KDSL talks with Emily Blackshire about Gap Year

KDSL will interview for intern Emily Blackshire on 26 March at 12noon EST. She grew up in a small town in South Carolina. Throughout the years, she worked on various summer projects through the US with after school programs and summer camps geared towards children in underserved communities. In 2010 and 2011 she spent weeks in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania working with a primary school and an HIV clinic that directed her attentions towards education and job creation projects in the developing countries. She became a regular tutor in an immigrant community in her SC town and interned with KDSL during the spring and summer of 2012, where the value of education was solidified a hundredfold for her. She spent autumn of 2012 working with Light Gives Heat, a nonprofit working in job creation to an IDP community in Uganda and volunteering with preteen girls at a primary school across the street from her Jinja home. She is currently living in the DC area interning at Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a social entrepreneurship company that gives innovators worldwide a chance to pursue their efforts in world change. She is currently working on becoming TEFL certified in order to teach English and literacy classes to the non-English speaking immigrants in her SC community this summer. To access her blog, you can check out http://emilyblackshire.wordpress.com.