All of the Places that I am Not Going

If you have talked to me about my plans for the year in the past five months you might have noticed that my plans have had a tendency to change very frequently. If you are curious about any of these shifts, here are some very brief explanations.

Phase 1: Nicaragua

• When I began considering taking a gap year I was planning to spend my year working as a volunteer with the CDCA, a non-profit organization in Nicaragua run by some of my parents old friends. I planned on this because it was an organization that my parents were familiar with and it would be a fairly inexpensive trip. When I received the Global Gap Year Fellowship I started changing my plans because I had the funds to plan my perfect trip. 

Phase 2: Thailand

• I quickly started doing research on places to go, and I fell in love with an organization in Thailand that provided education to the children of Burmese migrant workers. Unfortunately, it was very hard to get in contact with this organization, so I began to look for placement elsewhere.

Phase 3: Global Volunteers Network

• After Thailand fell though a family friend suggested I volunteer through the Global Volunteers Network (GVN). For a while I was planning on spending my year in Nepal working as a volunteer for GVN, however GVN could not place me in one location for longer that five months. This caused problems because my fellowship requires me to spend at least six months in service, and I had hoped to spend the majority of my year volunteering globally. 

Phase 4: United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries

• Luckily, at about the same time that I started researching GVN I also contacted Nancy Eubanks, the individual volunteer coordinator at The United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries (GBGM). When I realized that GVN was not going to work out I began working with Nancy to find a placement somewhere in Asia. She sent my application to volunteer placements in Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Mongolia, China, and Thailand, in hopes that one of these locations would be interested in having me as a volunteer. GBGM requires that all of its volunteers participate in a weekend long orientation. One of the people at the orientation suggested to Nancy and I that I could spend my year working in an orphanage in Bareilly, India that is run by the Methodist Church.

Phase 5: India

• I started getting really excited about the orphanage in , but unfortunately after about a month of talking with the administrators of the orphanage, they decided that they were not interested in having me as a volunteer. There was not really an explanation for this other than that the director of the orphanage had recently changed, and the new director did not want to have a volunteer. This aggravated me because this happened in towards the end of August, so it was the end of the summer and I had absolutely no idea where I would be going.

Phase 6: Choices

• At this point I became very grateful to Nancy. Within a week of hearing that the orphanage in India was not interested in having a volunteer Nancy had found three placements that were very willing to have me as a volunteer. Oddly, this was almost as torturous as not having any location at all. The first location was in Camodia, where I would be working at the Methodist Missions Center of Cambodia. I would be living in the Phnom Penh, the capital, and doing a variety of jobs. The second location was at a school outside of New Delhi, India. I assume that I would have been teaching, but I am not entirely sure what I would have been doing. The third location was a teaching position in Yumen, Gansu, China. For reasons that i will explain later in my blog, this is the location that i chose.

Long story short, over the past few months I have considered several different options, most of which have fallen through for one reason or another. Right now, I am preparing to spend the next nine months in Northwest China, and I could not be more excited!