BUCKING THE SYSTEM: ACHIEVEMENT CONFERENCE REINFORCES DECISION TO STAY HOME

This is not where I envisioned myself 10 years ago.

As an 18 year old, I had dreams of being a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press or a Russian interpreter for the White House or United Nations.

I wanted to travel for a few years before settling down in a not-so-big city near the East Coast with a well-paying and wondrously simple public relations job. Only then would I think about getting married and having children.

I held this dream close until my junior year in college, which is when I realized that people in other countries really don't like Americans much. In fact, that was about the same time several journalists and embassy workers had been kidnapped or found dead or both.

That's when I realized I might need to narrow my focus a little.

Although my aspirations moved closer to home, I can guarantee you I never envisioned working within a 30-mile radius of Charleston. Growing up, I vowed to get as far away from that one-horse town and its single stop light and lack of entertainment, appropriate housing and job opportunities as I could.

There was nothing for me there as far as I was concerned, and other than the occasional semiannual visit to see my parents, I would really have no reason to make any appearances.

And then I fell in love and got married. And then I got active in the community and got a new job in Cape Girardeau that I actually enjoyed. And then the children came and we bought a house.

And so I decided to stay awhile.

I had been questioning the wisdom of these decisions recently. Patrick and I both still have some goals we want to achieve, goals we know might not be attainable living in this area. But we like it here and we didn't know if we were ready to leave the quiet home life, civic work and network of friends we've developed.

A trip to St. Louis for an educational conference this week helped me put things into perspective. I was one of four speakers from this area making a presentation about the efforts we're making to improve academic and social achievement in African-American students. The other speakers, all childhood friends of mine, had similarly altered their dreams and had become involved in civic efforts in either Cape Girardeau, Charleston, Pinhook or some combination of the three.

None of us planned our lives this way, but as we spoke about the work we're doing and the small successes we've had, you could see the small-town pride we shared shining through. As we said during the conference, our decisions to stay close to home weren't perfect or thrilling to us at the time, but we all could see the impact our presence was making.

After our presentation, we were very surprised by the standing ovation we received. Participants later said they respected our honesty and our decisions. Some even said they wished they could be brave enough to return to the small towns in which they were reared to make an impact.

We never considered ourselves or our decisions as brave. Rather, our views were that we had taken the only options available to us at the time and tried to do some good. Our work professionally and in the community is simply a product of what our parents taught us at an early age.

As we left that conference, we all felt a little better about living and working in Southeast Missouri. Regardless of what we're doing, we're young, educated professionals who came home. We're working to uplift not just our towns, but our region, and that's a pretty good thing.

Sometimes the only decision is the best decision.