Tell Me More

My name is Michael Rossiter. Well, my legal name is Michael Brian Sloan-Rossiter. But let’s keep things simple.

I grew up outside Boston and recently moved into an apartment in the South End of that city. I spent four happy years at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. I studied trade, development economics and government. I graduated in June of 2008 and moved back to Boston.

After college, I started a job at a firm that provides consulting services to private equity funds. Mostly, the firm generates due diligence reports on an acquisition target’s market, market position, and customer base. Also, I snuck onto a couple of strategy projects, which I really dig. It is an engaging and interesting job and the fast project timelines has allowed me to look at a large number of companies in a short period of time. I think I was actually proving to be useful towards the end of my first year. Not bad.

So, to take stock, after a year in the real world I had a good job, a nice apartment, and great friends. Life was easy…I hate – no, I f***ing despise – easy.

So about a month and a half ago, I sat in my cube when a gchat message popped into my reality. It was from Zack Scott, my freshman and sophomore roommate. Zack had been diverted to Rwanda for some do-goodery by the financial consulting firm he was planning to start with. “I think we’re hiring someone to come for the rest of the year. you interested?”

I was working on something while I chatted and I didn’t think at all about my response. It was, in the terminology of Malcolm Gladwell, a “blink” moment.

“Yeah. Tell me more.”

So I type these words from Musanze, Rwanda. For the next four months I will be taking a hard look at the workings of a health center that serves the 30,000 people of a rural, low income community in northwest Rwanda.

Please expect this blog to be a lot different in tone and content than this post. Mostly, I will be posting about Rwanda and the project, CCHIPS. Check out the project website, http://www.wwhps.org . Also, I will be cross posting a lot of what I put here on the Field Blog on that site: http://www.wwhps.org/field-blog.