You’ve heard how a trip to Nicaragua can impact your future and how host sisters can become close friends in a short amount of time, now find out what traveling abroad can do for your Spanish skills! This is the third and final entry of our on going series, Notes from McKenna. Get the full scoop and read the other two if you missed out!
My experience with a language barrier in Nicaragua fueled my passion for foreign languages. I hope to study foreign languages in college, and aspire to be fluent in Arabic and Chinese along with Spanish. Nicaragua forced me to use a foreign language, an experience I had never had with learning Spanish in high school. For the first time, I saw that language is key to understanding other people’s perspectives, lives, and wishes, and understood that little to no sustainable progress can be made without communication between locals and outsiders. Any program focused on alleviating poverty can, in my mind, only effectively reach its goals by communicating with the people it hopes to target.
Girls at Colegio Esperanza in Nicaragua
My trip to Nicaragua helped me understand my own identity in that it allowed me to see that I am extremely passionate about humanitarian work and love travel, languages, and meeting new people with different backgrounds and perspectives than my own. The trip with Al Campo has had an enormous impact on my life.
A big thanks to McKenna Asakawa for all the time spent writing! Best of luck with the Spero Foundation and all of your endeavors.
Centaurus High School is going on another service and eco-adventure trip this summer! You can find out about their trip, or learn about customizing a trip for your own school.