Before this year’s Global Health Fellows set off for Peru, they spent five sessions on something that meaningfully supplemented their trip preparation: building skills to connect across language and culture, with the help of our colleagues at Dartmouth’s Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures.
Each spring, the Global Health Fellows travel abroad to see community-led health programs firsthand—bridging what they study in the classroom with the lived experiences of the people and communities behind it. This year’s destination was Peru, where the cohort visited schools and community clinics.
We wanted the Fellows to arrive not just informed, but ready: more confident in Spanish, more attuned to the cultural context they’d be stepping into, and more connected to one another before traveling as a group. The Rassias Center delivered on all three. Over five sessions—with three Fellows serving as drill instructors, drawing on their own language experience—the cohort built their Spanish skills, got a feel for the cultural traditions awaiting them, and began to come together as a team that would support each other personally and professionally throughout the journey.
That preparation paid off. You can read about the immersion trip itself here.
Our thanks to the Rassias Center for helping equip the Global Health Fellows for a meaningful experience abroad. It’s a partnership we hope to continue.
Learn more about the Rassias Center for World Languages and Cultures of Dartmouth College here.
