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Walking around downtown Tangail is always exciting. In the cooler evenings, thousands of people crowd the streets while rickshaws zig, zag, and blare their horns. Sizzles of street vendors cooking, chuckles of friends laughing, and distorted Bollywood tunes playing out of TVs in tea stalls are all mixed into an endless din. The smells of pani puri and other spicy snacks waft through the air. Colorful marigold garlands and rickshaw art glow during the golden sunsets. The experience is all-encompassing, like you are part of the heartbeat of the world.

Bengal people are very patriotic, and rightfully so. They fought very hard to be an independent nation — officially becoming their own state on March 26, 1971! — and they even had to fight for their language. Many university students were killed during a protest on Feb. 21, 1952, for the right to keep the national language as Bangla, as opposed to Urdu. I experienced a lot of joy learning Bangla because of how excited people were to teach me and how happy people were when I could introduce myself and ask for their name in their own language. There is something really special about connecting with another person on that level. 

New York City is famous for Central Park because the bulk of the city is a concrete jungle. In many cities across Asia, it is a different story. Tangail is exemplative of how much nature is intermingled amongst the man-made structures of the modern world. On one hand, this is very beautiful. Seeing trees and flowering shrubs growing out of the middle of a road is a great way to allow birds and pollinating insects to thrive in urban areas. On the other hand, water ways, such as the one in this photo, can become very polluted due to the lack of proper zoning and development.

The best part of Bangladesh was the food. I enjoyed everything I tried, especially the sweets. Tangail is famous for one sweet in particular, called the chom chom. It is a cheese! It is less like a mozzarella stick and more like a deep-fried cheesecake bite. The milk is strained, kneaded into balls with cardamom, and boiled in sugar for hours in traditional kitchens like this, before it is enjoyed locally or exported all over the country and the world.

Flying into Punta Gorda was exciting and beautiful. I am originally from Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, so this trip felt very close to home for me. This view provides a quick glimpse of Punta Gorda, a seaside town in the southern part of Belize that is home to about 6,000 people. In the back, you can see two small mountain peaks, visible from most areas of town. If visitors wish to hike the mountains, they can be escorted to the trails by the Belizean military.

There are many Mayan ruins found throughout Central America, primarily in Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and Guatemala. Here, on one of our cultural experience days, the other students/volunteers and I visited the Nim Li Punit ruins, a medium-sized Mayan complex in the south of Belize. The name is Kekchi Mayan for “Big Hat” and was adopted after an image of a ruler, wearing an elaborate head-dress, was found depicted on a slab at the site.

There are many ethnic groups living in Belize and in Punta Gorda. One such group, the Garifuna, are descendants of an Afro-Indigenous population from the Caribbean Island of St. Vincent. In town, they provide a “Garifuna Experience” for participating groups. This experience includes learning to play with the Garifuna drums, dancing the Garifuna dance called Punta, and enjoying an authentic Garifuna meal, including seafood stews and soups, cassava pudding, and plantains. This picture includes other students and volunteers who came from all over the world for this rotation.

During my time at Hillside, I presented four lectures to the staff and students/volunteers. One lecture presented was “Body Mechanics in the Workplace,” where staff were interviewed to see what caused them pain at work. I then offered techniques for better body mechanics to decrease their risk of injury and pain. Here, I am helping one of the center’s security guards learn the proper way to transfer a patient from a wheelchair to another seat, since he is often helping patients get into their cars after their physical therapy sessions. I have always been interested in doing clinical care, and this trip was very valuable and humbling for me.