JonBischke.com

It’s been three months since I’ve blogged and so I wanted to check in with some updates as it’s been an exciting and very memorable month. So here’s what I’ve been up to (in chronological order):

eduFire is now a part of Camelback Education Group – In June eduFire.com became a part of Camelback Education Group, a higher education holding company in Phoenix, Arizona. The blog post on eduFire has more details but I’ll add here that I’m excited about the future of eduFire as a part of Camelback, a company that I think has the potential to be a huge player in the online education space in the future. I’ll be helping with the transition but also starting to look at what my next career-related adventure will be. I am incredibly thankful to all of the people who’ve supported eduFire since we started it in 2007. I’m very proud of what we accomplished and very grateful to all those who helped make it happen.

Carrie and I got married! – On June 19th Carrie and I tied the knot in Lexington, Kentucky. It was an incredibly special week for us as we got to enjoy it with ~200 of our family and closest friends. We were married by our great friend Mark Dowds and one of our all-time favorite musicians, Rob Costlow, played at the ceremony. Oh, and there was a rap. All in all we could not have asked for a more amazing experience and are humbled and awed by how blessed we are. Thank you to all of you who traveled from places far and wide to be there with us in Kentucky. It meant so much to us!

Dubai and Ethiopia – For our honeymoon we went to Dubai and Ethiopia. Dubai was first up and was a really interesting experience. I kinda think that Dubai might be the world’s biggest start-up. You drive around the city and see all the cranes and skyscrapers and it’s hard to fathom that most of this didn’t exist a few decades ago. Really, a very audacious place. From the world’s tallest building to the world’s biggest (and most impressive) mall to ridiculous man made islands, this place screams “larger than life”.

It certainly isn’t a perfect place. Far from eco-friendly and the whole “slave labor” accusations thing is more than a bit troubling. But on the whole I have to say that I loved Dubai because of how entrepreneurial it felt. Similar to Bugsy Siegel rolling into Nevada in the 40s and envisioning Vegas, Dubai is really the product of an insanely bold vision and imagination.

After Dubai we traveled to Ethiopia. We wanted to incorporate some service work into our honeymoon and my parents lived in Ethiopia for a year when they were first married so we decided to follow in their footsteps. Simply put, it was a life-changing experience. It’s one thing to hear about people who live on less than a dollar a day. It’s another to actually sit with them in their homes and talk to them and play with their children. The range of emotions that a place like Ethiopia evokes is overwhelming. I wish that everyone could have the experience that we had at least once in their life.

We spent several days working with orphans in Debre Zeyit, a town about an hour outside of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia’s capital and largest city). Carrie and I will never forget those kids for as long as we live. Many of them have lost parents to HIV and some of them are infected with HIV themselves. Their lives are poor and destitute and it would be easy to pity them. Until you realize what they do have. Huge smiles. A sense of community like none that I’ve seen anywhere else in the world. An unbelievable spirit. On one hand you want to help and do whatever you can to help lift them out of poverty. On the other hand there’s a huge part of me that felt that anything that disrupted their incredibly strong social fabric would be a tragedy. As I shared with many people after first going to Africa in 2003, nobody in the world smiles as big or as easily as Africans do. (By the way, if you haven’t already check out the documentary I Am Because We Are. It was similar to our experience although the situation in Malawi is even more dire than Ethiopia.)

To sum up, it’s been an incredible last few months and I’m left with both a huge sense of gratitude for how blessed I am and also a stronger sense of urgency than I’ve ever had before to go out and make the world a better place. I’ve been reminded several times in the last few weeks of Ted Kennedy’s eulogy of RFK. You really should watch the whole thing (often) but this passage in particular does a pretty good job of bringing it all together for me.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.