This is my first stab at a blog in quite a while. My time in Uganda made doing a blog unrealistic; I had internet access maybe two or three times a month until I had about 3 months left. It just didn’t leave me the time to do a decent job. This will basically be my musings on law school, life, and politics. For those of you reading (it may be presumptuous, but I’m going to assume some people bother to read) I’ll give you a brief rundown of how exactly I ended up where I am: in law school at the University of Minnesota.
At one point in time I was a biology major at Carleton. I fully expected to go and get a PhD. Toward the end of my time at Carleton, however, I realized that I didn’t actually enjoy spending time in the lab. It was tedious and repetitive. I loved learning the stuff, but it just didn’t excite me all that much to think of myself doing lab research for the forseeable future. So instead of applying to grad school I sent in an application to the Peace Corps and jumped on the Appalachian Trail with Brendan, a friend of mine from high school. The trail was a great experience. It got me into great shape and I felt good about being me. Walking every day gives you a lot of time to think. By September of 2005 I realized that I was using up what little money I had way too fast every time I made it to a town. I also realized that I wanted to get out of the woods and get my life started. So I got off the trail. It still eats at me a bit that I got off the trail before I absolutely had to. I hate not finishing things. I’ll go back and finish it eventually.
The Mahoosuc Notch, Maine
Brendan, My Hiking Partner
My life didn’t “get started” quite as fast as I’d hoped. I heard from the Peace Corps soon after I returned to Ann Arbor. I was going to teach science in Burkina Faso. As you can imagine, I was excited to live in a place where people were cool enough to name their capital “Ouagadougou.” There was a catch, however. Once I received my assignment I heard absolutely NOTHING from the Peace Corps about what was going on. Sometime in November I called the Washington office to see if they still remembered who I was. It was then that I found out, “Ooops, your program was delayed until June, but we forgot to tell you. So sorry!” Me being the go getter that I am, I asked them if they could move me to a different program. Begrudgingly, agreed to put me in the Uganda Teacher Trainer program. I wasn’t so sure about the whole teacher training thing since my teaching experience included one semester of being a lab TA at Carleton and four months of substitute teaching. “What the hell,” I figured, “I’ll give it a try.”
In March of 2006 I boarded a plane for Boston. After three days of preparation in Boston 37 of us set off on a very long trip to Uganda.
