Wednesday, September 29, 2010

While at the University I completed a leadership minor which consisted of four incremental classes that focused on ideas such as individual leadership, group power, and public work by which we explored through direct application. We started out small and did small group projects within the class, then a public project within the University. Next, we coached St. Bernard's students in public achievement and really tested our personal leadership (some days resilience to humiliation). The last class in the leadership minor progression is simply, Global Leadership. The class brought the minor experience from frustration with the coursework to an understanding of the larger picture of the world that we were exposed to. 

Susan Atwood is the teacher of the Global Leadership course and just happens to have a beautifully tuned British Accent which added to the intriguing class conversations.  I speak so highly of this course because it facilitated the connections which lead to this internship in Kenya. In the class, we were assigned to construct a hypothetical leadership project for a specific issue in a country which corresponded to the home  of an International Humphrey Student. I was in the Kenya group which was paired with Carolyne Abong, a director at the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. My group members and I challenged each other which made our collaborated work extend beyond any of our own individual capacities. Our presentation also surpassed Susan Atwood's expectations based upon previous semester projects.

Our dedication to the research and innovative planning strategies impressed Carolyne beyond her own imaginable visions of our project. She left us all with an open invitation to intern in Kenya at the commission... I immediately began to fantasize. Then, I started to plan.