A good day for human rights in America

I teared up a lil bit reading this article today.

In 2008, I watched the numbers come in for Obama at 7am from a consulate gathering in India.  After swelling with pride for my country for the first time in my voting-age life and taking a few euphoric calls from Kenya, I called home to express my excitement.

The tone of my mother's voice when she picked up the phone took the wind completely out of my sails: she said she couldn't be truly happy about the victory because California's Prop 8 had passed the same day.  Coming from a woman brought up in the '50s in a Catholic household in Westchester, not her California-raised hippie liberal daughter, this sentiment reminded me how little the Obama victory actually symbolized a nation moving forward, and how much work there was to be done.

Two and a half years later, mom should be damn proud of her home state.  NY has done what CA couldn't do: nurtured a champion of the cause (Andrew Cuomo), organized a coalition of disconnected lobbying organizations, garnered support and muscle across party lines and overpowered the formidable force of the Catholic Church.  All this sure seems like it would be harder in an east coast state that contains Wall Street than a west coast state that contains the Castro*... so basically what I'm trying to say is, nice work, New York.  California, get your shit together.

Also, a shout-out to my father's employer of 35 years, Xerox, which made a significant contribution to winning the first Republican vote by endorsing the bill.  My school's LGBT club does a lot of work to promote and collaborate with companies that support equality for all their employees, and it's nice to see corporations standing up for what they believe in. (Hint hint, Exxon Mobil.)


*Obviously I know it's a bit more complex than this.  But it's still embarrassing to be a Californian when it comes to this issue.

And now, to Nicaragua

Oh, hey there blog.  It's been a while.  A year and a half, to be precise.  Sorry about that - business school turned out to be a little busier than expected.  But now that I'm back in developing country land, it seems only reasonable to start you up again for the moment.

The 5-second update is that I've been in my first year of the MBA program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business for the past 9 months.  I'm concentrating in Social Entrepreneurship and Finance, participating in way too many extracurriculars, and taking advantage of every possible opportunity to go abroad.  That has manifested itself in a two-week consulting trip to Brazil over spring break, and now my internship at an impact investing firm in Nicaragua called Agora Partnerships.

I'll save the long detailed update on Agora and my work for later, and for now will suffice with periodic random musings about life in Managua.  Up first: the fascinating life stories of taxi drivers.

It seems that there are two types of cab drivers in Managua: super sketchy and super overqualified.  The other interns and I have been warned over and over about the dangers of taking unknown cabs from the street in Managua (which we do anyway), so it's safe to say that there are a lot of bad cabs out there.  At the same time, the economic situation here has worsened so steadily over the past few years that unemployment has taken its toll, particularly on the higher educated sector of the workforce.

Unemployment in Nicaragua

http://www.indexmundi.com/nicaragua/unemployment_rate.html

The result: people with PhDs driving taxis to make a living.  In the past week I've met an agricultural engineer, a doctor, and a dance instructor who spent three years in San Francisco.  Fascinating, vibrant people with amazing life stories, but rough times.

I'll pontificate more later on what this overqualification issue means for entrepreneurship and innovation in the Central American economy, since that's what I'm working on every day.