Over the past decade the number of Americans who identify as environmentalists has steadily declined, from a peak in 1990 of 75 percent to less than half of Americans today. For most of the past three decades, a strong majority of Americans prioritized the environment, even at the risk of curbing economic growth. But since 2009, most of us have been unwilling to make that trade-off.

At the same time, as the New York Times recently reported, a large majority of Americans believe that the weird weather of late is at least partially caused by global warming. Another poll showed that 83% of Americans want more government support for clean energy. Yet another showed that three in four Americans recycle, have reduced their household energy use and buy environmentally friendly products.

In sum: Americans are beginning to believe in climate change and most of us have adopted various forms of environmentally-friendly behaviors. But, we now prioritize economic growth over the environment and don’t want to be called “environmentalists.” So what’s changed? Is it just a matter of labeling?

The “environmentalists” don’t seem to think so. In 2004, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus famously proclaimed that environmentalism is dead, spawning a firestorm of controversy but also getting many prominent environmentalists, including former president of the Sierra Club Adam Werbach to agree with them. They argued that environmentalism, with its focus on technical solutions and narrow scope of issues, is unequipped to handle the holistic challenge of global warming.

Historically, environmentalism has defined itself as preserving wilderness from human interference. John Muir and others like him built a movement around saving beautiful natural spaces such as Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National park. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960′s brought further attention to the way that humans were harming the environment through pesticide use. This environmental awakening culminated in 1970 with the first Earth Day in which one out of every 10 Americans participated.

At some point in the 21st century we became tired with the idea that planet had to come before people. With close to 7 billion of us in this world, we can’t separate ourselves from our environment and we need a way to clothe, feed and shelter all of us. We’re changing our natural environment and we will continue to do so. The issue at hand is simply how we go about it.

In 2007, civil rights advocate Van Jones sparked a new movement around the idea of “building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” Though right-wing conservatives managed to kick Jones out of his role as President Obama’s Green Jobs Czar, the movement for green jobs continued to grow. In 2009, over 12,000 young people gathered in Washington D.C. and stormed Congress demanding green jobs and clean energy as a part of Powershift, a conference organized by Billy Parish and the Energy Action Coalition.

I was at that conference. I distinctly remember looking around and realizing that we weren’t there to protect the wilderness. We were there to build a more sustainable and equitable world. And we’re not alone.

Making money is important and particularly with student loans, mortgages, health issues and little people with big educational needs, the urgency increases. But, even if we took the job just to pay the bills, those 40+ work hours add up to more than just dollar signs, they make up a large part of our identity. Hence why everyone’s favorite cocktail party question is, so what do you do?

Even if you’re not the cocktail party type (and I’ll admit that I’m more of a PBR girl myself), all those hours are bound to affect you. Maybe you spend the best years of your life thinking about how to provide excellent customer service at Walmart, maybe you spend them manipulating derivatives on Wall Street. Maybe you love all your co-workers, maybe you don’t. Whatever flavors go into your work wine, you’re not going to get out of there without a little tinge on your teeth.

Most Americans report being satisfied with their jobs. Young people, however, are not drinking the Kool-Aid. We consistently report low rates of job satisfaction and seem to change careers as though it’s, well, our job. This might be because there simply aren’t many jobs to go around, let alone good ones. It might be because we’re young and don’t really understand what it means to pay the bills since most of us still bum off our parents. But I think it’s something deeper.

In the past 30 years technology and globalization have revolutionized the way that we interact with each other, burning through any semblance of a boundary between our jobs and the rest of our lives to the point where many of us can, quite literally, work from anywhere. Even in Niger, West Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world, my Nigerien friends from Peace Corps regularly send me emails from their smart phones. The potential to transform our world is limitless and it is at our fingertips. All we need to do is dream.

Imagine a world where each of us strive to live up to our highest potential. Where we work on things that really matter, not just to our bank accounts, but to other human beings and to our planet. Naive? Maybe, but the idea of meaningful work is rapidly gaining traction, with over 500 companies certified as “B Corps,” a type of corporation that uses business to solve social and environmental problems, and the rise of talent agencies like ReWork that focus specifically on helping people find impact jobs.

While the impact or “social enterprise” sector may still be small, it’s likely to grow as more people express interest in finding meaningful work. As one of the founders of ReWork, Nathaniel Koloc, told me,”For many people, work becomes meaningful when there is positive impact associated with it. It’s possible to re-frame and re-envision traditional business offerings with a lens of social and environmental impact. We can transition hundreds of thousands of jobs to being “impact” jobs if more companies come to understand the value (both financially and culturally) of working to make the world a better place as part of their core business.”

And, as I’ve pointed out before, making an impact isn’t limited to the white-collar elite. Research has shown that across sectors, employees who believe that they are making an impact are happier and more productive. Companies from Southwest to Trader Joe’s and Costco have all found that by investing in their workforce and empowering employees to take control over small decisions, they are more profitable and their employees are more dedicated. Imagine if more organizations began to take on this practice, investing in their workforces and challenging their employees to take on some of our society’s most pressing problems.

And the impact sector isn’t limited to the United States. Ashoka, a non-profit leader in social enterprise sphere, has identified 3,000 social entrepreneurs from over 60 countries, all of whom are working on finding solutions to the world’s toughest problems. As Thomas Friedman pointed out in a recent op-ed, climate change is making the world’s toughest problems even tougher with land, water and food tensions contributing to massive uprisings like the Arab Spring. With nearly half of the world’s population under 25 we are going to need a lot of new jobs, but we need them in the right sectors. By reimagining what these jobs should look like we can help ensure that more young people find meaningful work building a more sustainable and resilient economy.

Reimagining work amidst a global recession might seem crazy but as Albert Einstein famously said, the true definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The past few months have been particularly exciting for me because for the first time large numbers of people have read my writing via blog posts for Forbes and The Huffington Post. With this excitement has come responsibility–I want to write informative and interesting that inspire people in some way. With every word, I aim to fulfill my personal mission statement (habit #1) to create the language and facilitate the dialog to build a more sustainable, just and joyful world.

Last Thursday night I did something that violated my mission statement. I wrote an article for Forbes called Why Crowdfund Investing is The Path to Economic Recovery but I didn’t take the time to thoroughly research the crowdfunding bill (H.R. 2930, called The Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act). I already knew a fair amount on the topic and so I read a few articles, pieced together a bunch of stuff that I’d already written about the bill for Solar Mosaic and sent the article to Forbes who published it right away. Almost immediately, I realized that I’d mistakenly written about the bill as though it had passed the Senate and President Obama had signed it when in actuality the bill had only passed the House–though it’s expected to become law soon, officially the bill hasn’t yet passed the Senate Banking Committee, gotten through the Senate floor vote and gotten a presidential signature. I emailed my Forbes editor right away, making the two corrections in bold (see below) to clarify that the bill is not in fact law yet. Unfortunately, given that the article wasn’t published till 2pm on a Friday, I suspect that she had already gone home for the weekend.

Perhaps I’m a bit neurotic but all weekend I’ve been stressed out about the article. Finally I realized that the best way to stop stressing about it is to recognize that accidents happen and that in terms of life mistakes, misrepresenting the legal status of one bill is probably one of the lesser mistakes I’ll make. I’ve certainly learned my lesson though, and in the future I am going to make doubly sure that I do the proper due diligence on everything I write!

Here’s the article as it should (and hopefully soon will) appear with corrections in bold:

The House did something astounding yesterday. They a) passed a bill and b) passed it with nearly full bipartisan support. This miraculous bill, called the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act, is a series of 6 bills tied together designed to make it easier for startups to gain access to capital. Undoubtedly the most exciting aspect of this act is what it does for crowdfund investing.

Think of it this way: you’re in the center of a room filled with everyone who has ever known you, friended you on Facebook or followed you on Twitter. You stand in front of all of these people and pitch the crazy, brilliant business idea that you’ve been dreaming of. If these people like your idea, they can invest in your company, benefiting financially if you succeed or losing a few bucks if you fail. Soon, this concept of “crowdfund investing” is expected to become law.

The potential for crowdfund investing to transform that way startups access capital is staggering. Crowdfunding platforms have already gained traction in the U.S. with the success of sites like Kiva, a microfinance platform and Kickstarter, which lets people donate to fund artistic ventures. Kiva has arranged nearly $250 million in loans while Kickstarter users pledge funds to the tune of $2 million a week. The key thing to note here is that these millions are being raised strictly as donations and zero-interest loans because until yesterday U.S. securities laws forbade offering a return on investment (ROI) to non-accredited investors.

While these crowdfunding platforms have been widely successful in their niches, they fail to fill a key need: the lack of financing for startups. Currently startup activity is at its lowest point on record–a point worth paying attention to since historically startups have created an average of 3 million jobs annually, while existing firms lose 1 million jobs each year. As the Kauffman Foundation report puts it,  “Startups aren’t everything when it comes to job growth. They’re the only thing.”

As traditional Venture Capital firms have moved into funding later stage companies, there has been an increasing lack of early-stage funding, known as Seed Capital. According to the Silicon Valley Watcher, “the latest report on trends in US Venture investments shows a massive decline of 40% in seed investments in US startups in the final quarter of 2011, and a much larger drop of 48% for the entire year.”

All it takes is a look to our neighbors across the pond to see what crowdfund investing can do to fill this gap. In Britain, startups like Funding Circle raise more than $2.3 million each month for small businesses from individuals who earn an average yield of 7.3 percent and Crowdcube just successfully funded the first $1.75 million project.

As the Community Builder for Solar Mosaic, a crowdfunding platform for solar investments, I’ve seen what crowdfunding can do to bring people together and pool their money to fund solar projects on the roofs of important community organizations, like The Murdoch Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. I can’t wait to see what Mosaic and other startups like us can do once we’re able to offer returns on these crowdfunded investments.

This advice comes in the form of two books, both of which have overly long titles. The first is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a self-help classic published in 1989 that was named the most influential book of the 20th century. The second is the recently released Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money, and Community in a Changing World, a book that has the potential to become the 7 Habits equivalent for a whole new generation of professionals looking to make an impact alongside paying the bills.

Blend these two books together and voila, you have The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Changemakers.

Habit 1: Develop a Personal Mission Statement

Just as organizations need mission statements to spell out their overall goals and guide their decision-making, so too do individuals. After all, we all want to live meaningful lives but each of us have a different idea of what that means. At the same time, getting to the root of what a meaningful life means for each of us can be a difficult process. Stephen Covey of 7 Habits recommends envisioning your funeral and writing down what you want your family, friends, colleagues and significant others say about you. Billy Parish and Dev Aujla of Making Good have a slightly less depressing take on this idea, framing the mission statement as a “daily mantra” to remind you of what’s important and who you are. Parish and Aujla recommend thinking of a time when you felt your most powerful and then writing your mission statement. Though it might seem silly to write a mission statement when many of us can’t even find a job, beginning our career search with the end goal in mind can help us find a direction. As Covey says, “It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap…to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of success only to discover that it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

Habit 2: Envision What Success Looks Like

Research has shown that the secret to success for almost all world-class athletes and other peak performers is visualization. They see themselves succeeding, feel it and experience it before they actually do it. This practice of visualization has exploded in the non-profit world where organizations frequently write out vivid descriptions of what it would look like for them to accomplish their mission statement. For example, an organization working on saving mountain gorillas in Rwanda might vividly describe what it would look and feel like to triple the population of gorillas and the employ hundreds of former poachers as tourist guides. This same principle applies to individuals; even more than writing down your goals, visualizing yourself accomplishing them makes you more likely to actually complete them.

Habit 3: Cultivate Your Special Powers

I went to a liberal arts college that taught me to be interested in everything. Then I graduated and realized that I was good at lots of things but great at nothing. Particularly for those of us without technical degrees, figuring out what we’re good at can be a challenge. One of the more hilarious activities suggested by Making Good  to answer this question is to pair up with a friend and write all of your important life experiences on stickie notes, making maps of your lives on a wall. By doing a little homework on yourself, you can figure out what unique skills you have to offer and how you can best cultivate those skills. Then you can focus on offering those skills to your  job, family, friends and community, using this practice to turn your skills into superpowers. For example, if you’re like me and love to write, you can use your skill to write compelling content for your company’s website, compose your family’s holiday letter, scribble love notes to your friends and volunteer to blog for a cool non-profit. All of this writing not only benefits your community, it makes you a better writer.

Habit 4: Find Your Inner Circle

As Making Good  explains, “Our culture celebrates the myth of the individual achiever…we tell stories of heroes who accomplish incredible feats on their own. But this isn’t how things work.” Behind every successful person is a strong network of loved ones who has helped her get there, what 7 Habits calls the “paradigm of interdependence.” Despite the fact that we regularly like, follow, poke, text and email thousands of people, research has shown that humans can only hold 150 meaningful relationships at one time. Making Good suggests concentrating on an inner circle of 15 people who you spend the most time with since you inevitably you take on some of their characteristics. Then, take a look at that list, think about what it says about you and figure out who you’d like to build a stronger relationships with. If you want to change, focus on building stronger relationships with people who push you or have more experience than you.  As Cervantes said, “Tell me the company you keep, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

Habit 5: Practice Deep Listening

There is a reason I talk to my dog. Unlike many humans who listen with the intent to reply or butt in before my thought is fully finished, my dog just sits there with these deep, understanding brown eyes. Of course, genius dog though he is, I’m not quite sure my dog can follow the 7 Habits principal, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”  Fortunately, I have a few friends who practice deep listening even better than my dog. After reading Making Good, I’ve begun to develop coaching relationships with a few of these people, relationships where we trade off deeply listening to each other, practicing focused listening without judgment or trying to steer the conversation. It’s amazing what we can hear when we really listen.

Habit 6: Seek Synergy 

7 Habits calls this “synergizing.” Making Good  calls it “organizing.” Though one concept is designed for older business professionals and the other more for young activists, the principal of cooperation is the same. Whether we’re building a movement or working on a team project, there are bound to be disagreements. As 7 Habits explains, the key is to value these differences and, back to habit 5, seek to understand where the other person is coming from. Only then can you both work to seek a synergistic third alternative.

Habit 7: Practice

As Aristotle famously said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

This article was also posted on the Huffington Post. 

As Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg recently presented at the World Economic Forum, while assertive and ambitious men are seen as more likable the more they achieve, the more women achieve and assert themselves, the less likable they become. One particularly discouraging study that Sandberg discusses in her TED talk shows a recent example of these stereotypes at work. When researchers presented students with a case study on a highly successful woman named Heidi and changed the name to Howard for one section of the class, the students rated Howard much higher than Heidi. They believed that Heidi was just as competent as Howard, they didn’t like her, they wouldn’t hire her and they certainly wouldn’t want to work with her.

This study, and many others like it, highlights the fact that to a large degree, women still can’t win. Three decades after we began entering the workforce in mass we’re still seen as ineffective if we conform to our gender stereotypes (nurturing, kind, sensitive) but as “brusque” or “argumentative” if we act assertively and display ambition.

Now let’s take these lovely gender norms and add them to what we know about Generation Y. Or, as I’ve begun to think of us, “Generation Why.” On the positive side, our love of technology has allowed us to Facebook, Tweet, Wikipedia and Quora our way into new knowledge–making us cutting-edge workers in a world increasingly run off of information technology. The other side of this, of course, is that all this information has taught us to frequently question authority and to give feedback to our employers as often as we seek it (which is often).

Though these norms don’t apply to every millennial in America–after all, we are the country’s most diverse workforce–and the workplace gender issues aren’t faced by every women, when you put these two characteristics together, you’ll find a lot of young women like my friend. Women who have been taught from birth to question authority but now are entering a work environment where those queries can all too often be interpreted as being overly assertive and disrespectful. Most of the time the problem isn’t that we don’t respect authority, it’s that we feel as though our employers do not respect us.

While this status-quo is enough to bring anyone to tears–particularly since jobs aren’t so easy to come by for my generation–acknowledging that these gender norms and generational divides exist is the first step to overcoming them.

The rejection did make me think about success and how we define success–should we define it by traditional measures (like prestigious Fulbright grants) or by something else? The internal debate spawned a blog post which was posted on Forbes and the Huffington Post. The post was read by over 16,000 people, flooding my Facebook wall and Twitter feed with comments and congratulations. Not such a bad way to start off life as a 24 year old!

Best of all, both Forbes and the Huffington Post said that they would like me to write for them more. I wrote a follow-up piece to my previous Forbes article, it hasn’t taken off in the same way my first piece did but it still was a lot of fun to write. So if you have ideas of posts you’d like to see, let me know!

Before you scoff, let’s think about that for a second. The first rung on the ladder, college, used to be seen as a straight shot to success. Now, for too many of us, it’s a straight shot to our parent’s couch and thousands of dollars in student loans, totaling over $1 trillion annually. As for a “good job,” well, many of us are busing tables in restaurants and shuffling papers in unpaid internships, but we’re the lucky ones. For those who didn’t make it to college, the unemployment rate is more than doubled at 8.7 percent, leading to a total of 14 percent of young workers (20-24) who are unemployed. While the economy will certainly improve, those years spent doing menial labor will never come back to us, with estimates that we could end up earning 10 percent less on average than somebody who left school a few years before or after the recession due to the loss of critical entry-level work experience.

As Derek Thompson of the Altantic put it, “For Millennials, this is the great irony of the Great Recession. A crisis that started in the housing market could wind up having the most lasting negative impact on the one generation that didn’t own any homes before the bust.”

Marriage is in decline with many young people choosing to wait or simply throwing marriage out as an outdated concept and opting for cohabitation or other “new family forms” instead. The idea that all of us should strive to own a home is what brought our economy to it’s knees so we’re lowering our expectations on that one a bit.  As for retirement, don’t think we don’t know that social security is just a big ponzi scheme–one that’s expected to run out in 2037, well before most of us retire.

Now that our ladder has been reduced to splinters, the question remains: what does “success” mean in the 21st century and how do we achieve it?

We know how we don’t achieve it. We know that decades of runaway capitalism with ever more desperate attempts to improve the bottom line and lobby for more deregulation have failed. We know that measuring our country merely by GDP has put us 25th on the “inequality-adjusted” Human Development Index–meaning that there’s a good reason why the 99% took to America’s streets.

So if we’re not measuring America’s success by GDP, what should we measure? Recently, economists and national leaders have begun pushing for a something radically simple: measure success by happiness. Of course, measuring something as complex as happiness isn’t easy but as the recent Harvard Business Review issue devoted to the topic will tell you, not only is measuring happiness possible, valuing it can greatly increase company profits.

Success for my generation will be a shift from business as usual to something Umair Haque calls “Betterness.” A transition from climbing the ladder of unfulfilling societal expectations and consumerism to blazing a trail with a life guided by a holistic focus on well-being, community and sustainability. Following a better path won’t be easy but as we lie dreaming under the glow-in-the-dark stars of our childhood room we know that it’s at least one dream worth fighting for.

For the majority of my life and the lives of my peers, our leaders have worked hard to give us a future we don’t want. Global energy needs are skyrocketing and the climate is heating up fast–with normally conservative institutions like the OECD, the IEA and McKinsey predicting dire consequences from our carbon emissions and explosive population growth.

Twenty years after sustainable development was first put on the agenda the world’s youth are planning to call this meeting to order. After all, for us, this isn’t merely about “the future we want,” it’s about the future we will live.

So what type of future do we want to live? Well, world, we’ve already begun showing you. We’ve tweeted and facebooked our way into an Arab Spring that has succeeded in removing dictators. We’ve #occupied cities across the world, calling for the global elite to pay their fair share. Now we’re taking on a new type of tyranny, the tyranny of an energy system and a concept of development that has enriched a handful of fossil fuel companies and corrupt leaders at the expense of the 99% and our planet.

Fossil fuel-based development is proving to be anything but sustainable. As Carl Pope recently wrote,

“There is not enough cheap oil or coal in the world to elevate the lives of the world’s four billion poor; trying to do so will kill millions, mostly the poor, with soot, smog, and heavy metals; and will bankrupt the treasuries of nations like China, India and America that face trade deficits for the deadly carbon duo, coal and oil.”

We need to rapidly transition to clean energy but more than that, we need to put our world on the path to sustainable development. Sustainable development encompasses a wide range of practices but as our U.S. youth delegation is urging world leaders at Rio+20 to define it, “sustainability” must convey underpinning ecological, social, cultural, and economic principles. We want world leaders to think of development in the sense of creating a “green economy,” one that prioritizes the well-being and basic needs of people and recognizes that infinite material growth is impossible in a finite world. A green economy must minimize ecosystem degradation and move beyond GDP as the sole indicator of prosperity.

Our demands are great but our need is even greater. Watch out world, we’re no longer toddlers gurgling bathwater and we’re tired of the way you’ve been playing with our future.

Attending an Indian wedding was enough to make anyone want to live there but I knew I needed to figure out if I could handle the India that exists outside the gates of the dazzling saris and Bollywood songs. So I took a train ride, by myself, in the lowest class, standing for hours, pressed against on all sides by skinny Indian men. I loved it and so when my parents left New Delhi I waved and jumped into the suffocating arms of a 17 million person city. I was quickly pulled up by the gentle hands of a few fellow Udall Scholars, two amazing Indian coworkers and an incredible Columbian housemate who showed me the wonders among the chaos. Having friends in a foreign country was enough in itself but having friends who were as excited as I was about going on adventures was paradise. My weeknights were often filled with Indian cooking experiments, surrounded by friends who knew as little about aloo gobi as I did. My weekends were spent on buses and trains, traveling to far flung temples and beautiful hill stations.

Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, found me covered in paint, shooting a squirt gun full of liquid paint out of an auto rickshaw. We were promptly shot back at by grinning Indian men from another rickshaw. I chased after an elephant on my way to work, only to joyfully haggle with the owner and try and get him to give me a ride for a non-tourist price. India beat Pakistan in Cricket and we all danced drunkenly in the streets, only to dance even harder the next week when India won the Cricket World Cup. I visited a few incredible women taxi drivers at their homes in the slums and was overjoyed when I was able to bring attention to their work by getting an article published in Forbes. I woke up early to see Delhi’s flower market, a full city block filled with beautiful flowers, soon to decorate the homes of India’s growing middle class. I traveled to a rural village and found that “rural village” means something very different in booming economy of India than it does in the sleepy villages of Niger. I interviewed countless women entrepreneurs, many who had braved domestic abuse to start their businesses, and wrote case studies for them to help get more funding. My friends helped wrap me in a saree and I got on a plane headed home after four incredible months.

Despite my best intentions, I teared up at the “Welcome to America” video on my flight. I visited Whitman’s graduation and relived the feeling of knowing everyone around me. I spent a few weeks funemployed, catching up with friends and even unexpectedly performing a comedy skit about Niger when I was forced onstage. My mom convinced me to join her on a half marathon and then another, close enough together we pretend that we ran a full one. I learned the joys of sloshball (drunk kickball) at my sister’s graduation and then started an all-consuming job as a program leader at a youth leadership/entrepreneurship program. I learned more about the heartbreaking racial and socioeconomic divisions in America than I could have ever imagined working in Oakland only 10 minutes from my fancy suburban home.

Social enterprises began to take over my life in a delicious way: Two of my good friends and I started a company to combat malnutrition in Niger through moringa oleifera, a superfood that grows there, and though we’re still very much in the R&D phase, we love what we’re doing. After Summer of Solutions ended, I found a job doing communications/marketing for Solar Mosaic, a company I love, and I finally found myself a real mentor. I started riding my bike 15 miles to work each day and found myself rewarded with a feeling of athleticism but without a stolen bike and Iphone.

My moments are turning into memories and my blog post into a memoir so I must stop. 2012 is upon us and who knows what adventures the new year will bring!

A bat entered my bedroom at exactly midnight, its small wings and high-pitched chirps seemed to be God’s way of telling me to wake up and greet the New Year. Blearily,  I reached for my phone  and stared at the greenish 00:00 01.01.2011 that cut through the darkness. Outside my house all was quiet, it was a far cry from the debauchery that has marked most of the new year’s eves that I can remember. According to the Islamic calendar the New Year falls on December 7, a day long past.  But even then, there hadn’t been much to give the new year a proper welcoming; the only reason I even knew there was a holiday was because we were given the day off school.

So there I lay under my mosquito net, alone in my little mud house since the bat had decided to find somewhere more exciting to carry out the New Year’s festivities. My mind began to wander, rewinding to midnight on January 2010, when I’d stood with my sister on top of a tall apartment building in Amsterdam, watching fireworks explode all around us and drunken Europeans below us stumble from one nightclub to another. She had been studying abroad in England and I’d been in Copenhagen for a conference on climate change. We’d decided to meet up and hostel hop, a very cold but exciting adventure.

Then there was the last semester of senior year, a strange mixture of incredible stress, tearful farewells and a lot of partying. I distinctly remember meeting with my senior thesis group at the Walla Walla Brew Pub, downing beers with our professor as we discussed the impending deadlines of the honors thesis. The library seemed to be my second home what with my thesis, fellowship applications and the normal, never-ending stream of homework. And yet, in between all the studying were potlucks, slam poetry nights, wine tasting and those awesome Whitman parties where everyone knows each other. Sadly, there was the inevitable break-up with my long-time college boyfriend but there were also the amazing friends who brought me chocolate and hugged me as I cried. I won a journalism prize of $500 and used the money to go on an “alternative” spring break trip down to New Orleans to build houses, discovering my love of power-tools and eating deep fried oreos for the first—and probably last—time. I gave an undergraduate presentation about my thesis and felt honored that three of my politics professor came to watch me speak. Then my introductory geology professor took me down a few notches, giving me the worst exam grade of my college career.

There was a lot of community service, weekends spent distributing energy-efficient light-bulbs in poor, mostly Latino, neighborhoods. And endless hours spent organizing events, like the Earth Day celebration that rocked Whitman for a whole week. Of course, there relaxing times too, like those picnics in the wheat fields, evenings spent lying on blankets and slowly watching the sun turn the golden wheat a brilliant orange.

I had the distinct honor of not only giving the baccalaureate speech at my graduation but also having twenty members of my family make the long drive up from the San Francisco Bay Area to celebrate with me. After graduating I had a little more than a month to try to see all the people I love before taking off for two years in Niger.  June was filled with coffee dates, lunches, long walks and then an amazing graduation present trip to Italy. I definitely spent a lot of money before moving to the poorest country in the world…Then there was that fateful day at the airport, hugging all of my sisters and almost breaking down at the sight of my dad tearing up, but somehow walking through that security line and coming to Niger.

July, August and September were spent in a summer-camp like flurry of language classes, volleyball games, runs through the millet fields and lots of bonding with my host family and fellow Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs). There was “demystification,” a night spent with a Peace Corps Volunteer to discover what the life of a PCV was really like. After that, I found out my village placement of Safo and was lucky enough to get to visit it before anyone else had seen their villages, spending two weeks living in my new house with three other PCVs and a language tutor to try and immerse ourselves in Hausa. Our language immersion group made up a song in Hausa to the tune of Madonna’s Holiday and ended up winning an oreo cream pie for our efforts. Then I had to say another goodbye, tearing up as my host mother cried and giving long hugs to all the amazing friends I’d made during Pre-Service Training.

On September 29^th I arrived in Safo and began my new life in a small Nigerien village only to have it shattered with the news that Stephanie Chance, a fellow PCV and friend who had spent language immersion with me in Safo, had unexpectedly passed away in her sleep. Along with the rest of my training group, I immediately left my village and headed for Niamey, the capitol city, where a funeral service was to be held. It was hard, so hard to say goodbye, but amazing to see how our group banded together and comforted each other. After a few days of mourning and counseling sessions, we went back to our villages and re-started our lives.

I started to turn my house into a home, making myself a mud oven, planting a garden and decorating my mud walls with postcards from home. My days began to have a rhythm, a schedule of alternating between teaching English at the middle school, helping out at the health center and chatting with the men at the mayor’s office. Before I knew it, it was Halloween and time to go to the nearby Peace Corps hostel to cook delicious food, dress up in crazy costumes and dance the night away. Another month passed in a whirl of work, dinner parties, teaching my favorite little girls how to count to ten and building lots of improved cookstoves. Thanksgiving at the hostel probably involved even more gluttony than usual, given my inability to buy many vegetables or fruit in my village. I painted a few maps of Niger and one of Africa on my primary school’s walls and then made a small tree farm at my middle school. Then it was Christmas and we decorated our hostel as best we could and played carols to help bring the spirit of Christmas to a country where no one actually celebrates it.

Now it’s 2011 and there are children banging at my door so I’d best go answer and find out what the new year will bring!