I co-wrote this blog with Fikrte Abebe, a fellow Fellow. We were recently exposed to the results of a study done by the UN in 1998. The results were published in a book titled “Voices of the Poor.”  Through the reading we believe we have…

08 May, 2013

I was raised to be chaste, to wait until marriage, to not discuss sex openly because if I were discussing sex openly then it must be that I have lax moral views towards it. I must not think that it is as sacred or solemn…

28 March, 2013

Growing up in a society with people who look exactly like me, I never truly understood the term racism and how it was talked about in American Schools.  I learned about slave ships, the civil war, and Martin Luther King Jr.  And every February I…

01 March, 2013

One morning my host mother in Nizag and I were eating breakfast when I noticed the unusual abundance of eggs in the kitchen. Eggs, at $0.15 each, are expensive for my family. For this reason we eat eggs only occasionally. So I asked my host…

11 December, 2012

This is my new host family. By far, they are the most welcoming and loving group of people I have met in Ecuador. My 18 year-old host sister is this athletic ball of energy that monopolized my attention the first time I met her. My…

05 December, 2012

Lots of things have passed since the last time I wrote a blog: Fall Training at Stanford in August and in-country orientation in Quito from September and October. But by far the most interesting and challenging events happened to me in the last month and…

21 November, 2012

Do you know the feeling? I mean the feeling of belonging somewhere, within something, or with someone? I do. Getting to this point or feeling, however, was by no means effortless. Unlike most of my classmates in high school, I was always indecisive and uncertain…

10 July, 2012