The Countdown Begins!

This is my last week in Cincinnati, and my second to last week in America for an unspecified amount of time. Excited? Yep. Nervous? Only about my lack of language ability. Ready to go? YES! For those tardy to the party I'll rewind a bit. This first post will be a bunch of FAQs...

1. Where are you going?
Currently, I'm a Peace Corps Nominee. For those unfamiliar with PC lingo (which I certainly was before last year), a nominee is someone who has been nominated for a particular region and focus are but has yet to be invited. So I have been nominated for Business Advising in Sub-Saharan Africa leaving June 2010. The next step is to patiently await word from my placement officer who will (hopefully) tell me that I have an invitation. The invitation gives the specific date, place, and job that I will be doing in the Peace Corps. Make sense? But, before that I will be doing a separate program in Morocco through Cross-Cultural Solutions. I will be in Rabat, Morocco from January to April. From there it gets a little hazy. I might stay and travel around North Africa/ Middle East. I might come back to America and wait until I hear from the PC, that part is still fuzzy.

2. What will you be doing in Morocco?
The program focuses on women's development, caregiving, teaching, and community development. I suspect I'll do a bit of all of these things but I will start by teaching intermediate English to refugees and possibly with the Millennium Challenge Corporation on an Enterprise project.

3. Why????
Probably the most FAQ. Just a bit of background on me. I graduated from Columbia in 2006 with a BA in East Asian Studies, but I had already been working on Wall Street since I was 19. Yes, they don't seem to be related but such is my life. I loved my job in trading and all of the people I worked with and it was a really tough decision to leave. But, when I started on Wall Street, I always knew it wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, for a myriad of reasons. Fast forward to 2008: My company goes bankrupt on my birthday, someone crashed into my car, and I spent the night of my birthday watching Gossip Girl and revising my resume. How is that for a wake up call? As much as I loved the people that I worked with, having everything implode made me realize I needed to really sit and think about what I wanted to do, what career I wanted. In ten years, what kind of job did I want to walk into every day? I read, I researched, I prayed and then life started to make a bit more sense. I was always interested in things international, I love learning languages, meeting new people, and learning about different cultures and world history. I also like money. I like making it, budgeting it, spending it, advising people on it. I like economics and finance as a field but trading is very pointed and specific. You trade this specific product for these specific clients. This question is going on too long so suffice to say, Jeffrey Sachs "End of Poverty" had a profound effect on my decision making and I knew I wanted to do development/ diplomacy and I quit my job in June 2009 to make it happen.

4. So now what?
There are several plans in play. I don't want to put them in print because I'm superstitious. Rest assured, there is an ultimate goal.

5. Why can't you stay in America and volunteer? People in America need help too!
Yep, they sure do. And I do volunteer in America, I have volunteered in America for a very long time. But there are countries that have negative GDP or where per capita GDP is $900- a year. Development abroad is actually in America's interest, which is why Secretary of State Clinton has reiterated the three pillars of the State Department to be defense, diplomacy, and development. Yes, I understand that there is a lot of work to be done in America and when I get back I plan to continue to do what I can to make our country better.

6. How can we contact you?
My favorite FAQ! Email me! Write me snail mail style! I can't put my exact location details on a blog for security reasons but send me a message and I'll tell you. Call me! For the time I'm in Morocco, I will have internet access much of the time. I have a Skype number that is a 917 area code so you can call me just like you would call anyone else in America. So, I might be out of sight but hopefully you all won't put me out of mind!

Ok, that's all for now. I just wanted to start this before I left. Happy New Year!