First post! T-minus.... 2 days... until departure!

I've been inspired by my more blog-savvy friends (now that I think about it, I can't think of many Duke soon-to-be-juniors who aren't keeping a blog this summer, and hey, I gotta be trendy, right?)  to create a forum where people could read my posts, see my pictures, and vicariously experience my inevitable awkward moments, frustrations, joys, sorrows, and everything in between.

The idea for the title of the blog "Optimism has no borders," came from a special friend who showed me the "Life is Good" tee-shirt that looks like this:

(The company donated 100 percent of the proceeds from the tee-shirt to the Haitian Child Relief Fund after the January 2010 earthquake).

Although I donated to the relief effort in other ways than buying a tee-shirt, the slogan stuck with me for some reason. I guess it is because so much of what we hear about Haiti is negative: that it is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, that there was "yet another" coup, that the tiny Caribbean island was rocked by an earthquake that measured a 7.0 on the Richter scale. Even the Haitian dictator (from '71-'86) Jean Claude Duvalier ("Baby Doc") once said that "The people of Haiti are destined to suffer." When I told people I was going to Haiti this summer, most of the comments I received were negative! A sarcastic friend remarked "Sounds like tons of fun," while a concerned pre-med classmate said "You're going to get cholera," and an elderly man I met at a restaurant in San Diego told me that I "needed to get my head checked," when I told him my plans for the upcoming summer.

Am I destined, like Duvalier said, to become a Negative Nancy like the rest of these folks? Only time will tell (and the title of my blog! If it changes to something depressing....y'all know what's up). For now, I remain an optimist. I know that I certainly can't solve all of (or any of) Haiti's problems: but that does not mean that they are all unsolvable. Hopefully, being in Haiti will show me (if and) how policy makers  are working towards solutions.

Back to packing! More later...