Rebecca Crook, a SESP junior majoring in human development and social policy, received a Northwestern University fellowship to take Kiswahili classes in Nairobi this summer. She is one of 10 students to receive Immersion Language Grants from the Office of the Provost.
Crook, who interned in Nairobi last summer, will return to Kenya to study at the Language Center of Nairobi. "I want to be able to better communicate with Kenyans. Although the people with whom I interacted last summer had the opportunity to go to school and speak English, I experienced numerous communication barriers. Many people who came to the Gender Violence Recovery Centre in Nairobi where I interned only spoke their mother tongue and Kiswahili, and I yearned to understand their stories firsthand but couldn't," she says.
"Also, Kiswahili is the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa, and because at this point I would love to live in that region of the world in the future, I think it would be very useful," she adds. Kiswahili is also known as Swahili.
This summer as she studies Kiswahili, Crook intends to continue her work with the Gender Violence Recovery Centre, which is part of Nairobi Women's Hospital. She plans to expand the advocacy work of the center and also to begin her senior thesis.
For her internship in Nairobi last summer, Crook won a Summer Internship Grant. An initiative spearheaded by student leaders, University Career Services and the Northwestern Alumni Association, the Summer Internship Grant Program supports students who intern during the summer at typically non-paid internships.
To add to her global experiences, in the fall of 2009 she completed a semester abroad in Chile.
Immersion Language Grants support the learning of foreign languages in an intensive and experiential way. In 2010 the Office of the Provost awarded 10 grants of $2,000 each to help defray the costs of intensive language study. These grants are intended to enhance and facilitate ongoing academic and professional training.
Photo caption:
When Rebecca Crook interned in Nairobi last summer, she lived with a family of nine, including her "host niece," Grace.