I have been asked to present my Peace Corps assignment to you as a form of reconciliation. I taught balance-sheet reconciliation for thirty months, but there was certainly more going on than that.

During the winter of my senior year at UNC, I was far more interested in service to persons in third-world countries than in getting a job that would provide good housing and food for a new family, savings, and a little money for splurges. I saw no connection between the job description of assistant chief financial officer and ways of improving the lives of the various people I had seen and visited. In order to work in the third world, I applied to the Peace Corps, which gave me a volunteer position as a business advisor in Haiti.

Haiti has a serious lack of persons able to find ways for the poor to be contributing members of, or even operate, financial institutions. Haiti asked the Peace Corps to assign volunteers to transfer skills to interested and needy groups. I helped Haitian peasants learn and adopt basic management practices, accounting procedures, and a good process for defining a loan market and determining the levels of credit their borrowers might have.

I was then a person I had not expected to be: one of the most important business thinkers and leaders in a region. In fact, at the end of my service, my supervisor encouraged me to apply for a job with a micro-lending organization in Port-au-Prince. I spoke with the man doing the leg work for hiring, and he thought I might be the person they needed. I asked God if I should take the job if they offered it to me. God said “no.” This was difficult to accept because I still only wanted to work in the third world.

When I returned to the U. S., I applied for several jobs, but my effort produced nothing. After talking with people in international development careers and praying some more, I decided to apply for business school. I was admitted to the top two graduate international business programs in the country and chose to attend the International MBA program at the Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Four years ago, MBA school seemed like the last place on earth I would have ever wanted to be.

I share all these details to illustrate a process of reconciliation. I have at last harmonized the business world with my desire to help others. Because of this reconciliation, I feel I will be much more effective in my vocation and much more enriched by it. I hope you can find a few examples of reconciliation in your own lives and experience the joy of discovering them.

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