Greetings from the AMIGOS International Office in Houston! My name is Leslie Eme and last week I began my new job with AMIGOS as the Youth Ambassador Program Director. AMIGOS has dreamed of bringing Latin American Youth to the US for some time and now this dream has become a reality, and I am so excited to be a part of it. The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) has selected AMIGOS as a recipient of the Youth Ambassadors Program. ECA awarded AMIGOS a 2-year grant to manage the exchange of 30 youth annually from Paraguay and Uruguay and 15 youth annually from the U.S. I will be managing the program from the San Francisco, California area, where we will be recruiting host families for the Latin American Youth Ambassadors. I first became involved with AMIGOS as a Chicago North Chapter Volunteer in 2003. Since then, I have served on Project Staff as a Project Supervisor, Associate Project Director and, most recently, as the 2010 Project Director in Cotopaxi, Ecuador. My experience as an AMIGOS Volunteer was incredibly powerful. It was the first time I had traveled outside of the US, and it instilled in me an identity as a global citizen that has shaped my life choices ever since. I have loved guiding other AMIGOS Volunteers through their life-changing summers and am now thrilled to be directing a new program that will provide transformative experiences for youth from Paraguay, Uruguay and the US! There is a lot of work to do before our first group of Paraguayan and Uruguayan Youth Ambassadors arrive in California on January 6, 2012. Over the next couple of months we will be meeting with our partners in Paraguay and Uruguay, looking for host families in the San Francisco Bay area and finalizing our program curriculum and agenda. If you are as excited as I am about this new program and would like to get involved, please feel free to email me at leme@amigoslink.org.