About Sarah

From Texas to DC to New York to Kenya!  Who would have thought?

I grew up outside of Houston, TX, where my parents still live.  After graduating from Pearland High School in 2001, I moved to the Texas Hill Country to attend the University of Texas.  I loved college and fell in love with Austin – it remains my favorite city in the US to visit.  I recommend visiting.  (Warning: you may never want to leave.)

My time in Austin was formative for me.  I started learning about the world beyond Texas, studying government and becoming very interested in the political process.  It was there that I decided to try a vegetarian lifestyle, which has remained a very important part of my life.

I graduated from college in 2004 and decided that my next step would be law school.  I had my sights set on studying law in Washington DC, so I sent out one application to Georgetown Law (I was broke at the time and didn’t have the money for more application fees).  Luckily for me, I was accepted, and I packed up everything I owned and headed east to start studying the law in the US capital.

I loved law school  – I felt like I was learning all of the secret mechanisms behind how the United States functions.  During my time at Georgetown, I became quite interested in international law.  I worked at a law firm in Costa Rica for a summer and studied abroad at an Argentina law school for a semester.  I also was drawn to classes about children and women’s rights.  My two favorite classes in law school were Street Law, in which I coached an inner city mock trial team, and Women & Criminality, where I learned about how women fare in the criminal justice system.

I graduated from law school in 2008 and moved to New York to work as an associate at Seyfarth Shaw.  Before I started my job, my best friends from law school and I took a road trip through South Africa, Lesotho, and Mozambique.  During this trip, I took a tour of a South African orphanage, where I found 50 children crammed into a tiny room without adequate food, love, or care.  It broke my heart and planted a seed in my head.   I decided that I could not live in the proverbial vacuum in the United States while children around the world were suffering.  I needed to act.  If I didn’t, who would?

The rest, as they say, is history.  I found a perfect fit for my desire to help children – Flying Kites, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of orphaned and vulnerable children in Kenya and around the world.  I am moving to Kenya at the end of October 2009 to live at the Flying Kites Children Center and to start my next adventure.  Life is good.