By Meike Schleiff, 23, reporting from Renick, West Virginia, on an amazing U.S.-Haiti organization—that she started
For those of you who've ever dreamed about being able to spend your time working on some wild fantasy project, but never truly thought that it could become a reality, here is a pseudo-success story!
No fanfare or princess-worthy wedding or instant glory or any of that. But something that seems to be truly working out.
When I graduated from college in 2008, I decided to travel to Haiti as a volunteer. It's like when your aunt says you just need to apply yourself and you can do anything you want to. I didn't really believe it would change anything until I did it.
That first trip to Haiti to teach English has since grown into a nonprofit organization that I founded and now direct, The GROW Project.
It includes a bunch of young (and older) folks in Haiti and in West Virginia, who are working together on a local level to understand and solve problems that each community is facing—mostly around health care and education.
Most of all though, we've made friends between a lot of people who at first weren't sure they had anything in common. In our world—where space, resources, and time have to be shared between more and more people—we need to make the effort to understand each other better.
If this is the kind of thing that appeals to you, you have a personal invitation from me to visit our site and drop me a line to let me know how you'd like to be involved. That might even mean taking your own destiny-changing trip to Haiti, as we have two coming up—in July to help build classrooms and in December with an international youth exchange and language program.
But whatever you believe is important, there are ways to make it as close to the center of your life as you'd like it to be. And if you take action, trust that you'll find others who feel the same about an issue and are more than willing to give you a hand.
As Paul Hawken wrote, "You are brilliant and the earth is hiring." Apply now.