I was a college senior majoring in Spanish. I had just filmed a documentary in Buenos Aires on the Argentine Jewish community as part of my senior thesis (never mind I never got around to editing the film, the paper was excellent). I wasn’t ready to go home, I was done with school for a while, and I still couldn’t resign myself to getting a corporate job and beginning my ticky-tacky American adulthood. It was a no-brainer that I was going abroad. The only question was where.

I had traveled with the American Jewish World Service Corps (AJWS), and from their weekly e-newsletter learned that there were two Jewish organizations sending young Jews abroad: AJWS and The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). These programs place applicants in the communities worldwide in which they work, both Jewish and secular. AJWS was looking for higher degree graduates, but JDC was interested in Bachelor’s graduates. Like me.

I applied, hoping to go to someplace exotic, like India or Ethiopia, but ready to go anywhere, really, so long as I had some connection to the place. I received a call several weeks later – how did I feel about working in Ukraine, in a city called Dnepropetrovsk?

Read the full article in the New Vilna Review.