Dream big? Hm...

This whole time I've been gushing about my TN. All the people who are so nice, the good food, my servant girls...but anyone who knows me knows I always take the good parts and focus on them. Now I want to tell you all what I really see every day:


It has become quite apparent to me the importance to keep your head. When you are surrounded by AIESECers all the time, doing AIESEC work, you tend to get caught up in the love and Big Dreaming. But it is so important to keep focus and not get completely swept away in it. Yes AIESEC is amazing and has given me so many opportunities/amazing friends that I will talk to for the rest of my life, but I have to remember that I am living in the real world also. Yesterday I was at an AIESEC event and I left my purse alone while I walked around. A little later another AIESECer ran up to me and told me not to leave without it. I was really confused as to why he would think it was so dangerous, but now I am realizing why. Everywhere I look when I walk down the streets of Cocody I see poverty, illness, depression. This is the world we live in. This is what we fight to get rid of. When you are in AIESEC-US all you do is feel the love. Feel the AIESEC loveliness of hanging out, talking politics, smoking hookah. Because we are Americans and we have everything we want. We don't know how lucky we are to be able to walk down the street and not be scared to be robbed or beaten up. In Madison when I walk down the street I never see skinny naked children crying to their mom because they are hungry. I never see people covering themselves in mud and lying down to try and cool off because they don't have any thing else. Madison is paradise. Madison is like heaven. No ten-foot tall piles of garbage, no maggot infested toilets everywhere you look so you have to hold it in for as long as you possibly can, no little boys and girls selling tissues on the side of the road who when you look into their eyes you know that if you bought a box of tissues from them it would make them the happiest child on the face of this earth because it meant dinner for them and their family. This is where I live right now. You would not believe how many people I talk to who have applied for a US Visa and have been denied. Or how many people would kill just to get on the waiting list.
I've also realized there is no such thing as a poor college student. If you are able to even CONSIDER going to college, you are richer than you will ever know.

Sabine and I have become super close. She writes me notes in English or French, depending on how much time she has to spend on it, and leaves it for me for when I get home from work. She just basically tells me she loves me and she wants me to stay here forever haha. But we were talking today and she told me for the first time about her past. She grew up in a village in West Cote d’Ivoire, and she was like those babies I see every day: Her mom couldn’t provide her with food, clothes, or anything else. So when she was 12 her mom sent her here, to Elizabeth’s house, to be a domestic and basically do everything in exchange for an education, food, water, clothes, etc. But she doesn’t have time to study because she has to do all the chores around the house so her grades suffer and she can’t get into a university. She said it is the same for half the girls in her grade. I always wondered before why she wants to know all about my life in America: my car, my going to eat at restaurants a lot, coffee shops, university, friends, social time, etc. She absolutely loves hearing about it and I never knew why before, but now I understand. She is sort of living vicariously through me. When I tell her my life she imagines it’s hers, and then she tells me she’s going to come to America with me and live the life. But every time she says it I can tell we both know she could never actually come to America. She doesn't even have enough money to pay for a passport.

What is my point? When you go to a third world country and actually see for yourself how much in this world needs fixing, you find a new perspective. I don't want to dream big. I want to do big things. Because dreaming big but doing nothing is what has got us all here. So I am going to continue to live this amazing experience, and when I go home, I am going to stop dreaming and start doing.