By Eliza Morse
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September 16, 2010
When Julie Stevenson arrived in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, this past May, never having taken a single Spanish class, she had 12 weeks to help design and establish a new accounting system for Asociacion de Mujeres del Altiplano (AMA), a non-governmental organization whose members didn't speak English.
Three months later, Stevenson, a senior, said she had completed her task and had even been able to act as a translator for service groups from the United States that had come to work with the organization.
Stevenson said she had taken Spanish classes during the first six weeks of her stay, and by the third or fourth week she was able to talk to everyone at her internship without a translator.
Stevenson got her first taste of Guatemala during the spring of her sophomore year, she said, when she went on a spring break trip sponsored by the University of Richmond and organized by the Highland Support Project (HSP), a non-profit based in Richmond that works with AMA and other Mayan communities in Guatemala.
"One of the reasons I really wanted to go to Guatemala and live and work abroad was to learn about other cultures," Stevenson said.