Other than spending a few days in the Caribbean on a cruise in high school, I have not been a tourist in Latin America. The only countries I have traveled to for substantial amounts of time are Japan and New Zealand, neither of which I did substantial service learning in. While travelling through Japan in middle school, we did a short project on a farm picking potatoes, but that was such a short project that was so long ago that I don’t remember much from it. I did think it was a little weird that we, a bunch of middle schoolers with no farm training, were doing work for these farmers who obviously had a better grasp on the work than we did, and who would be doing the work once we left. I enjoyed the experience because it allowed me to interact closely with everyday citizens, so I felt like I was getting a less augmented view of everyday lift for a Japanese person, but I am confident that the “service” was not at all helpful to the community.

I will focus mainly on my experience as a tourist in New Zealand and Grand Cayman, since these are the two places I have traveled to most recently. New Zealand was not as much of a typical tourist experience, since we stayed with a local the whole time and lived at her house. We still visited some of the touristy sites, but my most prominent and favorite memories from the experience were from simply exploring the town, Glenorchy, on my own, and in casual interactions with locals in restaurants and through our host. I expect that my favorite memories from Nicaragua will be from similar circumstances. I still enjoyed the more typical “touristy” experiences like going on tours and following the guides, but definitely found more fulfillment in the personalized interactions.

Grand Cayman was definitely a much different experience from New Zealand, in that we stayed in a beach house for a week and were fairly self sufficient. We only interacted with locals in buying groceries and a boat trip that we took, but even in those situations, the people we interacting with seemed fairly westernized. The Caymans are much more developed and economically stable than much of the rest of the Caribbean, so we did not see much that differed from the US in the week that we were there. I am really excited to travel to rural Nicaragua, especially after taking LACS 20 and being able to mentally prepare myself for what to look out for while travelling. This will be the first time in my adult(ish) life that I will be in a country where English is not widely understood, and the first time that I will spend more than a day in a “developing” portion of the world. Like I said previously, I expect my most profound and memorable interactions to accompany personal, non-touristy experiences, but to still see some value in our time in Grenada when we do more stereotypically touristy things.