A two-year collaborative project between professors in the department of Black studies, the department of global studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), culminated in a research trip to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in June 2015. The research collaborative aimed to develop a conceptual and inclusive framework for short-term and long-term development prospects in the earthquake-devastated community of Carrefour-Feuilles. The research trip included a two-day workshop that brought UCSB scholars to this specific community in Haiti to engage with community leaders and residents, Haitian faculty and students, grassroots organizations, governmental agencies, and international nongovernmental organizations working in Carrefour-Feuilles. The research project, titled “The Haiti Sustainable Development Research Collaborative: The Carrefour-Feuilles Neighborhood Redevelopment Project,” consisted of three professors from global studies and Black studies, three graduate students, ve undergraduates, and two videographers, one of whom recently completed a master’s degree in the UCSB global studies program. Together, we spent seven days in Haiti hoping not only to reach our research goals but to also to provide the ve undergraduates with an educational opportunity to broaden their historical and sociocultural understandings of Haiti and its development in an increasingly globalized world. Their reflections, provided below, offer valuable insights on the undergraduates’ rst experiences in a non-Western developing country; they also uncover the fruitful complexities of translating textbook. UCSB Students and Faculty knowledge into real-world understandings of both local and global issues. The students—Unique Vance, Mariah Boyd, Sean Tanabe, Ashley Baker, and Andrew Neiman—each completed a course and research project in Spring 2015 with Nadège T. Clitandre, an assistant professor of global studies who has close ties to the community of Carrefour-Feuilles. She and Claudine Michel, professor of Black studies, co-led the trip with the assistance of Philip McCarty, a lecturer in global studies and anthropologist with experience in eld research in countries outside the United States. Together with reactions offered by N. Pierre, Jamella Gow, and Nikita Carney, doctoral students who focus on Haiti and the broader Caribbean, this short essay provides insight into the preliminary processes of building a partnership between a large US research university and a community in Port-au-Prince, as well as the experience of engaging with leaders and other members of the community of Carrefour-Feuilles. In this piece, we provide personal and critical reactions developed in the eld and also a commentary on the value of cross-cultural research and academic exchange between students from different countries. We share these reactions in the hopes of generating more interest in this fruitful collaboration between the Center for Black Studies Research and the department of global studies.