The start of my summit list

I took some time in Ghana to reflect on my life thus far as I began to chart next steps. One night I was thinking about all the beautiful moments I've had around the world, and how thankful I am for a collection of memories that surpass any photograph I could have taken. I started to write them down and I look forward to adding to this list as memories resurface and new experiences are had. I am calling this my "summit" list in tribute to the beautiful vista each of these moments offered.

• Cuban cigars on the coast of the Mediterranean with my brothers.
• Watching the 2010 world cup in Kenya.
• Starting alone, ending amongst friends hiking through Cappadocia.
• Singing in the Sistine Chapel (I have never been so certain of God’s presence).
• Watching my mom talk to sheep in the Scottish highlands with my Dad and nephew.
• Walking through a soft layer of snow in Red Square late at night after the ballet.
• Fireflies on the evacuation path during a tsunami warning in Vladivastok.
• Bioluminescence that looked like diamonds on a nighttime dhow ride in Lamu.
• Trekking the Routeburn with my siblings.
• Arriving at my destination after my first solo roadtrip in South Africa just as the sunset behind the mountains.
• My first salsa lesson in Costa Rica.
• Hiking in to my family cabin with my best friends in the middle of the night.
• Getting stuck behind an elephant in Amboseli.
• Arriving at sunset in Ithala.
• That first cold coke in Tanzania.
• Squid hunting in Corona del Mar.
• Pear icecream on a solo walk in Paris.
• Singing with my cousins in a Gondola at Christmas.
• My first leisurely walk through an African city at night in Accra.
• Laguna de Apoyo.
• Dancing at Mar y Sombre.
• Carmel beach at sunset with family.
• Running in Rongai.
• Bela's birth.
• Cracked crab at my grandparents table.
• Trying to leap over a rafter in Zurich.
• That moment when I held a baby, sat next to a teenager and comforted a dying child.
• Root beer floats in a half-built house in the Oakland hills.
• Stargazing in the middle of a high school football field.
• Yoga on the beach on Christmas day.
• Dancing with wild abandon in Accra.
• Watching the sun set from my surf board at Old Man’s.
• Napping with my nephew in Moscow.
• Walks with my nephew in Berkeley.
• A surprise birthday party in the middle of a ski hill.
• New years, champagne, a hot tub and friends.
• Ice skating through Gorky Park.
• Singing the national anthem as we landed after every choir tour.
• My dad's solo singing tribute to the MacDonalds at Glencoe.

Here and there

I want to share some posts from a few sites I've had the pleasure of writing for recently. The first is a post prepared for Vittana about the research my colleague and I conducted leading up to the launch of Opportunity International's first micro-loan for higher education. I am still "high" on the experience of getting to dive into the education arena. As my work continues to evolve, I come back to education over and over. Sometimes, it's a step removed (as in my current work, which focuses on empowering women...who in turn ensure their children go to school), but it's always at the core. Development policy and practice is crazy complex to say the least - but if you measure your returns based on quality of life, opportunity and equality - there is no better priority than education at every level.

Read about a day in my life with Opportunity International Ghana and Vittana here.

The second set of posts are for Go Girl Magazine - a site I learned about after connecting with an amazing group of women following a bid for a spot as a blogger on a trip to Kenya with Vestergaard Frandsend last summer. I wasn't chosen for the trip, but the organizers put all the applicants in touch via a google group, which led me to Go Girl (coincidently, the founder/editor had recently started working at the Rotary Foundation - go figure!). Besides a monthly writing gig, the group also led to a new friend in Kenya named Georgia, who I got to meet in person back in October. Georgia works in PR and when we met for lunch in downtown Nairobi, I had my dear friend Maggie with me. Quick to recognize a promising young woman, Georgia has taken Maggie under her wing and even hired her to help with a few of her work events. Maggie finished high school last year, but does not have the funds to attend university, thus Georgia's mentorship and friendship has been that much more appreciated. All this to say that writing for Go Girl is just a piece of an ever-unfolding story and a reminder of how powerful online communities and connections can be.

You can see my posts for Go Girl here (start from the bottom). I write about my quest to find and embrace "home" wherever I am.

I will be resuming my 30 days of Asante posts soon - now that I am back in the land that reminds me to say THANK YOU every day, no matter what.

With each OPPORTUNITY, a new DOOR opens

When I tell people about the last five years of my life, I always say that once I was brave enough to step away from my current reality and say out loud, "I want to go back to Africa," door after door flew open. All these years later, metaphor becomes reality. I recently began a 4-month contract with Door International, a mission-based organization that serves the deaf community around the world.

One of our artisans, Anna.

I have long been drawn to any service provided to people with physical disabilities in the developing world. The longer I live in this context, the more aware I am of people unfairly ascribed to lives of isolation, humiliation, dependency and general dehumanization as a result of some physical ailment outside of their control (often the result of poverty and the lack of immunizations or poor healthcare in general). A few weeks before I finished my fellowship with Vittana working at Opportunity International in Ghana, I received a job posting from a friend in Nairobi for a Business Manager position. Door had been looking at social business opportunities to provide jobs for the deaf and raise funds for their programs. Having worked with a jewelry consultant that specializes in helping non-profits start businesses, the program had been launched, but needed someone on the ground to develop a local supply chain, navigate shipping and customs issues, take over wholesale and retail responsibilities and oversee the artisans directly. I threw my hat in the ring, another in a long line of steps taken in faith that if it was meant to be, it would.

Winnie, one of our artisans wearing the "Her time to shine" Onyx Necklace.

A few weeks later - here I am! I'll be working with Sasa Designs and helping market our organic farm through the beginning of May, at which point we will review our progress and whether the business can support me working full time or if I am able to raise my own support (I tell you, I didn't see life as a prospective missionary coming - funny where God puts you!). For now, I'm diving in, getting up to speed and learning sign language as fast as I can. And yes, I'm still working on my thesis, which is of course directly tied to this work in the first place. A door opens and things come full circle once again...stay tuned!

One of our artisans, Rose.

All photos by my colleague Whitney Simons.

Sit back and take it all in

Just a little reminder of how awesome this universe is.

World Aids Day: In Rememberance

I wrote this on April 18, 2007 while living in Kwa Zulu Natal, South Africa:

“There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens the pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and child bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.”

-From Alan Paton's 'Cry the Beloved Country'

What is the meaning of a world where you welcome death for a child because it means the end of suffering - the end of knowing your mother has left you, of feeling too weak to play the games of the children around you, of finding the strength only to cry?

This is the face of AIDS in Africa. Of a child who came three weeks ago and whom I mistook for shy. A child who came in clean and pressed clothes and bright white tennis shoes that swallowed her stick-like legs.

“On admission to the center the child looked malnourished with very thin legs and arms and sunken eyes. According to the grandmother she does not like food, has diarrhea with blood, sweats at night and is restless.”

Her cries were the first I heard here – I went to investigate once when they seemed as though they’d never stop. And even with an arm around her bony back and her head on my knee, they continued. They were cries for which there could be no comfort.

On Saturday we invited her to hit the piñata, and gently took the bat when she broke into tears after one swing. The children shared their candy with her as she held back, as she always did, when they rushed forward to join the excitement.

Two days ago, she went to the hospital for the fifth time this year. She had no stuffed animal for comfort, it was insisted that anything of the sort provided would quickly be stolen in the night. Sister visited her and said she was worried. This morning the prognosis was better – she was smiling and talking to the nurse on duty. When Sister returned to see her after supper she was told she died in the afternoon. We learned her CD4 count this morning, it was 3.

I did not know her before I came here, nor any like her. She existed only in theory, in a far off land where the virus that killed her raged out of control. Then I came to Nkandla and I learned her name. I held her, I watched her, I worried after her and I got to know as much as I could of the shell that remained after three years of constant pain and illness.

Now I introduce her to you for this is all I can do – to offer a face and a name to that which we think we cannot know. This was Lindokuhle. From here on out, may this plague be considered a stranger no more.

In honor of World Aids Day, please consider contributing to The Africa Project, still hard at work with the Nardini Sisters in Nkandla.

Day 12: Tribe

The West African Sankofa

"Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi."

"It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten"

I have never been the most patriotic of Americans. This has very little to do with what it means to be American, and more to do with how I see the world. I don't imagine I'd be any more gung-ho to be Canadian, British or Kenyan for that matter. To me, nationality is a crap shoot. Given the absence of my ink on the constitution, I don't feel a personal claim to what makes this country great/not great beyond my daily actions to support the good things therein. I cherish parts of our foundation and the subsequent (and continued) evolution of human rights that I hold dear - most notable among these, equality. But for me, the significance of country or citizenship is moot - we are born into a sliding scale of humanity, with some countries inevitably further along than others. I believe as individuals we are defined by our actions, not by our birth.

As a white, middle-class American growing up, I was often envious of friends whose culture or ethnicity offered prescribed values and practices that could be publicly acknowledged as such. Sometimes, such distinctions were painful, as when a friend told me at our 8th grade graduation she'd have to prioritize her Korean friends in high school out of respect for her family. Mostly, it was something that I felt a vague separation from - I just didn't have anything like ethnicity to identify with. What I did have was a close extended family with deep traditions tied to singing very specific family songs in treasured family spaces. As I grew, I came to identify these things as the unique culture I could claim as my own. Still, this was a small circle in comparison to the ethnic labels other communities could claim.

Over the years, such perspectives and experiences (coupled with a move from my child hood home and immersion into a variety of unfamiliar communities in high school and college), cultivated a deep sense of responsibility to be firmly independent. Not only did I want to avoid being a burden to anyone, I didn't want to need anyone: success meant being able to take care of myself. I vowed to never test whether I had the sort of safety net ethnicity and tribe can often provide in case, quite simply, it wasn't there (mind you this wasn't based on any lack of family support - my family is beyond generous).

When I talk about how my time in Africa has become a simple experience in humanity far more than a lesson in what's wrong with the countries that combine to make up this awe-inspiring continent, I mean it. Removing myself from my own communal framework and stepping away from this naive attempt to be "independent," helped me to see the value in identifying with a group. By stripping away years of politically correct conditioning and my personal feelings of exclusion, I started to understand (if not always totally agree with), how important it can be for someone to say with total confidence, "I am a [INSERT TRIBE/NATIONALITY/SELF-IDENTIFIER HERE]." While tribalism has many negative and potentially dangerous sides in any culture or context, I can now see how the gift of belonging can be critical to identity. Before, I felt any firm "I am" statement was laden with the potential to exclude or judge anyone else who might not be from the same "I am."

This Thanksgiving will be the fourth I have spent abroad, away from my tribe. In honor of this day, I'm resuming my "30 Days of Asante" posts and taking a moment to be thankful for learning that independence is often over-rated. I have been adopted by many cultures at this point, welcomed in and made to feel like I belong. I have also learned just how critical my sense of identity as an American...a Californian...a MacDonald or a Daniels, etc., is. While I'll never focus on the idea that one "I am" is any better than another "I am," I remain more and more thankful for my growing ability to identify in some way as a member of a larger group. Over the past year I have been overwhelmingly supported by my tribe of family and friends, all of whom have helped me let go of any presumption that I could exist, survive or thrive without the love, support and companionship of those who share my roots and history. Somehow, understanding this makes venturing out into the world in all its diversity, pain and splendor that much sweeter.

For this, I am thankful.

Here today...gone to Ghana!

When I returned to the U.S. last year, I did so with a desire to promote access to education in the developing world. All my time abroad, all my studies and work experience to that point suggested that the fight against poverty is best served by getting kids into school - and more specifically, college.

In the developing world, most curriculum and pedagogy are based on wrote memorization. Students rise hours before dawn, drawing close to kerosene lamps to churn through unfathomable amounts of information. All this is done to reach an academic climax at the end of high school that determines whether they will be one of the fortunate few to gain access to government universities. Of the 300 thousand or so Kenyan students who sat exams last year, only the top 3% gained admission to the University of Nairobi system with a government bursary. An additional 3% or so will attend by paying their own fees, and another 3% or so will attend private universities. The rest? Their formal education and all the opportunities it might offer, end there. This situation and the staggering numbers of hardworking students it leaves behind is replicated across the developing world.

What this means is that many people in the developing world never get to engage or participate in an education that promotes critical thinking, problem solving or comprehensive analysis. American teachers struggle to do this in overfilled classrooms with limited resources - imagine what a rarely paid rural teacher faces with 60 students, no books and a small blackboard (often without any chalk?). Getting kids to college means they might learn how to think critically, to challenge the problems around them - to actively engage in changing their circumstances, both personally and in their community beyond.

I shared these thoughts last year from the Bay Area to Seattle with anyone and everyone I could, along with the ideas I was starting to mull over for addressing this challenge. Little did I know that a model similar to one I was dreaming up already existed – and in Seattle, no less! Which brings me to my current "geotag" in Accra, Ghana, and a 3-month fellowship with a non-profit called Vittana.


Vittana is based on the Kiva-popularized model of micro credit, often practiced with small business owners and entrepreneurs in the developing world. By providing access to previously unavailable capital, people from Bangladesh to Peru are moving beyond day-to-day, subsistence living and gradually breaking the shackles of poverty. There have been challenges, to be sure, but as my recent visit to a group of borrowers showed me, the “poor” can be reliable “investments” who are exceedingly capable of paying it forward in the form of education for their children and greater community involvement and economic engagement as a whle.

Vittana’s founder, Kushal Chakrabarti, realized this model could be used with students as well – providing access to funds to pay for school fees – especially when a lack of fees was threatening to force a student to drop out of college just a semester or two shy of a degree. Vittana was launched and in the past few months has gone from working in 8 countries to partnering with 19 local micro finance institutions (MFIs) in 12 countries.

Click here for an easy break down of how Vittana works. My role as a fellow in Ghana involves doing the market research that determines the feasibility and scope of a potential loan product, and then helping build and launch this new product with our partner. My fellow colleague and I are working with one of Ghana's largest MFIs to create a loan program that addresses student's needs in the Ghanaian context - a challenge given mandatory national service after college and high unemployment rates. It is a lot of work in a totally new country, but each time I meet a student and see the "hustle" they go through to get through university, I'm inspired.

I believe deeply in the interconnectedness of international communities, and ensuring citizens throughout one of the most booming continents (6 out of 10 of the fastest growing economies in the last decade are in sub-Saharan Africa) are equipped with the tools they need to support this growth. I am so excited by the idea of helping students stay in the programs they've worked so hard to access that I'm doing this work on an almost exclusively volunteer basis (fellows just get a small stipend to help with travel costs).

If you are interested in supporting Vittana's mission, please consider visiting the website and picking a student - it's that simple. Just think - with a few clicks you can cross "help someone go to college" off your bucket list and even get the money back when they're done. I'll let you know when our first Ghanaian students are on the site - until then, I hope you can find a student that shares an interest or a goal that might resonate with your own story.

It’s an honor and privilege to do this work – to sink my teeth into the arena that my studies and experiences show me is the most critical support we can provide to the developing world by working to increase access to education for future leaders. These are the people who will take responsibility for their communities. Please join me in supporting them.

Vittana borrower Hend Hamdan from Jordan
Studying to be an environmental engineer