With a maymay user’s baby in Mandalay.

Leadership

My view of the world has undoubtedly been changed as a result of the Global Social Benefit Fellowship. I never had a distinct ‘aha’ moment, but looking back, my view of what it means to be a leader and how I can effectively do my part for the bettering of our planet is all clearer thanks to my fellowship experience. I feel as though a light has been shed on aspects of myself, my strengths, and how I problem solve throughout all parts of the fellowship. When I was in Myanmar, I needed to problem solve and make things happen for myself. We were sitting in the office in the first week we were there, sort of waiting to get directions and be told what to do. We spent so much time preparing for this, to be in Myanmar and with everyone at Koe Koe Tech, that once we got there it was sort of a stand still. What next? Everything was laid out so clearly before. We came from the classroom, a place of such structure, right into a real professional setting, where we were given the power to do what we thought was right to help Koe Koe Tech. We wouldn’t have any interviews, any interaction with people, any progress made, unless we got up and did it ourselves. Nobody was going to tell us exactly how to do it. We were expected to figure that out on our own. Things began to happen when we made them happen. We had to get up and do it. We were productive and worked well together and separately. I was impressed by how much we were able to get done once we were in the field. Through this, I learned something invaluable about leadership. A leader doesn’t sit and wait for instructions. A leader is not told what to do every step of the way. A leader takes their strengths and goes ahead and just does what needs to get done. A good leader is one who does this in an honorable and respectful way. As the only person on my interdisciplinary team with filmmaking skills, whenever we were conducting a filmed interview, I was the leader. I needed to delegate tasks, ask for help, teach my teammates certain skills, and be patient and respectful as through it all. In this way, the fellowship showed me, in a very real hands-on way, how to be a successful and respectable leader.

The Human Connection

When you look at Myanmar at first glance it is different than the United States in almost every way it can be. It is a country with an incredibly rich culture that dates back centuries. It is a developing nation with a dissimilar government to ours, a feeble health-care system, a dominating national religion, a lack of sanitation, and a recent history of military rule. It is a nation stricken by a great deal of poverty. What these facts don’t say however is how similar an individual in Myanmar is to an individual from the United States. We are alike in that we both have the ability to love and feel pain, we both have families and want to be successful. We want to be accepted into our cultures. We are humans. The human experience is what connects us all. This is something I always knew, but reading about people all over the world is much different than sitting down face to face with them. I remember sitting atop a temple in Bagan with a young woman around the same age as me. She saw my friend, Athena, and I walking around a different temple and offered to show us a spot that she loves and that is special to her. We climbed up to the top of a temple and found ourselves high up, looking out over thousands of stupas in the countryside.

Bagan.

We sat with her for a while and shared information about ourselves. She was just a normal, young 20 year old girl with a boyfriend and a family and a good sense of humor. We talked and laughed and became fast friends. She is no different from me. She may live a completely different life in a place incredibly foreign to me, but at the end of the day, we are the same. It was through experiences like this that I found how much I love social entrepreneurship as an effective way to help solve the greatest problems of the world. The goals of social entrepreneurship don’t come from a place of seeing people who need ‘saving’ or charity cases, but as real human beings like us that we can work alongside to empower and help unlock their potential to be great. Social entrepreneurship is a sustainable solution that strives to work with others to build something that will last; to make systematic changes for the better of others, to, as the Miller Center succinctly states, “end global poverty and protect the planet.”

Bagan.

Beliefs

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe there is a meaning or a purpose to life, so I don’t look for one as many do. The fellowship did not change any of this about me. What the fellowship did teach me to believe, however, is the importance of self-reflection. I have found myself looking inside myself more since my experience with the Miller Center. I actively try and make sense of my emotions, my feelings, and why I do what I do. I have a greater sense of self-awareness because of this fellowship. I am better able to understand my own self and that has helped me greatly in trying to understand others. I feel as though through this experience I have learned what I like and what is important to me. This has helped me figure out what path I want to take going forward. I thrive in settings that are unknown, I love assimilating to a new culture, immersing myself, being the different one in the crowd. I love working with people on a team and I love using my creativity to help others. I love telling stories. Through self-reflection I have learned all these things. I know what makes me happy, what my strengths are, where I excel. I have learned that I will never stop learning. That is one of the beautiful things about life, that I will always be learning more about myself, the world, and my place in it.

Looking Forward

One vocational decision I have made looking forward is that I am not ready to start a career. I have more growing to do, more of the world to see, before I settle down. Now, with absolutely nothing holding me back, is the best time for me to do this. And so I will.

Inle Lake.