Not enough of us hit the “reset” buttons on our lives. Or we wait too long.

Suzie Ahn, a former colleague of mine in the good old days of the San Bernardino Sun sports department, hit the button, and she didn’t wait too long.

Suzie did what some of us talk about doing, but never actually get around to:

She joined the Peace Corps, and has embarked on two-plus years of living and working and trying to make people’s lives better in Benin.

Yes. Benin. one of those little sliver countries on the south coast of west Africa. You know, next to Togo.

Here is a link to her blog from Benin. It makes for fascinating reading because it gets you inside the day-to-day of the Peace Corps existence.

It isn’t necessarily about saving lives or finding a new way to get a greater yield of yams or instilling a desire for representative democracy … it’s about coming to grips with a (quite) foreign culture and seeing what your own skill set can bring to the situation to make it better. And it also is about showing an American face in a faraway place and showing that we can grasp geopolitical issues broader than the red/blue-state thing.

Suzie is working in trying to improve a community information center, and so far that mostly seems about getting a better internet hookup. Hasn’t quite happened yet, but she seems to have identified the problem.

Meantime, she gives us an idea of the cultural and the language issues, and where she lives, and the government bureaucracy.

Like many people who spent most of the careers as copy editors, Suzie writes very nicely, and her copy is clean and coherent. (Well, we expected that part of it.)

If ever you thought about chucking it all and doing two years with the Peace Corps … this is a must read.

And if you just want to see how a really kind and intelligent Korean/American thirtysomething woman gets along in a country most of us know little or nothing about … well, there’s that part, too.

I readily concede, after having read every post she’s put up, that I know I couldn’t do what she is doing. Abu Dhabi and the UAE are not California, but not like Benin isn’t. Suzie is out there. She is asking friends to send her weekly news magazines because she doesn’t know what’s happening in the world. That’s not a problem for us here in the UAE.

So, bravo, to Suzie. She didn’t hate her job, but she seems to have decided that it was time to try something else, and her “something else” is pretty darn ambitious. (Though she comes from a family with at least one diplomat, I do believe; so an exotic posting may not be out of her comfort zone.)

Take care, Suzie,  and we will be reading you. Hope the wifi (or whatever) comes up soon.