India -> Alaska -> Kenya.  This is the rest of my 2012, and so to simplify communications a bit over these next 8 months, I am going to try to update this page as much as I can to stay in touch with all of you!  I haven't embarked on any of these exciting excursions yet, but I thought I'd get the first post up here now as an overview of what I'll be up to for the next 8 months (and also because I'm procrastinating writing a paper at the moment...).
So, first on the itinerary is India.
The College of Wooster has a program called Global Social Entrepreneurship, which is a semester long course that I am enrolled in this spring, followed by a 6-week internship experience based in Bangalore, India.  Social Entrepreneurship is the idea that social challenges like poverty can be solved with creative and innovative business-like solutions.  I know this is a vague definition, but SE can be taken down so many diverse paths that it is a little hard to generalize.  So what is the Global Social Entrepreneurship (GSE) program, exactly?  As I said, it has all begun with a course I am enrolled in this spring with 11 other students, our professor, and two program assistants.  We have spent this semester studying poverty, education, livelihoods, and other topics through different academic lenses in order to prepare for the summer experience in Bangalore, where we will work with 3 different non-profit organizations for 6-weeks as interns.  The three organizations we are working with are Hippocampus, PremaVidya, and Sattva.  Hippocampus and PremaVidya both work in the education sectors while Sattva is a media consulting firm that works solely with other non-profit organizations.  The 12 student participants have been divided into 6 teams of 2 students each, and there will be 2 teams at each organization.  I don't know yet who my teammate is, but I do know I will be working with Hippocampus.  What will we do while working with these organizations?  Well, each non-profit will have identified some challenge or area of probable expansion within their organization, and each student team will write a business plan to address that challenge.  While this is a major goal of our time in Bangalore, in the end, we are all just there to learn.  We will learn about our specific non-profits, the challenges they face, South Indian culture, and I am sure dozens more things that I can't even articulate yet because I can't anticipate them.  When I learn more about my specific project and who my partner will be while we are in Bangalore, I will keep you all posted!
After I leave Bangalore, I have one week to be a tourist in India and see a few sights, before I go spend a week visiting an organization based in West Bengal, India called Vivekananda Sevakendra-O-Sishu Uddyan (VSSU) http://www.vssu.in/home.html.  VSSU is a microfinance and community development non-profit that works in dozens of communities throughout West Bengal.  I will be spending the week learning about how their organization functions and visiting some of the villages in which they operate.  This week will be my last in India, and I will head back to the states from Calcutta after more than 2 months abroad.
I am flying back into LA, but I will spend just a few short days recovering from jet lag before I head up to Alaska for a month!  I am lucky enough to get to return back to my old summer job at the Imagination Station Daycare for just 4 weeks to earn a little money, see some friends from home, and have a little downtime before my next big adventure....
I leave Anchorage and head back to LA for another three days or so, and then I will be getting on a plane to head off for my semester abroad in Nairobi, Kenya.  I am so excited for this experience, I don't know where to start.  Well, first I guess I'll say what the focus of the program is- Health and Community Development.  As a part of the semester abroad, I will be taking four classes: a health and community development seminar, a research methods class, Swahili language, and at the end of the semester, I will spend a month doing an independent research project on a topic of my choosing (I'll get back to you on what that topic is...).  For most of the program, I will be living with a family in Nairobi, but we also take trips out of Nairobi to travel to either Uganda or Tanzania, and to stay in a rural village on the Kenyan coast for about 10 days.  I don't know details of my host family or anything yet, but again, as I learn more over the summer and once I get there, I will keep you updated!

So.  This craziness starts in about 3 weeks when I leave for India, and I think it will all be pretty overwhelming until I make it back to the states in mid-December after my semester in Kenya.  I have a few seemingly simple (but in reality very lofty and complex) goals for these next 8 months: I want to learn more about non-profits, economic development, and how I can become involved in these areas in the future.  I don't know exactly what my time after college will hold, but I have a feeling it will in some way relate to development and the non-profit sector, so I am hoping the rest of this year will help teach me if this is something I want to pursue, and if so, how I might integrate into these fields in the future.  This is obviously the "self-discovery" part of all this.  I don't know what I'm going to discover, but I know that no matter what it is, it will impact my plans for the future.
For now, I have to make it through finals, I get to spend a week or so with my family (yay!), and then it will all begin.  So bear with me, I will try and update this blog as much as I can, and for those of you that I am not going to see for a while because of all of these plans- know that I miss you already!!!