Freedom, Compassion, & HOPE...but the Greatest of these of HOPE!!!

In my Leadership course at the Clinton School, Dr. Bill Grace guided our class in an activity to help us discover our core values in life—the three inner-most values that should guide every decision in our lives. Through this exercise, I learned that my core values are freedom, compassion, and hope. Even though the stakes, circumstances, and risks will always change, I must always uphold these three core values in all that I do. This realization helped make sense of my deepest passions, while also giving me a clear sense of purpose and direction. In the fall of 2006, I dedicated my life to freedom, compassion, and hope and made the commitment to let these values guide all of my decisions in the future. My commitment to these values has overwhelmed me with a sense of peace. Knowing that remaining true to these values will always lead me in the right direction will help make difficult decisions seem easy.

Thanks to Dr. Grace, I knew, from the beginning, that the driving force of my IPSP was hope. I was very excited because I had always wanted to work in Africa, yet I was so scared that I would not be able to help and change things as much as I would like. I was so happy that my life-long dream was coming true, yet so sad that I was inevitably going to have to look into the eyes of all the Malawian children and leave them all in August, knowing that I could not make all of their dreams come true as well. Leaving all of my family and friends and everything else that is comfortable, uncomplicated, and alluring about living in the United States of America was simple. Living in rural Malawi (one of the ten poorest countries in the world), knowing that I could not make every dream of every Malawian I met come true was exceptionally difficult. However, my commitment to hope was my saving grace, and hopefully it will be the Malawian’s saving grace someday as well.

I was intensely committed to helping lift the Malawian people as much as I possibly could. I had come to peace with the fact that even if I failed miserably in my mission, all of the Malawian people (especially the children) would see that someone they do not know, from a small town and a small state very far away, cares about them in an extraordinary way. This realization that people outside of their family, from across the world, care that much about their well-being would hopefully create hope in the hearts of the beautiful Malawian people. Hope is not created through impact measurements, or bricks laid, or negative HIV test results. Hope is created by the most rare human connection of all—people reaching out to people, driven by compassion and sincerity, simply to show that they care. And that is exactly what my IPSP was all about. Once I stumbled upon this gem of truth, I was confident that I would succeed and make a real difference in the lives of the Malawian people. Freedom, compassion, and hope have led me to serve everyday of my life, but this summer hope was my driving force. Now that my IPSP is complete, I reaffirm my previous realization—because of my dedication to creating hope, I did succeed and make a real difference in Malawi.