Most kids look forward to their 16th birthday for one reason: A driver's licence.

For Jocelyn Sweet, the development and communications manager for Taking It Global, her present opened a gateway to the world. It just didn't have a steering wheel attached.

"When I was 16 my mom gave me luggage — that was my Christmas present," the now 24-year old says laughing. "I was like, `What is this telling me?'

"And she said, `I'm telling you to go.'"

No, she wasn't being kicked out of the house. Sweet says her parents encouraged her to always go out and do what she wanted with her life.

"Growing up I was always told, `You're smart and you have all these opportunities and it's totally, totally your show, whatever you want to do,'" says Sweet.

Today she has used those suitcases to travel the world. And she found herself in development because she "can't imagine not being involved in positive work."

Now at Taking It Global, she believes she's found a home where she can feel like she's making a difference. "(Taking It Global is) so valuable and it's so organic and dynamic. It's a self-prescribed program — you choose how much you want to be involved."

She came by the travel bug almost through heredity. Her father worked in international transportation management for General Motors, which meant he did a lot of travelling. "(My dad) came home all the time with postcards and different looking currencies and stories and talking about strange foods he had eaten while travelling and that inspired me," says Sweet.

Her family would relocate every four years or so because of work. She considers herself a "GM Oshawa-Whitby brat," from Halifax and Vancouver all at the same time — although she adds her family returned to Halifax most often because that's where her parents prefer to be.

"I feel like I understand Canada," she says.

Since 15, Sweet's been involved in international development work. Her first encounter with the industry was one of those "ah-ha" moments she's had her share of. Her family was living in Vancouver at the time and she had begun work for a magazine called Spare Change. On her first journalism assignment she interviewed then 14-year-old "wonder-kid" Craig Kielburger, founder of Free The Children.

"He fundamentally altered my perspective on the world in a 2 1/2 hour conversation," she says. "He had shown that ... people my age could make a meaningful, lasting contribution to the state of the world."

From there on in — and for eight years after — she was hooked. During her summers, no matter which part of Canada she was living in, she would work as a facilitator in leadership camps in Thornhill for Free The Children.

In September 1999, with her university years upon her, she packed the luggage her mom gave her to head to Toronto for Ryerson's journalism school. It was during these years that international travelling opportunities abounded.

"I had a chance to stand in a Free The Children school surrounded by 175 totally excited kids and have them read to me," she says fondly of a trip to Ghana. "(It's amazing) to see the pride they had, showing me the could read, knowing I was from the organization that made it possible, and to know that organization is funded and supported by the efforts of young people from across the world."

Sweet continued her journeys, travelling to Thailand as a facilitator for an international program and Mexico to speak to the global council of the YMCA on behalf of Free The Children.

"I remember there was this one kid with us (in Thailand) and he was from Upper Canada College and he was on the floor playing with a kid that was infected with AIDS and he was enjoying this experience and connecting with this kid as a person," says Sweet. "That person from UCC will go on in his life with ... the memory of being in that AIDS hospital (and) the knowledge that he brought laughs and jokes and tickles to a kid who otherwise wouldn't have had that. That knowledge was really, really cool."

Seeing children in Bangkok who were effectively "born with a death sentence" had a major effect, inspiring her to continue what she does.

"I remember giving water to a 9-year-old Thai girl, the daughter of a prostitute, in the last stages of dying of AIDS," she says. "Coming to work (at Taking It Global) every day helps me deal with that memory. I have to turn it into fuel for what I can do. I can and have to continue do something about this."

So, after graduation in 2003 — and upon realizing after her fourth year internship at Canada AM in fall '02 that producing a national television show took too many of the wrong kind of sacrifices — Sweet applied for international work again.

At the time, Journalists for Human Rights was planning to send its first batch of journalists into Ghana in July 2003, just a couple of months after her graduation. "They asked me if by the first of July I'd be ready to move to Ghana," she says smiling.

She agreed and threw herself into what would become "the single most powerful experience" she has ever had.

"There's something really cool about learning about a new society and a new place through journalism," adds Sweet, who spent her time at The Chronicle in Accra, the capital.

"I got to write about HIV/AIDS and spend time in AIDS wards with stage-three patients. I got to (write) about child labour by talking to them and their families."

Ghana was only four years out of a dictatorship. Sweet says the fear of speaking out was still prevalent.

"It took me a week to get to the Chronicle's office on my own because they're so hidden in this random spot in the city. They were put there out of fear," she says, adding the founders had been jailed in the past for speaking out against the government.

Sweet was expecting that as a North American journalist she'd be the one teaching them. She was wrong.

"To sit in a room with an African journalist that had participated in a movement that overthrew a dictator was really humbling. I thought I knew what I was doing but there is a whole skill set that journalists in that type of situation have to develop," she says. "You gain a reverence for people who can handle that and who can handle the developing world."

Her time in Ghana was not all serious work. Friendships were made. Experiences — like her 24th birthday where she ate Italian food, in an African restaurant, with her Ethiopian boyfriend — will be forever etched in her mind.

"It took me a year to recover from Ghana," she says. "It was a readjustment process. (Being away as a foreigner) alters how you see North America when you come back."

She came back changed and the idea of starting in a lowly position at a Canadian media outlet where she would have to work her way up just didn't fly.

"I just felt like that would be a waste of what I had learned," she says. She hasn't lost her passion for journalism and its ideals — she just has no interest in writing banter or producing shows that won't change the world.

She knows the serendipitous moments that have brought her to where she is today are intertwined with the lessons she was taught by her parents.

"On (my dad's) 50th birthday I sent him a card from Narita airport in Japan and the card was saying, `Dad it used to be you who was flying through Narita and now it's me,'" she says happily. "It's all there (in life). It's what you choose to make of it and how you choose to participate."