At six p.m. every weeknight, the Level 8 English class meets on the second floor of the New Building at the Sihanouk Buddhist University (Battambang Branch). It’s mostly college students, plus two monks, a thirty-something business woman, and a whip-smart tenth grader. Each person has a different story, but they are all connected in their passion for the English language and deep desire to learn. Their foreign teacher leans towards the eccentric, so every day looks different. From traditional lectures to improv acting and structured debate, the students grow in confidence and expand their ability to communicate.

No score, no referee, no sidelines, just a chaotic stampede of forty students and teachers of all ages playing soccer. That’s how I spend my Friday afternoons at Children’s Future International (CFI). When I first arrived, the students were eager to see my skills, but I warned them they’d be severely disappointed. I quit soccer over six years ago and was rusty, to say the least. While I have slowly improved at preventing the ball from going through my legs, that doesn’t stop the older students from trying.

Here is a bit of a peak into the experience of working at Children's Future International.

For Bridge Year Students, New Year's Day means more than just the start of a new year. It also marks the halfway point through our time abroad and the beginning of a period of reflection, as we try to digest what the prior months have meant to us. When preparing to leave for Bolivia in August, I was eager to exercise my muscle of independence and test my abilities with little to no safety net. I did not expect to miss anything from home. For the most part, I was right. However, Bridge Year has a striking way of exposing all the seemingly inessential things in your life, that, turns out, feel very important once they are taken away. 

The first week of being in my homestay, I was just relieved to have my own bed. During our first month in India, we were constantly in motion: overnight train rides that took us from Delhi to Udaipur to Agra, beautiful but occasionally nauseating bus rides through the foothills of the Himalayas, and a new place to explore every three days. As exciting as these changes were, by the end of the month, I was ready to settle down. My new environment would also be quite the transition, but this time, it would be one that I could truly adapt to.

My homestay is what is called a “joint family”: multiple nuclear families living together under a single roof.

“What is something you have learned thus far on Bridge Year?”

This question is one asked to the five of us so often that it has gone from thought-provoking to mundane to formulaic. Recently, after thinking about how I’ve probably given at least 10 different answers to 10 different (or sometimes the same) people, I realized that I didn’t have a truly cumulative answer.

We had planned to spend our winter excursion floating. We had wanted to explore temples older than our own country, drift down the Mekong river in kayaks, splashing in practically every waterfall in Cambodia; our goal was to sink into nature and escape the hustle of city life. What none of us expected were the friends we made along the way.

Recently, I invited our cohort and our instructors to come to my homestay family’s house to learn about the process of making legomoro, a traditional Indonesian snack from our neighborhood, Kotagede. Follow along as I share the process of making legomoro as well as a peek into some special moments with my homestay family.

In September, our Bolivian cohort visited Tiquipaya’s local trash and recycling plant, Dirección de Gestión Integral de Residuos Sólidos (GIRS), located just across the street from my homestay. At the beginning of our charla (talk), we discussed the purpose of the plant, how it serves the community, and the struggles the workers face. However, our bubble of blissful ignorance surrounding the state of our environment burst as soon we followed our guide Jhoselin outside. Before us stood a heaping mountain of trash, hungry dogs, and a thick stench that clung to our clothes.

Written in both Spanish and English, Bridge Year Costa Rica participant, Zane Mills VanWicklen, reflects on navigating the unknown during the initial days of the program, and how a stone changed his perspective on how to build connections and embrace differences.

Take a look at some of the special moments from the Senegal group's first month!

This year, I’ve worked with Aajeevika Bureau, an NGO focused on addressing the issues faced by migrants and their families. I sat down with my boss, Sanjay Chittora, director of the Skill Training unit of Aajeevika Bureau, which provides workers with opportunities to upgrade their skills and increase their earnings. We discussed the history of the organization, his work within it, and his outlook on the NGO sector more broadly.

It is communities like these which remind us not to forget about humanity when we look to numbers and textbooks to solve our problems, to logic because there is no place to contain our emotions. Bridge Year serves as a reminder of what it means to be human—that beyond a culture of productivity and achievement, what really sustains us are the values of love, community, and humanity living within everything around us. I think that it would surprise us to find how many of the answers to the issues which seem so beyond us are actually written in the interactions of our every day.

There is so much I could say about my community placement, Green Wave. Green Wave is a social enterprise selling jewelry that trains and hires women from the nearby women’s shelter called Maison Rose. I could talk for hours about the mission, my boss, or the community that has become another family to me over the course of my Bridge Year, but to keep it short, I'll just share what a typical day looked like for me.

Roughly translating to “people of the house”, waa keur is the Wolof phrase for family. Both a very important concept in Senegalese society and a strongly emphasized aspect of the Bridge Year program, I knew becoming a member of my new homestay family would be a defining aspect of my time in Senegal. Having only the slightest idea of what the future had in store, I was thrusted into my new home in early September. Starting from day one, I began to develop a better understanding of the dynamics within the household. Over time, I made a place for myself in the complex family structure of the Sall family home and began to truly feel like a member of the family. 

I had been aware of Javanese since before departing for Indonesia, but I couldn’t have anticipated its prevalence. In our home neighborhood, Kotagede, most of the inhabitants are Jogja locals, meaning they speak Indonesian but their primary language is Javanese. The language dynamics immediately interested me, and I wanted to learn more about how locals view their two languages; which one is more comfortable, and how it feels to switch between languages, or even mix them. I was told by many that regardless of their clear fluency in both languages, it would feel awkward to speak Indonesian to other Jogja locals.

“Bapak Ino is an insurance salesman. Ibu Sri is working at the nearby kindergarten in an admin role.* Diva is a university student and Ahnaf is a student in high school. The family likes to do activities together.”

These few sentences, alongside a family photo, were all I was given before entering my homestay in September. One thing left unmentioned was their house. 

I remember sitting in the living room of our final group homestay. After hearing these short descriptions of the families, everyone’s excited thoughts quickly turned towards the houses we would be staying in. Several failed attempts to find photos of our new homes on Google Maps only made us more restless and left us to wonder.

Looking back,…

It is currently the wedding season in Cambodia! Weddings are held in months that have 30 days. Recently I went to a wedding in Doun Kaev in Takéo Province with my homestay family. My mom’s nephew was getting married. Here are some pictures to take you along for the wedding journey while sharing a bit more information about Cambodian wedding traditions.

It's exciting to think about where a bridge might take you, but an equally important part is where you started. I often find myself looking back to be eluded by mist. Growing up outside any culture and being mixed, it’s difficult to explain where I come from. I know there are the pine-covered mountains of Colorado, but behind that?

I work at an NGO called RISE Foundation (Yayasan Remaja Indonesia), whose core mission is to promote and develop the health, wellness, and advocacy of Indonesian youth. Since beginning my internship at the end of September, I’ve learned so much from my mentors and fellow interns. Everyone at RISE is passionate about their work, and the office has a friendly air of camaraderie that many American work spaces that I’ve experienced lack. One of my favorite traditions is the lunches when someone surprises the rest of the office with food to share. While talking and laughing with my co-workers and friends, I’ve tried delicious noodles, chicken sate (grilled chicken skewers with a flavorful sauce), and pai susu (pie made out of custard and condensed milk that is popular all around Indonesia…

It becomes hard to look up when all that is around you is a sea of anti-Blackness.  Racist incidents just become a part of your daily life, something that you expect to happen and are more surprised when it doesn’t.  Whether it’s malicious, disgusted stares, your coworkers grabbing your hair and telling you how interesting it is, your host cousin telling you that Black people deserve to get paid less, or a plethora of other examples, the sting of racism becomes something that you have to endure every day.  Sure-you might learn the context, the history, why things are the way that they are yet none of that helps to change how you feel. The racism makes you crazy. It starts to make you question whether they are right, whether you really are less than, because it is all…