If you were recently looking for David Slade you didn’t find him on campus. He was in Costa Rica on a seven-week program with 13 Berry students. The Berry students taught English in elementary schools and lived with host families throughout the Santa Cruz region. Professor Slade graduated from Berry College with majors in Spanish and Communication and remembers hours of playing guitar with friends in the College Chapel foyer late into the night, endless sessions in the forensics lounge and Laughlin photo darkroom, life-changing conversations with professors, and getting married in that same College Chapel years later. Between Berry and graduate school, he worked in public relations at CNN en Español in Atlanta. Now, back at Berry, he teaches Spanish and writes about eighteenth-century Latin America. And plans his next travel course to Costa Rica. For a glimpse of his last trip, see http://facultyweb.berry.edu/dslade/costarica/.

Bethany Battig, a rising junior and a double major in Spanish and government came a long way from her home in Essex, Vermont, to come to Berry. She was drawn to Berry by the campus and the people and she hasn’t been disappointed. She stays busy in the classroom in courses like Hispanic Culture, Don Quixote, and Contemporary World Issues, as well as in her on-campus jobs at the Alumni Center and the Cottages, and her off campus job as a nanny for five children. Thanks to a Berry scholarship she will spend the fall semester at three different locations in Latin America, with three different host families, as she joins students from across the globe, studying for 5 weeks at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico, 5 weeks at the University of the Pacific in Lima, Peru, and 5 weeks at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Following her graduation from Berry in spring of 2009, she plans to study more Spanish in graduate school and to pursue a career in Spanish.