So here we are, at the halfway point. It doesn’t feel at all like a halfway point because we’re all still learning and growing so much, more and more every day, but the reality is that in no time at all we’ll be home. Soon we’ll be able to have all the things we constantly […]

People say that home is where the heart is. As beautifully simple as that phrase is, the concept of home is more than just an emotional comfort zone. The last few years of my life have seemed like a constant state of flux (moving around from high school to college, back to Chicago and then […]

Last weekend we went to an awesome little town called Viñales. The group chose to go in a bus, it was filled with tourists. The journey lasted four hours, we passed through varying scenes of Cuban countryside. As we got off the bus, we were greeted by a mob of women aggressively asking us if […]

Each of us here are required to write an ethnography (or, un investigación) about something in Cuba. The topics are diverse, ranging from the culture surrounding car ownership, to renewable energy, to race and tourism. I have chosen to study the mental health care system, both because the health care system here is fascinating to […]

Becky Friedman March 2, 2015 I have written around four drafts of my first blog post, each entirely different from the previous one. Some I rewrite because my feelings have changed so drastically from the last time I procrastinated going to the WiFi centers, and once because I ended up without a computer. But the […]