To many of my friends and family, it may have seemed like a strange decision for me to leave a decent paying job in NYC to work for an entire year as a Global Health Corps fellow in Burundi, a small, French-speaking country in East Africa where running water and electricity are a luxury. At the time, I’m not sure I even really knew why I wanted to do it, except that it was the right thing for me at the time.
Flash forward 6 months to our mid-year retreat in Uganda…
I felt a sinking in my stomach when I saw that the next scheduled activity would be “Sharing our Stories.” I have never felt like my story of why I chose to work in development was inspiring enough to share due to having lived a fairly privileged life in many ways.
I struggled during the brainstorming, but after sharing in small groups, I discovered what it is that truly motivates me — my parents love for my brother and I and their commitment to providing us the best educational opportunities possible.
My parents have a love story to which I can only someday aspire. They met at a Boy Scout camp as counselors when they were just 15, neither having ever dated anyone else. The same day she met my dad, my mom returned to her cabin to excitedly tell her friend that she had met the man she was someday going to marry. Sure enough, despite the distance when they left at the end of the summer (my mom grew up in Wisconsin and my dad Minnesota), my dad wrote her love letters every day. They got married when they were only 21 and are still married today, becoming more and more similar as the years pass.
Nonetheless, getting married and having children so young wasn’t easy.
Unlike most other American children, I never believed that Santa Claus was real. When I was just 3 and my brother 5, my parents were in graduate school and struggling to support two small children at the same time. They had scrimped and saved to buy us Christmas gifts from thrift stores and garage sales to wrap and put under the tree. We had always been happy with their thoughtful gifts, until that year when my brother saw the extreme amount of gifts that his friend had received in comparison. He came home and asked my parents, “Was I a bad boy this year? Why didn’t Santa get me as many presents as my friend?” My dad, unsure what else to do, explained that mom and dad were really Santa, and I of course was relayed the message at this young age.
As we got older, they both eventually earned their PhDs and found jobs in academia. My parents, who value education very highly, wanted to provide us both with an undergraduate education. In order to pay my studies at UCLA, and because the job market was so tough in California where we lived, my mom temporarily moved back to Wisconsin for a job, and once again they were long distance for several years. To save money, my mom wouldn’t even use the heater during snowy winters, but somehow always managed to find more than enough for my tuition and extracurricular activities. They were also supportive of me following my passions, even when I changed my mind approximately every six months about what I wanted to be when I grew up — from mathematician, to artist, to lawyer, to psychologist, to dolphin trainer — until I finally realized I wanted to work in development.
I’ve since graduated, earned an MPA, and started a career in international development. I’ve been touched by many of the beneficiaries of organizations where I’ve worked and volunteered. In Haiti, I met a father living in a tent camp at an abandoned amusement park who desperately wanted to find a job to support his family. In New York, I worked with a single mother battling cancer who was passionate about her small flower business because it allowed her to care for her son. In Burundi, I’ve witnessed community groups whose members have all adopted orphans into their homes and save a small amount each week to be able to afford to send them to school. These people all inspire me. And in each one, I see my parents who love my brother and me so much that they would sacrifice anything for our well-being. They are the reason I am here.
At FVS-AMADE, the organization where I am working this year, one of the biggest projects is the opening of “Amie des Enfants,” a rural secondary boarding school where students receive a quality bilingual education. 30% of the children are orphans, chosen among the brightest yet most vulnerable in our programs. Unlike me, these children aren’t lucky enough to have parents that can send them to school, but this opportunity will open doors for them for the rest of their lives.
I’m fundraising to be able to build a science laboratory at the school, which will cost the organization $20,000. A dear friend of mine, who prefers to remain anonymous, has generously offered to match up to half of the costs if I am able to raise the rest in donations. If you were as fortunate as I was to have parents that supported you in your educational efforts and want to pay if forward, or if you care about educational equity, please consider making a donation to this cause here. Or, if you’d like to learn more about FVS-AMADE, please feel free to check out our our website.