impact

By Emily Nagler

Although I'm less than halfway through my PiLA fellowship -- five months and one day to be exact -- I feel like I've become a member of both the community of Patzún, Guatemala and my host organization, the Women's Justice Initiative (WJI). To my surprise, it took only a few weeks for me to feel welcomed and settled as a member of the team, despite all the barriers I had created in my mind.

When I received news a year and a half ago that I had been accepted as the PiLA fellow at the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress, I felt a massive rush of conflicting emotions. I was ecstatic about the new opportunity, hopeful that I would learn and grow, but at the same time very scared to be doing this alone, as the only Princeton fellow in San José, Costa Rica.