2013-01-09
I am the whimsical child of uninhibited Chaos and graceful Mutability. Great Chaos, whose company I am the most comfortable in. I am understood by you. To be filled with madness as we are; this exhilaration that keeps the mind awake. For others you are terror, but when I see your constant dance of freedom, I only feel...
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A few weeks ago, as I was chopping onions with my adult host sister, she said something out of the blue that caught me by surprise. “At the end of the month, we’re going to finish the house.” “Wait, it’s not finished?” I asked, confused. Sure, the majority of the rooms are unpainted, the exterior...
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2013-01-09
On September 29th—after a month of language and cultural training in Dakar—I finally arrived in my rural placement site in Senegal’s southern coast called Palmarin, the home of beautiful mangroves. In my family, I have three sisters—Oumi, Saly, and Awa—and two brothers—Jean and Alou. I’m privileged to have multiple siblings from both genders as my interaction with them has allowed me...
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2013-01-09
My breath quickened as I walked to the front of the class. Armed with foam drawings of bacteria and white bloods cells, I intended to demonstrate how HIV attacks the immune system to a group of forty giggling thirteen-year-olds. I had practiced my “charla,” full of new Spanish vocabulary, to my family and to my friends, but never to...
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2013-01-09
This is a speech I gave at one of our recent seminars. Even since I gave this speech I have seen improvement in both my classes and patience… I’d say it’s safe to say there is correlation between the two. About four months ago we were all sitting on the grassy field of Stanford. We all...
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2013-01-09
The smell of burning waste seeps in through the open screens of my bedroom window. I came here to escape it. I thought that it would be far enough. It was us who raked the plastic next to the highway and added a bit of grass, so that it could burn quickly. It was me who bought...
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2013-01-09
After living in New York City for a year, commotion has grown to be the norm for me. I thrive in the chaos, the shoulder-to-shoulder metropolitan density. My hometown of San Jose is a modestly urban city as well, which has led me to naturally gravitate towards a lifestyle full of traffic and Starbucks coffee shops...
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