Adventure Time with KC

This post has taken me a few days to finally sit down and finish writing. I came back from three days worth of visiting various refugee communities in Jordan, and I was exhausted. When we finally had a debrief on the whole experience, I wanted to blog even more. But then even more things happened, and I just sat around being tired and overwhelmed. Today, one of my professors emailed us the Thought Catalog article by Kelsey Parsons in response to increasing criticism against volunteering abroad. I read the article, and I was struck by Kelsey's patience with all the comments and honestly responding to a lot of them to defend and refine her position. Sure, her article was not written to be an excellent piece of literature to be remembered forever more, but what her argument sparked was tons of people spending ridiculous amounts of time to criticize her and others like her while the rest of the world is suffering. Sure, I scoff at short-term projects that may waste money, time, and d...

Hi all. For those of you who are interested in learning more about the study abroad program I will be starting in a few days, here is the URL. www.sit.edu/studyabroad/ssa_hrc.cfm?cp=2014SSP So I start in NYC, my hometown, for about ten days, before we fly out to the first country: Nepal! It seems fitting to start here since the UN headquarters is here and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the foundation to human rights. Plus that way we start off in a nice first world city before we move out to a foreign country with a new culture and lifestyle that we're not used to. I am excited and pleased. I have never lived in Brooklyn before, so those first ten days in NYC will be interesting. I am still packing but I am 80% done. I applied for a Brazilian tourist visa today (for my own post-program travel to bask in the World Cup excitement) and fingers crossed - I should get my visa and passport back on January 30th, two days before I fly out on February 1st! I g...