Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Calvert and along with Ioana, I will be participating in the Modern Story Project for the summer term. I am a recent graduate from Middlebury College where I majored in Geography and minored in African Studies. This will be my second trip to India and in the last few days the anticipation of returning to this magnificent country has kept me up at night. I am so grateful to have an opportunity to work with this project and extremely honored that Remy and Piya have trusted me and Ioana with their brain child. What follows is a brief introduction to me and a small snip-it of my life story.

I was born and raised just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. My two older sisters were 14 and 11 years old when I was born and quickly became my second and third mothers. I came into the world in the middle of my family’s story, having missed what I like to call “the lost decade” (the 1970s).  I took it upon myself, at an early age, to write my character into the subsequent chapters of my family’s story in a significant way.

Following in my sister’s footsteps I attended the Agnes Irwin School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania from Kindergarten through my senior year. Throughout high school my primary distractions from  my school work were rowing for both school and club crew teams and being a leader in my school’s community service organizations, which was somewhat of a tradition in our family. When it came time to decide on college  in my senior year, having been bitten by the travel bug early in my life,  I knew that going straight from Wayne, Pennsylvania to four years of college in the US was not what I wanted to do. With the unconditional support of my parents I embarked on a gap year adventure that took me first to Atenas, Costa Rica with the School for Field Studies, then on to Harlan, Kentucky where I was a teaching intern at the Pine Mountain Settlement School and finally on my first trip to India where I taught English and Art at the Little Stars School in Benares.

In addition to teaching while I was in India, I also worked with the National Polio Eradication Campaign helping volunteer nurses and doctors vaccinate children with the oral polio vaccine. While I had traveled in the developing world before this was one of my first experiences traveling independent of my family and it shook up everything I had believed to be true about the world. Overwhelmed by all that was learning, I decided to dive headfirst into my work with the Polio campaign and attempt to determine where my skills could be of use.  This experience helped me to identify my passions and interests in international public health.

While at Middlebury College, despite a strong desire to return to India, I got sidetracked and focused my studies within the Geography major on sub-Saharan Africa. In my Junior year I spent the fall semester studying at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and my spring semester with the School for International Training in Cape Coast, Ghana. When the opportunity presented itself to return to India on the eve of my graduation from Middlebury I jumped at it immediately. I had been waiting four years to return and thought that the opportunity to teach, which is something I love to do, was the perfect way to begin my post-college life. I can not wait to meet our students in just a few days now and to share their stories with you. That is all for now from the US!