It’s rare students find the words to describe their international summer service program. We talk about re-entry shock; how difficult it is to feel that people understand the experience you’ve had in such a foreign place. Traveling in Cuba can be particularly eye-opening, in a way that makes returning home a bit difficult. Did you have fun? Yeah. Did you make friends? Yeah. Was the food good? Yeah.
For most Americans, any knowledge of Cuba comes in the shadow of the “red scare,” and with a curious, if somewhat biased interest in an island nation stuck in time since it’s last friendly engagement with the US, whose closest border is a mere 103 miles away.
ARCC is thrilled to announce two 90-day Spring semester gap programs to compliment our Fall gap offerings. Beginning in February of 2017, ARCC will offer a brand new Patagonia and Cuba Gap Semester as well as the extremely successful Asia gap semester to China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.
These Spring semester gap programs are designed either as stand alone spring programs or as natural extensions of ARCC’s Fall semester gap programs. Just as with our fall gap programs, these new spring semester gap programs…
On our first day in Cuba, someone told me that Cuba “no tiene sentido ni razón” (has no sense or reason) and with each passing moment in Cuba, this becomes more apparent.
As a leader, this is my seventh ARCC trip — I am used to being flexible and rolling with the punches, but leading a teen service program in Cuba takes this to a whole new level. It’s a special time here. We are the first to run volunteer trips in Cuba […]
Hola de Cuba, I am already enchanted by this wonderful nation filled with contrast: a spirited, vibrant population, mired in an infrastructure circa 1959, but extremely proud of their people, their country and their traditions, and always looking forward. Driving through the cities and small towns and seeing street after street of crumbling facades of once magnificent colonial buildings, you can’t help but wonder “what might have been?”.
