After graduating from Bryn Mawr in 2009, Gillian Freedman attended Boston College, where she majored in International Studies. When she finished college in 2013, she knew that she wanted to join the Peace Corps. After a long application process, she headed to Peru in 2014 to work for two years as a community health promotion specialist. Throughout the experience she remained in contact with her former Spanish teacher, Jenniffer Gray, and was able to return to Bryn Mawr as a guest speaker. When Gray found herself in need of a semester substitute just as Freedman was finishing her Peace Corps work, the timing was perfect. Although Freedman does not plan to teach long-term – she hopes to remain in the public health field – she is delighted to have the opportunity to work with Bryn Mawr students as a faculty member.
My interest in the Peace Corps grew from the other international experiences I've had. As a child I lived in France for a time, and then I went back to study abroad in Paris in 2012. I knew from these experiences that I love living in another culture, and I was also interested in the opportunity to improve my Spanish fluency, and to work within another country’s health system in order to understand its strengths and challenges.
While in Peru, I worked in a community of just under 2,000 people as a community health promotion specialist. My role was to increase community engagement around the topic of health, specifically adolescent health (teen pregnancy prevention and leadership skills), as well as prenatal and early childhood health (nutrition, prevention of stunted growth, early childhood stimulation, hygiene and illness prevention in pregnant women and children under three years of age.) In the next year or so I plan to start graduate school to earn an M.S. in nursing, and long-term I plan to pursue public health nursing as a career. My time in the Peace Corps solidified for me the huge role that nurses play in health care systems domestically and abroad, and in the field of public health.
One of the most interesting things for me while in Peru was experiencing firsthand the process of cultural exchange. Learning not only how another culture sees things, but also to put myself in their shoes and understand why they see things this way, allowed me to approach challenges with a greater sense of how to meld my viewpoints and theirs. I also learned how amazing the world is, in the sense that there are people all over the world who will take in strangers and make them a part of their family and community without a second thought.