So I started my Summer of Service last week here in DC. I'm participating in the Congressional Fellows Program under National Student Leadership. It sounds a lot fancier than it is, but so far it has been an incredible experience.
Here's a typical week:
- Monday: Volunteer at a local private school in one of the most impoverished areas in DC. House meeting at night.
- Tuesday: Intern in the office of a Senator's wife (for privacy reasons I'm not allowed to use her name on this blog!). She is highly involved with international humanitarian issues, particularly with respect to women empowerment and healthcare. I was updating her "People to Meet With" list (friends with whom she will visit while "in town" - read: in state or in country) last week, and she has relationships with people all over the world. Seriously. From Florida to DC to California to England to Nigeria. It's crazy. Being around her will in and of itself be an incredible opportunity to peek into the kind of life I'm considering for my future career. So we'll see how that goes. Anyway. Tuesday afternoons we meet at the house of one of the people more or less in charge of the program and discuss big life topics, like purpose and leadership.
- Wednesday: Intern again. Wednesday nights a speaker comes to our house, and usually expands on the topics discussed Tuesday nights.
- Thursday: Intern again.
- Friday: Group breakfast, an optional Bible study (the program is faith-based [which I actually didn't know when signing up for it], but not in an indoctrination way whatsoever - more like exploring what you believe and why, and how that affects the way you live your life and make life decisions and lead and serve, etc. etc.), and chill time.
I'm really excited to have the opportunity to work on the issues that she works with. One of her main things right now is trying to find a way to connect women artisans in poorer countries with markets in the US to help them earn a living and remove themselves from poverty. I've done a bit of independent research on that, and I'm excited to show her what I've found.
The people living in the house (we're living in a sorority house on the University of Maryland's campus) are great people. Not everyone is into politics, but everyone is looking for a way to serve other people and are exploring this opportunity to build relationships with people in DC and with the numerous contacts associated with this program. We'll see what comes of that. My roommate is from Germany - she's wonderful - and the other girl interning with me is passionate about a lot of the same issues as I am, though she definitely has more of a focus than I do. I have a lot to learn from her.
I'm really expecting a lot from this summer: to figure out what it is I want to do after graduation (grad school, which grad school, what I want to study, where to go and what to do if I want to instead enter the workforce or maybe the PeaceCorps), to decide whether or not I want to pursue politics, to understand myself better, to build relationships with the people around me, and most importantly: to serve both this local community and the international community in a myriad of ways. We'll see how much of this actually gets accomplished :)
Until next week!
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