It’s easy to learn a foreign language when we’re young, our minds not yet shut down and expectant of a proscribed array of experiences. Children absorb new things like sponges. Get a few years on us, and it goes downhill rapidly. We get frustrated, too busy to study or practice, and then we can’t really parlez vous anything.
Immersion language programs are incredibly helpful. If you have time to go on a learning vacation and join an immersion language school, you are guaranteed to progress much further and more quickly than repeating tenses and verb cases at a night school community college class. Using the language as the tool it is for native speakers makes it functional.
ECELA is a South America-based language immersion program, and for it’s students learning Spanish in Buenos Aires, there is an upcoming opportunity unlike most you’ll find out there. For students in the medical fields or interested in becoming health care professionals, in addition to the immersion language work, you can also participate as a hands-on volunteer in a Health Fair, providing important medical services to local communities.
This program helps you as a student and will send you home able to converse with Spanish-speaking patients in emergency rooms, maternity wards, and EMT/ambulance work…and the local Argentinean community that is under-served and in need will be getting proper medical care and advice. The roving Health Fair is organized with local community centers in under-resourced barrios, moving week-to-week. There is free medical attention provided as well as education and screenings for diabetes, skin cancer, glaucoma, etc.
You’ll be learning Spanish in the mornings in the upscale Recoleta district, and making a difference for locals in low-income areas in the afternoons. The programs run in June and July, and in 2011, plans are to expand programs to Chile and Peru. You’ll come home form this vacation with e heck of a lot more than souvenir t-shirts and photos.
Change by Doing 