quick catch up

I've been bad at this, I know. I was all geared up to reminisce and then I got busy with work and blah blah blah. Anyway, I've been "road warrior"-ing through Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota for the past few weeks and it's been a pretty intense experience. I swear, sometimes the culture shock in the US is harder for me than it is when I go abroad.

For all of those who don't get what I do, here's a brief overview of what I've been doing for the past few weeks:

Visited University of Wisconsin, Madison to meet with their Center for Global Health. We're working to bring medical students and masters of public health students to our sites to help with our health initiatives in rural communities. After some extensive meetings with their directors and faculty members, checking out a Public Health Symposium, and rounding up some undergraduates at a public service panel discussion, I called it a day (or week) and headed out.

Met with Iowa State University faculty. We're working with their international education and honors college to put together a really interesting service-learning program which involves different levels of difficulty, I guess. We started with one fairly easy one in Peru this past summer, with students working on a variety of projects and going through reflection courses with an Iowa State faculty member. We're doing a Oaxaca program this coming summer as well as the Peru program and we will eventually be adding on a Ghana program and hopefully a Brazil program. Their goal is to get freshman to participate in the Peru program, leading into the more difficult programs in Mexico, Brazil and Ghana in their 2nd, 3rd, 4th years. It's an interesting model and still very much in the development stages, so we shall see how it works.

Just spent a week in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota. We don't currently have a program running with them, but I'm working on it! I had a presentation with a variety of faculty members last week and a series of meetings, so hopefully sometime in the near future we'll figure out where to start.

And now I'm off again...to...Wisconsin again?