this summer (part 1)

So as I promised, I will now write about my AMAZING summer plans that await me. There's alot of back story to these plans, so to save everyone from reading a ridiculously long blog post I'm going to do this story in parts! So here is PART 1. Get psyched!

Lets rewind back to October when I began thinking about what my coming up summer would entail. I wanted to somehow incorporate interning, volunteering/doing service work, while living abroad in another country. So I started looking up a ton of organizations in Bangkok, Thailand (because I really wanted to work for an organization that helped fight human trafficking, and its largely prevalent in that area). I found a ton and wrote them all down with the intention of eventually contacting them.  Fast forward to December, I'm at Urbana (a crazy awesome conference) and I hear about an amazing mission trip opportunity where I could work in India for an organization called Freeset Global, which is a fair trade organization that provides employment to women who had been previously enslaved in Kolkata’s sex industry, allowing in a life of freedom rather than the life of enslavement they have always lived. If I was accepted I would potentially have the opportunity to do communications type work (graphic design, feature writing, photography) as well as interact and engage with these women on a daily basis. It wasn't Thailand like I was "planning" on, but the merge between doing an internship as well as service work sounded wicked awesome. I jumped at the opportunity to apply.

As I waited to hear back from the India opportunity, I decided to apply for the Rachel Robinson International Fellowship. I have a scholarship from the amazing Jackie Robinson Foundation, and one of the many great programs the foundation has is this fellowship in which a few students are selected to pursue their aspirations in interning, studying, or doing service work abroad. The fellowship can be used one of two ways: an internship with CARE (the fellowship partners with this organization) or for a third party organization/internship. I applied for the fellowship for the latter reason. So with two applications in, I began the waiting process...