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This blog captures the experiences of Goshen College students participating in Study-Service Term in Ecuador.
Over the course of the semester, students are living with host families, strengthening their Spanish, learning alongside Indigenous communities, and engaging in service that connects local realities with global questions. From the Andes to coastal regions, Ecuador offers a powerful setting for hands-on learning shaped by culture, community, and care. Through these reflections, readers are invited into the everyday moments, challenges, and discoveries that are shaping how students understand the world and their place within it.
One of the sacred elements of the SST structure is the final retreat in which students regather from their service locations for a final time together of rest and reflection before returning home. In Ecuador, our retreat location has been...
Looking out from a small pueblo in Imbabura Province. I’ve been given the opportunity of using my real eye, my camera, for my service placement. There’s a quote I love (that I can’t remember who or how it is said...
As our second week of visits to service locations concluded, students and leaders came to the realization that this chapter of SST is quickly drawing to a close. The end of SST always brings a mixture of emotions; sadness, joy,...
This past week we set out on our cherished SST tradition of visits to students at their service locations. Our first stop was to visit our students in the cloud forest and Amazonian rainforest locations on the west and east...
I have to admit, I was nervous. As I stood by the medical center in the crisp morning air and watched students continue to file out of a charter bus, my pulse increased. I was tasked to act as a...
Blog: Week 1 of Service Isa H. On our way to our service town in the Ecuadorian Cloud Forest, Lisa and I weren’t quite sure what to expect. With nervous stomachs and bladders, we sat on the bus for about...
Our final week of the study portion of SST was an eventful one. It began with the widely celebrated Ecuadorian national holiday of Carnaval. This pre-lenten four-day party involves getting soaking wet and covered in foam in many parts of...
This past week we set out on a journey south through the Ecuadorian Andes to discover more of this stunning landscape and the people who inhabit it. As we wound our way around incomprehensibly deep gorges, steep mountain passes, and...
As the current SST’ers celebrated the one-month anniversary of their SST adventure, they experienced the unique sights, sounds, and smells of an open-air market, helped prepare a traditional Ecuadorian meal, learned some Latin dance, spent time with refugees hearing their...
As students continue their march through the SST experience, encounters with new landscapes, new cultures, and new sensory experiences pound out their steady drum beat each day….. One of the true challenges of SST is to fully absorb the daily...
As we reflect on this past week, it is hard to absorb all we saw and experienced in the last seven days. The SST experience continued its daily sensory buffet of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and the unique feel of...
The first week of the study portion of SST continued the daily immersion of new sights, sounds, and experiences that began in orientation last week. The contrast between SST and many other international exchange programs is that after each day...
SST in Ecuador is once again in full swing and for those who have experienced it firsthand, the first few days are a whirlwind of activity; a fire hydrant blast to the face of new sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and...
To our wonderful students: Friday evening you made your way back to Quito for our final retreat weekend where we had a fantastic several days of reunion and reflection! SST is a mix of challenges, accomplishments and growth moments. Sometimes...
For this month of July, students have participated in service internship placements around the country. Here are some photo highlights!
After completing 20 days in Tena we got the green light and made a move to Service this past Saturday. Yay! Some students were joking that instead of Study-Service Term SST (which is named for the two significant halves of...
CONAIE is the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador and it is a large organization composed of representatives of various indigenous groups in Ecuador and they advocate for more indigenous rights. They do this most often by shutting down main...
As of today, we have been in Tena for more than a week longer than expected. This is due to the countrywide protests regarding indigenous rights and economic security, led by the organization CONAIE, which stands for the Confederación de...
CONAIE stands for the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador. They represent the rights of indigenous people in Ecuador, specifically including the following communities: Quichua, Shuar, Achuar, Huaorani, Siena, Secoya, Shiwiar, Záparo, Cofán, and many more. Since the 1980s this...
In our last week of study several students including Nina and myself came down with covid, so unfortunately we had to navigate some significant adjustments in our final week with Quito host families, which included moving spanish classes to zoom,...
We had a wonderful week last week hosting some faculty from Goshen College and making our way North to the city of Otavalo in the province of Imbabura.
One of the texts for our term is Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. I believe one of the great benefits of the book is that it…
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