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Dispatches from the Field Archive:
April Deibert

Strange Happenings and Some Well-Deserved R&R

Adelaide, Australia, Sept. 10 -- Since my last update, a lot has happened.  Just as I was down about leaving my beautiful home in South Australia, I learned that I would be heading to another country for an internship at a U.S. Embassy from January to April 2008. The U.S. Department of State is sending me to the ex-Soviet bloc in Central Asia. Interestingly enough, as I fell asleep the night before, I was watching an episode of "MacGyver" set “Somewhere in Central Asia… present day.”  So when I woke up to a phone call from the Central Asian Affairs Bureau, I thought I was certainly dreaming.

And so, as I’ve come to realize, reality is always stranger than fiction—randomness comes when you least expect it.

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A Military Coup, a Cyclone, Conservation Work and a Wonderful Job

Adelaide, Australia, July 16 -- "Why can't you?" A simple question from an Australian friend helped me decide that it was at last my turn to move overseas. I had made many close friends over the years while living in International House and working as an adventure counselor at a ranch in Northern California. Adelaide, in South Australia, seemed like the perfect place to land - not only did I have friends there but it was 180 degrees different from my hometown of San Diego.

Little did I know that studying abroad would take me on the adventure of a lifetime - experiencing everything from wine tasting in the Barossa vineyards, Australia's best-known wine region, to doing conservation work in the Outback, to being flooded in by a cyclone near the Great Barrier Reef, to witnessing a military coup in Fiji.

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