some luxe field trip

If your goals for study abroad include:
-meeting people from your host country
-having substantive opportunities to practice a new language outside of class
-thinking critically about how race works in a different society
-doing a cool internship or volunteer thing in your spare time
-having the chance to take weekend trips or go camping
-forming close relationships with professors and getting letters of rec for fellowship apps
-any kind of academic rigor at all

DON'T DO THIS PROGRAM.

Classes are 100% lecture-based and given by a rotating cast of professors, which means you will hear the same introduction to the issues basically every day, never get a chance to form a close relationship with someone, or hear how the different themes the lecturers present are seen to relate to one another. The management actively discourages weekend trips and forbids volunteering and internships. When our methods class got in a fight after they claimed there was no racism against Afro-Peruvians, they managed to backtrack more or less, but told me afterwards that they normally try to avoid the topic of race altogether (in a program titled "Indigenous Peoples and Globalization"!!!!!). Their philosophy is that Peru and the USA are totally incomparable as societies, but also that we are somehow 100% capable of understanding deep and complicated issues within Peruvian society by taking cursory bus tours of indigenous villages and popping in and out of schools. They believe in Humala's consulta previa in the context of government negotiations, but doesn't believe in consulting indigenous subjects before writing anthropological observations of them. They believes in the left's proposals for intercultural bilingual education, but don't seem to care that their classroom is basically absent the intercultural part since there is no space made for connecting with Peruvians. I arrived speaking Spanish fairly well and so have had the chance to discuss some of my concerns with them but they barely give the time of day to people who struggle more with the language.

A side note: It is also very difficult if you get sick on this program because the staff is very liability-conscious and will make you follow the doctor's recommendations exactly, even though they are also aware that the doctor overprescribes. I stopped taking bronchitis medicine a few days early because it cost 13 soles a pill and was giving me hand tremors, and the director said they would send me back to the US for breaking the code of conduct. He also shamed me for being hesitant to waste so much money by implying that I was rich (the SIT insurance makes you pay for everything out of pocket and doesn't reimburse you till you get back). So far I have paid $186, which is over 600 soles, about a quarter of our month's budget for independent research.