I'm just back from a week in Madrid, where I plan to move in September to improve my Spanish. I'm going to teach English to make money, and outside of my lessons, I'll be completely immersed in my favorite language. I couldn't be more excited.

I am starting my Masters in Education this summer. I plan on teaching in Department of Defense Schools once my Masters is complete. I will begin teaching High School Spanish locally this Fall.

Things are great here. I still live in Strasbourg, where I am now freelancing as a French->English translator, mostly for small-to-medium-sized businesses, university research departments, and outsourcers (translation agencies). In a couple of weeks I will also be taking a teaching position at the Institut de Traducteurs, d'Interprètes et de Relations Internationales, where I completed my Master's in professional translation in May 2012.

In an interesting turn of fate, I have been doing some English-language editing of publications on semantics/pragmatics for the Université de Lorraine. This particular department seems to write a lot of its papers in English, presumably to reach a wider audience.

As for the translating, I do a wide variety of fields, especially medical (my Master's thesis was on facial composite tissue allotransplantation, wah!), light legal (terms and conditions, sales contracts, etc.), and your typical marketing/business documentation, plus websites and the odd tourism brochure.

I hope to do more teaching in the future because I am particularly interested in "traductologie" and curiously frustrated by the gap between theory and practice in translation studies.

"Living in Galicia has been particularly interesting because Spanish is not the only language spoken in this part of the country; Galician is a co-official language. Most Galicians speak Galician with each other more than they speak Spanish. Becoming familiar with the basics of this language via simple observation throughout the course of the year has been fascinating for me due to my interests in Spanish and linguistics, and my background in both has made it relatively easy to understand Galician without studying it.

The school I work at is bilingual; teachers and students alike communicate in both languages, including a mix of the two. My job allows me to observe bilingualism in action, and the effects it has on reading, writing, and general language development. I think that living and working in a bilingual community has made me aware just how far-reaching the effects of a language can be in society, daily life, and everything in between."

After graduating in January, I continued working as the Office Manager for The Boston Language Institute, and received my TEFL certificate there. I then accepted a position teaching English at Shenyang Jianzhu (architecture) University in northeast China. I've been working here in Shenyang at the university since August 2006, teaching students of all majors as well as some of the faculty, and another private school teaching kids as young as age 3 to business English classes. I've also been doing private tutoring for IELTS, TOEFL, and SAT test prep. I've taken advantage of the 4 months of university holidays, traveling all over China and the surrounding countries.

I'm traveling to Australia this summer to escape the Olympics (Shenyang is one of the satellite cities for soccer matches) and take the GRE, as I plan to work one more year here and then move back to the states to pursue an MA in Linguistics (hopefully) or ESL.

Through one experience or another, I've gradually been launching myself into the development field. I was RA for the BU Program here last year, and then began working part time for a small NGO called Rain for the Sahel and Sahara. I administrate our programs here, which are primarily in support of nomadic schools up in the Agadez region. We do various projects to support the community and the school, such as school gardens and grain banks. One element that I have been working toward adding to our programs is adult/women's literacy, in both French and Tamascheq, the local language of the region which has traditional literacy that has been fading out over the past couple of generations. With my focus on linguistics I have always been a proponent of national language literacy; but since literacy on the part of the parents has a positive effect on the liklihood that they will understand the value of education and send their children to school, we're able to slide this in under our primary education sector.

I've gone into all of this with my focus on education and language. In one way or another, though, my life circumstances keep pushing me toward health. While back in the States for much of 2004, I got a job in Public Health in Arlington County, which was a great perspective-builder after (and before) so much time here. Personal circumstances have put health in the forefront for me as well, to an almost humorous extreme: everywhere I am, babies tend to be born, and in difficult circumstances. I helped carry my best friend here through over a year of treatment for Tuberculosis, which included spending a great deal of time at the public TB clinic in Niamey and giving Streptomycin injections. This friend's little sister had a crisis with cerebral malaria, and I was the only one available for her immediate care. My personal role is hence quite often impromptu nurse and midwife. The circumstances I have seen here (as well as in Arlington) have made me think a lot about health care problems and inequalities. In Niger especially, not only is the situation drastic, but there are internal racisms among the population that put certain people at an even greater disadvantage.

Through one thing after another, I've been accepting the message that is sending me down the path of public health and health justice. Most of my life and studies has been geared toward cultural understanding, and I've had wonderful opportunities and privileges to expand on that. I take that as a great responsibility, and see this now as a way of applying that awareness to something real and valuable. I've taken some time to focus on what I want my graduate studies to be, but I'm in the process of applying to PhD programs in Anthropology and Medical Anthropology.