Today’s blog post prompt is to discuss the most important thing you learned on this trip. There were many things I learned on this trip. I learned about healthcare and the culture of Argentina. We had many lectures where we learned about different roles of the healthcare system. We also had many hospital visits where we got to walk through and see how different hospitals operated. I really enjoyed the hospital visits the most because I felt like it was a great opportunity to actually be able to walk through their hospitals, see everything, and also watch them take care of patients. It was also really cool to learn just how different their healthcare system is from the United States. Going into this experience I thought free healthcare was amazing and I couldn’t wait to learn more about it. Well I learned that free healthcare might not be the greatest option. That is because it leads to a lot more issues that they then have to solve on top of treating their patients with the best care. It was crazy to me that a hospital bill in the United States for having one baby can be over 30k, but in Argentina the bill is 0. I was genuinely in shock learning about how different everything was. I also feel like I left Argentina with a lot more knowledge about healthcare in general than I went into the trip with. But overall I think the most important thing I learned on this trip was to take the opportunities that are right in front of you. Taking the opportunity to go on this trip really changed my life. It changed my viewpoint of a lot of things, one of them being my role in healthcare, but it also changed me as a person. I found a group of friends that I was genuinely sad to leave when the trip came to an end. I went into this trip not knowing the people that were also going, and I left with people I now consider good friends of mine. It makes me excited to go back to school because that means I get to see all of them again. Getting close with them really made a difference on this trip. I had a great time and I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything else. I am going to miss Argentina and the many memories I made there so much.