began Monday by focusing on colonialism and
neocolonialism, and on Tuesday we discussed history and contemporary issues in
Latin America. The objective of these classes was to give students the
necessary background on our context in Latin America to allow them to better
understand all of our seminar themes that are to follow. This can be
challenging for students as we lead them to view these points from a Latin
American perspective.
Our class on Thursday featured our first guest speaker, our
good friend Elmer Rodriguez. Students were very impacted by his story of
growing up in extreme poverty alongside a garbage dump in San Salvador. We were
all challenged to engage with poverty not in terms of statistics or strategies
but by meeting a flesh and bone representative of real poverty. It is important
to us that the subject of poverty does not remain an abstract, distant issue,
but that it becomes a familiar face, a personal story.
We are looking forward to having our first opportunity to
interact with local University students who are learning English this Friday
with the Universidad Metropolitana Castro Carazo. We will also have the
opportunity to engage in the unique Independence Day activities of Costa Rica
this coming Monday. We are thankful for student health and safety during our
first two weeks of the semester and are looking forward to many more exciting
and challenging weeks to come!
Students viewing Elmer's beautiful paintings after class
Students enjoying lunch time in the LASP backyard
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