behind the scenes

In Bungoma: the rainy season is beginning. Yesterday was the first long afternoon rain, meaning that if it continues, planting will begin next week. Apparently the planting season used to commence during late February or early March; last year the rains did not begin until late March. Now it is already mid-March and the farmers are still anxiously anticipating the rains. As Matt commented when we were discussing this during a run, "I hope we are all picturing Al Gore gesturing toward a chart right now." The expansion of the Sahara in action...

Tonight the One Acre Fund staff is going to split up individually and spend the night with various OAF farmers. We each get assigned a family and will be there for dinner, overnight, and the following morning. I will bring my camera (and bugspray); prepare yourself for upcoming tales and photos!

In Amber: I have finally resolved a long internal battle over whether or not to defer law school for a second year. I emailed the law school dean about it back in November, when I was thinking about extending my stay in China to a full year and following that with a year in Kenya. Clearly those tentative plans were never realized, yet even after I packed up and moved onto Kenya I still had an itch to push back school for another year.

It does seem a bit ironic that after all my work to gain acceptance, I would feel inclined to defer for two years before entering. But, as always, what I have learned has forced me to reconsider options I had counted out and think twice about decisions I had previously made with great certainty.

I guess in a sense it brings me back to my initial deferral decision: I was sitting in a conference at Harvard Law School - during admit weekend, but related to an international human rights forum they were hosting during the same time period - where each of the panelists was asked to give advice. There were four panelists, but I only recall the closing message from 2 of them. One said, "Get a degree in economics" (check!) and the other said, "Defer. I don't care who you are or where you are in your career. If you are thinking about law school, defer. If you are midway through law school, take a year off. If you are deeply involved in your career, pull back for awhile and do something else."

So that was when the economy was a bit better, and jobs were still available to those who might take a leave of absence. But still - I had never even realized that deferral was an option, and while I left the weekend excited about law school and what opportunities a law degree would open to me, I also began seriously considering the advice I was hearing everywhere during my visits to both Harvard and Yale: defer.

Evidently, given my year of travels, I took the advice to heart and - with only a vague sense of what I would do during my deferral year (travel? teach English?) - I pushed back my entrance to the fall of 2009 and started researching and filling out applications. I stumbled upon Tsinghua Experimental School in Shenzhen online, applied, had a phone interview, and signed on. Then, 20+ emails to various NGOs in Kenya/Ethiopia later, I connected with the founder of One Acre Fund. He happend to be in Minneapolis on a fundraising mission the day before I left for China, so I interviewed with him then, and from Shenzhen organized my second half of the year.

So now, only 10 months after my initial decision to defer, I feel like quite a different, more patient, happier person than the one who listened to advice and decided to push back the "real world" in favor of seeing a bit more first. Of course, this is a huge luxury I have had - a year in which the sole purpose was to travel, to learn, to experience, to grow (yes, I realized I used "purpose" in the singular sense; I do consider all of these to be under the same umbrella of intentions!) and during which I did not really need to earn money or be concerned with debt, payments, or other obligations at home. But it has become difficult to imagine what my life would be like - what I would be like - if I had headed to Yale last fall instead of China.

However, even with the fulfillment left by this year of exploration, I decided at last that another year was not merited at this point. First, because once I enter Yale I will have a legal background and more skills to apply to future positions. Second, because any position I take next year will be limited to a one-year time frame. Third, because more funding will be available for me to do something similar after I enter Yale and have access to its deep pockets. Fourth, because it is simply what I decided at the last moment, and I am notoriously better at making peace with outcomes than making decisions themselves.

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It is ironic to me that tonight I will be in such a different place - the home of Kenyan farmers, where the thoughts that have been playing on repeat in my brain are as foreign to them as their everyday concerns must be to me. It is also eye-opening and humbling to be constantly aware of this juxtaposition of cultures. This has perhaps been the most enriching aspect of my travels.