Today, I bought a one-way ticket to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
After months of ups and downs, possibilities, and broken promises it seems almost unreal that a path has finally been chosen. Last year, as a City Year Corps Member, I began looking in December for international opportunities. I graduated from the Ohio State University with a BA in International Development and dreamed of going to Sub Sahara Africa to do nonprofit work. I chose to stay in Columbus for a year after graduating as a way to give back to my city. City Year was my way of saying thank you to the city that has been my home for the past 23 years.
So, rewind to December 2013... I made a connection with a nonprofit in India which seemed to hold promise until things feel apart in May. Summer came, my year at City Year ended, and suddenly I became the college-graduate-with-no-job-soon-to-move-back-home. How did I wind up here?
My good friend Sam and I were talking on the phone a few weeks after everything went down and he told me I should go to Addis Ababa to help him with his project! It was an ‘oh yeah that’d be awesome’ reaction combined with a ‘this will never actually happen’ reality. Yet, slowly after talking more and more, and Sam’s consistent persistence that I would "love it," "never want to come home" (sorry mom & dad), and how this was the "right move" started to actually become a possibility.
Sam and I met the summer going into my senior year of high school on a youth group summer program that spent a week in Poland followed by five weeks in Israel. I don’t think there is a single picture of just Sam and I from that summer. Why? Not because we hated each other, we simply weren’t friends. Our paths crossed a little as our circle of friends overlapped but for the most part, Sam and I didn’t spend a lot of time together. It was six months later, during the youth group’s international convention, when a majority of the trip-goers reunited that Sam and I got to talking. At the end of the five day convention, we swapped numbers and said to stay in touch. From there it’s history!
Sam and I have consistently spoken for at least once month (minus the months one of us was out of the country) for the past five and half years. The summer after I graduated high school I went out to Minnesota, where Sam lives, to mainly visit one of my best girlfriends from the trip, but got to see Sam for a day as well. I didn’t see Sam again until this past summer, five years later. We decided (aka my mom required) that if we were serious about making this happen, that Sam and I needed to physically get together to hash everything out. And that’s how the meeting at Nagawicka came to be!
Lake Nagawicka, Wisconsin. Home of my mother’s first cousins who graciously welcome myself (a vegetarian) and Sam (gluten-free and lactose-intolerant), who was an hour away at the University of Wisconsin where he had just graduated, into their home. We spend three solid days researching, planning, and skyping with our partner in Ethiopia, Eyasu, to map out how everything would work. We didn’t get as far as I’d hoped, but it was a start.
The next six weeks were filled with phone calls and getting ideas down on paper. Attempts to reach the embassy were tried and failed. Reaching out to other organizations for advice and support were sought and needed. My dreams of going to Sub Sahara Africa slowly seeped into reality and came to fruition with the purchase of a one-way ticket. T-minus 32 days!
