I loved sports, art, theatre, and adventure... and I still do! I was involved in a number of clubs and activities in high school, constantly busy. I worked as a newspaper girl, in a pie shop boxing boxes, and for an amazing entertainment company called Buckeye Sounds Entertainment, where I stayed employed from the day I was legally allowed to work up until the day I moved abroad. 

 

I was lucky enough to find and blessed enough to go on an amazing gap-year program called Kivunim: New Directions after high school. With Kivunim, I spent a school year living in Jerusalem, Israel learning Hebrew, Arabic, Middle East History, and about coexistance and world consciousness. During the course of the year we went on five international trips to ten countries where we learned about the past or present Jewish community that once thrived or still is thriving there. 

 

After my year abroad, I came back home to attend the Ohio State University (OSU)! O-H! I continued my high school theme of active engagement and participated in Dance Connections, Unplugging Society: Women of Color Think Tank, and MuJew (Muslim- Jewish Dialogue Group) during my three years at OSU. I also worked for two OSU catering companies, was the advisor to my high school youth group, taught Hebrew High School classes, and held internships with StandWithUs and the International Poverty Solutions Collaborative at OSU, which allowed me to TA an undergraduate OSU class on Poverty and Leadership. 

 

I was able to continue my dream of traveling as an assistant to the Kivunim Teacher's Program two summers in a row during college which took me overseas back to Israel and to Europe. I knew I wanted to major in International Studies, though picking a concentration was a little more difficult. I eventually landed on Development Studies and minored in Geography and Globalization. 

 

After graduating in the Spring of 2012, I knew I wanted to go work abroad, but also felt a call to help in my hometown. Columbus has given me a lot and I wanted to give back, so I joined City Year, an AmeriCorps Program, as a Corps Member in the fall of 2012. City Year works to increase the high school graduation rate by improving students ABC's (attendance, behavior, and coursework in Math and English) with Corps Members who are placed in underperforming, high poverty high schools as full-time teaching assistants for the school year. I was placed on the orignial City Year team at South High School, a Columbus Public School with a 50% graduation rate. The year was filled with many events and included the birth of the South High Harmony Project, a choir started in partnership with the Harmony Project, a Columbus community choir that centers around song and service, and the South Side Community Festival, a now annual festival held on the South Side that I executively led. 

 

The school year came to an end and my months of planning to go abroad crumbled before my eyes. I took up an internship with The Women's Fund of Central Ohio and facilitated Ohio State University's summer Youth Work and College Readiness Program and gave myself until the end of the summer to come up with what to do next. 

 

I was speaking with my friend Sam who had been to Ethiopia a few summers back. He'd told me about an idea of project he wanted to start with a local friend there awhile back, but I hadn't really looked into it at the time. We got to talking and planning for Life to Live Africa began. I met up with Sam in person (he lives in Minnesota) and it'd been 5 years since we'd seen each other. We hatched a plan and I was going to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in October 2013 to start a project to help combat poverty in the slum surrounding his friends home. 

 

And so my journey began... first to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and then onto Mombasa, Kenya. And now in Basse, The Gambia where I will be living and working for the next year until June 2015! After that... who knows??!

 

Read more about my trials, tribulations and tremendous globetrotting on the blog page.