This fall, I traveled to Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania on ARCC’s Gap Africa program. After living 90 days of adventure, learning, challenge, and so much newness, all I can say that will do it justice is that it was the experience of a lifetime. The things I learned on my gap semester seem endless, but these are the ten that impacted me the most…
Traveling with Celiac Disease or other serious food allergies can feel daunting. I have lived abroad off and on for the past 10 years, but most recently spent the past 3 years in Central America. There was a time before this that I didn’t think traveling and living abroad would ever be possible given my diet restrictions.
We are entering our 35th summer of running summer programs for teens. Over these years we have had the opportunity to bring tens of thousands of students across the globe to destinations far off the beaten path to explore, adventure and make a difference in local communities. Whether in the rural areas of Thailand’s Chiang Mai Province, high in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, on a small Fijian Island in the South Pacific or here at home on the streets of San Francisco, we are incredibly proud of the impact our students have had on the places and communities they have visited.
Machu Picchu is perhaps known best as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. The ancient city, which literally translates to Ancient Mountain in the Quechua language, has survived for centuries nestled within the Sacred Valley of the Andes and was a former home to at least a few hundred people during the height of the Inca Empire from the 1400s to 1500s. While there are no human residents of Machu Picchu any longer, it does still have some…
I’m sitting in a tiny Costa Rican open-air cafe, drinking a well-needed, semi-cold Sprite. My large backpack filled with months worth of my personal belongings beside me. I’ve just ordered something off a laminated menu. I think chicken and rice, but honestly, I’m not quite sure, as I hardly speak any Spanish at all. Internally I’m kicking myself for the eight years of German I studied in school – Spanish would be pretty handy right about now.
With 18 different summer service programs across 6 different continents, we know how hard it can be to make a decision about which program is the best match for your personality. Everyday we talk to families and help them decide between two or more programs that they are interested in. After years of these conversations, which we love, we thought it would be fun to design a short quiz that might help people figure out…
I have always considered “experiential education” to be most effectively implemented in nature’s classroom, learning about ecology, geology, and scientific inquiry through direct engagement with one’s surroundings. For me, history, as an academic subject, has never seemed as conducive to experiential education as science–how can one have direct experience with something that by definition has already occurred? Science is all around us, history is in the past. After traveling through Vietnam, however, I quickly realized how wrong that assumption was.
Our ARCC group was on their way to teach English in a school in Beqa. As they stepped off the boat that morning, the Fiji National Rugby Team was finishing up a kava ceremony with the chief before starting a training session for the day. Fijian are fanatics when it comes to rugby and the rugby players are national heroes.
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…
What do you think of when you turn on a light in your home? Have you ever stopped to think about how fortunate you are to have electricity, the ability to watch TV at any hour of the day, charge your electronics, have a light to read by? Most of us have probably never given it a second thought. But the unfortunate reality is that approximately 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to electricity. That is roughly 17% of the global population.
