Foreign Travel Program
From Senegal with Love
click here to download the lwspassport
The Lowell Whiteman School’s Foreign Travel Program challenges students to broaden their global perspective and deepen their understanding of diverse cultures while they learn more about themselves.
Through a month of foreign travel every spring as well weekly preparation for three months prior to departure, the Foreign Travel Program allows students to learn from the world around them, connecting academic knowledge to real world experiences. We do not travel in the cursory manner of a tourist but instead actively engage communities with a variety of meaningful interactions. For this reason, the journey of Foreign Trip, our experience of four weeks in-country, is fundamentally more significant that merely “visiting” a country.
The Foreign Travel Program is a balance of adventure, education, cultural immersion, and opportunities for self-discovery. Each year small groups, twelve students and two faculty guides, depart for one of five destinations, and while their destinations range from Mongolia to Senegal to Bolivia, all of the trips are guided by principles of responsible travel. Faculty and student groups travel humbly and do so in order to learn more, striving to minimize any negative impacts on local communities or their environments. LWS travel groups support local economies whenever possible and seek out meaningful interactions with the people of the communities they visit. All trips include homestays where students are immersed in a community. Students live, eat, and commune with local families. In addition, LWS groups engage in community service, typically working with community members on a project of their choosing. We value these experiences from play to work to daily living as opportunities to enhance our understanding of a broader world.
Students return from Foreign Trip having learned different lessons. While they have all expanded their worldview in someway, their experiences are uniquely their own. For some the most significant experience will be communicating in a language they had only known in the classroom and subsequently building relationships with friends a world away. For others it is taking on the challenge of an adventure, a physically challenging homestay or high altitude trek. For many it is a simple as removing themselves from their comfort zone and, faced with the unknown, cultivating a greater sense of their own abilities. Whatever their story, students return knowing more about themselves and the world around them. By exploring the world around them and processing those experiences, they return to speak of their discoveries with both authority and a sense of awe. The adventure of Foreign Trip opens the door to an entirely new way of seeing the world and one’s place in it.
Students in Geography or Honors Environmental Geography complete interviews during foreign trip. They use their primary research interviews to compose coherent assessments of their experiences. A selection of these reports are available below.
Janis McLaughlin, Class of 2008, reports from Swaziland and South Africa in 2008
Willow Fitzgerald, Class of 2010, reports from Sikkim, India in 2008