Aimee Bothwell

The Wallenberg Fellowship has provided me with funds to spend a month in Xian, China, this summer, volunteering to help educate and care for children with physical and mental disabilities.  Disabilities are widely misunderstood and highly stigmatized in China, and children who are born disabled often face a bleak future.  Resources for disabled children and their families are almost non-existent, and even mildly disabled children cannot attend public schools.  Through a program with Cross-Cultural Solutions, a non-profit global volunteer organization, I will be placed at a non-profit day care and education center for infants, children, and teenagers.

In pursuit of a similar objective, I will spend July and August working in Madagascar with Azafady, an NGO based in London, England.  Some of the main focuses of the program will be digging wells to bring clean water to people in remote villages, building schools, and helping to renew and revive some of the vegetation that has been torn down through slash and burn methods of agriculture.  After flying into the capital of Antananarivo, I will spend the first three weeks in Forth Dauphin, an urban area on the southern shore of Madagascar. Here, the other program members and I will be participating in health education programs with local clinics, as well as learning about the Malagasy culture and traditions.  After Fort Dauphin, we will spend seven weeks in remote rural communities of the Tolagnaro region constructing and furnishing schools and developing systems for delivering clean drinking water.

The Wallenberg Fellowship has provided me with the ability to participate in Azafady’s program.  It will allow me to help out a community in need and provide me with valuable experience and tools to pursue a future related to urban studies and poverty in this country. I have hopes that my experiences with Azafady and the Malagasy people will supply me with the knowledge to work in a similar capacity here in urban areas of the United States, where resources are scarce and the need is great.  It will also give me an inside look into how NGOs function, which would be useful in starting a non-profit of my own here in the States.  Already, the organization and reach of Azafady is something I admire, and I aspire to duplicate this level of service in my future.

Stephanie Elise Curtis

During my time in Honduras, I was most struck by the resourcefulness of the people. The community hospital I volunteered in was short on the most basic supplies such as gloves, needles, hospital gowns and medicine cups. This hardly seemed to faze the nurses; perhaps because they had never witnessed the abundant supplies in U.S. hospitals. To save, they used cloth diapers and washed and reused medicine cups. At the cost of ideal sanitation, they used gloves sparingly and reused needles on the same patient.

Despite the need, the nurses continued to be generous with their patients. Newborns would wear hospital clothes home because the mothers couldn’t afford to buy some of their own. It was difficult to return to the hospitals in Michigan and see the unbelievable waste that occurs with such thoughtlessness.

I was moved by the discovery that almost everything can be reused by someone. Once when I was on a field trip to a neighboring town, I saw a man wearing a University of Michigan cap and couldn’t resist the urge to shout “Go Blue!” The man had no idea what I was talking about, but at least I knew that wolverines give to charity.

A year later and I still can’t make any big purchase without thinking of the value the amount of money could translate to someone in Honduras. That plane ticket could feed a family for two months or those shoes could buy a respiratory machine for a child in a hospital.

Aside from the lessons on the value of money, I learned things that will enrich my entire career. As a nursing student working and living with Spanish-speaking nurses and doctors for five weeks, I drastically improved my medical and conversational Spanish. My dream to become a bilingual nurse is coming true as I begin my first nursing job on a pediatric floor in a community with many Spanish-speaking families here in Michigan. The support I received from the Wallenberg Travel Fellowship will continue to spark positive change in the world with each Spanish-speaking child I treat. I also hope to continue to visit Honduras throughout my career on medical mission trips.

In the past year I have grown a great deal as an extension of my experience. After traveling solo through a developing country, being dependent on a second language, climbing underneath a 140 foot waterfall, helping deliver babies in an outdated foreign hospital, and making friends with fellow volunteers from around the world, there isn’t much that I feel I cannot do.

I feel like each person has a duty to use their gifts to better the world around them, and I thank the Wallenberg Foundation for using theirs to better mine.

I traveled back to my home country, India, to establish an after-school program Pudiyador-Adyar for under-privileged children in the slums of Madras (Chennai). The program was modeled after an existing program called Pudiyador. The central idea revolves around the belief that children should have a wholesome childhood, irrespective of the background they come from. Although this idea seems simple and obvious, I quickly realized how this is not the case in places where children are viewed as potentially cheap labor.

Since my work was in my hometown, I thought it could be accomplished smoothly, but nothing could have prepared me for those crazy but amazing six weeks. I encountered frustrating bureaucracy that stood between us and our objectives, pessimistic people who questioned the very need to educate under-privileged children and tiresome cultural practices that made life very difficult in general. On the other hand, I worked with some of the nicest people, saw some fantastic work done in other organizations, learned a whole lot from the children at Pudiyador, and truly understood what it takes to start a non-profit organization from scratch and run it successfully.

Most important lesson learned: Impacting society even on a small scale is not a 6-week affair. It not only involves a lot more time than I had imagined, but also more people, resources and... obstacles! Starting a Pudiyador would not have been possible without the Wallenberg fellowship money and the inspiration that it provided. I also want to mention that it was certainly not a single-handed effort. I had at least three people from the Pudiyador family by my side at all times. Together with their experiences, resources, goodwill and encouragement, we managed to start a center to help children in need. A year after that was done, we are still working hard to keep the center up and running from half-way across the world with occasional visits. A registered Michigan non-profit called PACE now bridges the gap between the two countries. A University of Michigan student organization called Inner PACE now works directly with the running of Pudiyador. More and more people are getting involved at various levels, from volunteering to work with the children on the ground to contributing ideas at the organization level.

The children at Pudiyador do not really understand the scale of it all, but they will do so as they grow up. I truly believe that their well-rounded education will help them transcend their economic and social boundaries. Perhaps they will soon learn that no ideal is too dreamy for the real world.

Matthew Leslie Santana

I am a third-year student from Miami, Florida pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Latin American and Caribbean Studies and a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance. I am also active in sexual health related activities on campus and have been a member of the World AIDS Week Planning Committee and the Sexual Health Peer Educators with Chinyere Neale at University Health Services.

As a violinist, I have performed with the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama as a member of the Teen String Quartet in Miami. In 2005, I was one of eight semi-finalists in the junior division of the Sphinx National Music Competition for Black and Latina/o string players.

As a member of Trio St. James, a piano trio comprised of undergraduates at the University of Michigan School of Music, I have performed twice for President Mary Sue Coleman.

Since coming to the University of Michigan, I have been named an Angell Scholar and have been given the William J. Branstrom Freshman Prize in recognition of my academic achievement.

This summer, I will be going to South Africa as a member of the Pedagogy of Action program led by Dr. Nesha Haniff and sponsored by the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies and the Women’s Studies Department. While in South Africa, I will be teaching an oral methodology in HIV prevention developed by Dr. Haniff for people of all ages and literacy levels. As a part of the teaching process, I will train students to teach this methodology in English, Zulu, Xhosa, and other South African languages. While in South Africa, I will be working at the University of Zululand in rural KwaZulu-Natal, at Cato Crest Primary School in Durban, and at Damelin Community College in Johannesburg. While at the University of Zululand, I will be involved in conducting focus groups and in-depth interviews in order to assess the impact of Dr. Haniff’s oral methodology from the previous years of the program.

In addition to the Raoul Wallenberg International Summer Travel Fellowship, I have received the Center for International and Comparative Studies Student Research Fellowship and the College of LS&A Summer Opportunity Scholarship to fund my summer travel and research. I am very thankful for the generous support of the Wallenberg Endowment, without which I would not have been able to participate in this transformational program. Upon my return to the United States, I hope to help publish reports based on the findings from the research conducted in South Africa and to use my experience to inform and enhance my sexual health work in the campus community.

Under the generous fellowship grant endowed by the Wallenberg Committee, my work in the area included volunteering in a health clinic and teaching English to kids and healthcare professionals. 

In the Regional Hospital, my experiences included accompanying physicians in their daily rounds in ICU and Surgery, observing routine checkups and surgical procedures, observing interactions between physicians and their patients, and learning some basic knowledge about medicine and the Peruvian healthcare system.   I also frequently made efforts to initiate conversations with the patients to learn about their health conditions and lifestyles.  These experiences are immensely valuable to me personally as an aspiring physician.  After spending 30 hours per week in a hospital, watching multiple surgeries, and encountering a countless number of people being cured of their illnesses, my desire to study and practice medicine grew even more intense – I wanted to be a part of the life-saving process that I’d witnessed on a daily basis in the hospital. 

After working in the hospital, we taught English to school children and some hospital staff.   Since they often receive English-speaking tourist patients, the hospital workers were enthusiastic to learn English, so I utilized my medical Spanish vocabulary acquired in a Spanish class.  The children we worked with were of ages 6-13 and from a poverty-stricken area of Puno, and their families had very little means of providing them necessities like notebooks and pencils, let alone a good education.  But the kids were so eager to learn from us; by our second day, our class had doubled in size.  I believe that our presence in their lives gave them very positive messages – that education is important, that they matter, and that we care about them.  The whole experience was emotional; our farewell on the last night was filled with tears.

During my trip, I gained an understanding of the local culture, improvements in Spanish communication, and exposure to clinical medicine and surgical procedures.  But most important, this experience solidified my enthusiasm for humanitarian work and intensified my passion for medicine.  I believe I will continue to devote myself to efforts of similar nature.

David Osit

I am a filmmaker and undergraduate student at the University of Michigan.  Over the course of several months in the summer of 2008, I will be traveling throughout East Africa where I will work with FilmAid International, a non-profit organization dedicated to harnessing the power of film for education and social change in refugee populations worldwide.

I will monitor and evaluate services and communications in FilmAid offices in Nairobi, Kenya for several weeks while also working with the refugee population through interviews and volunteer work within Kenyan refugee camps. 

Specifically, I will be traveling to the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps within Kenya, which house primarily Sudanese and Somali refugees respectively.  

Additionally, with the help of the Wallenberg Fellowship, I will be traveling to refugee communities in Rwanda and Uganda to meet with camp coordinators with regard to extending FilmAid programs, while drafting a preliminary handbook for gauging infrastructural needs for future operations along with a report monitoring communication between the field offices.

Raised in New York, I am a senior in the Department of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan and I plan to ultimately make a career of directing and producing documentary film geared towards social issues while pursuing a graduate degree in visual anthropology or comparative media.  

From an equipped and branded bus, teams of young people, including university students and graduates, travel to low-income schools to offer education on health, safety, and the environment, while motivating youth to engage in community development by applying these new skills.  In Kiswahili slang, chanuka means “to sharpen up, or get with it, by using knowledge.”  The program challenges and recognizes young people for their participation in promoting peace and contributing to building a more productive nation.

The Wallenberg Travel Fellowship is allowing me to do meaningful work in both health and education, in a post-conflict country with a struggling health infrastructure and education system.  I am gaining meaningful insight into Kenya’s education system and the way health education is implemented through visits with Chanuka to local primary schools.  In the past, I have considered pursuing a career in international education policy, and this experience has solidified that goal.  I truly believe that education is the heart valve of any country and that health and education are inseparable.  Poor health affects one’s ability to receive a quality education, and a quality education is the greatest predictor of one’s future health and quality of life.  This experience will inform and shape my future studies and work in international education policy and public health.

Divya Srinivasan

I am currently doing my PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

India, where I was born, is a nation of inequalities: although one of the ‘fastest growing’ economies of the world, more than half of its population of a billion survives on less than 50 cents a day, living in dismal conditions. The greatest challenge faced by India is to make its growth more inclusive; to ensure that its economic growth offsets the alarming disparity between the privileged minority and the less fortunate majority.

Growing up in a middle class family shielded me from the real India: I saw neglected street children every day. Yet, their hunger, disease and life in appalling sanitary conditions could not penetrate even my outer shell of consciousness. This attitude can be easily misconstrued as indifference. However, the truth is that the magnitude of the problem is so enormous that I felt overwhelmed and powerless, not knowing where to start.

It was only after a year of being away as a graduate student in Ann Arbor that my shell began to break.

In the summer of 2006, I chanced upon an article in the Ann Arbor Observer about Pudiyador, a non-profit organization in India that works towards the empowerment of underprivileged communities. Pudiyador’s vision is to overcome existing socio-economic challenges by empowering people using a wholesome approach that includes both balanced education and social support.

During my next trip to India in 2006, I encountered the same poverty that I was accustomed to; but this time, the experience shattered my shell. It moved me. It was real and it made me react. My paradigm shifted gradually: from awareness, concern and distant support to direct action.

In 2007, understanding that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty, I took up a project with Pudiyador-India, to work on an after-school center for underprivileged children in the semi-rural community of Urappakkam, outside Chennai.

The community of Urappakkam now has a Pudiyador center, to complement the poor quality of education the children receive in nearby government-run schools. In addition, Pudiyador also organizes several extracurricular and community activities, organizes distribution of nutritious food supplements, and free medical care.

The center currently supports 40 children aged 11-16 years. Due to the environment in which they are brought up, when our children come in at the age of 11, certain habits are
already hard-wired into their system that are very hard to tackle. Stricken by malnutrition, furthered by the lack of attention from parents and teachers alike, they are also already disadvantaged in terms of learning.  So one of my main goals for this summer is to resolve existing issues in the center and expand the program to include 30 younger children aged 6-10 years.

I spent two months with nine other volunteers from across the United States completing door-to-door surveys of about two thousand households surrounding Bukhaweka – a teeny village about an hour’s drive outside of the country’s fourth biggest city, Mbale.  We administered basic health tests such as heartbeat and blood pressure and temperature checks to each member of the family that lived there and also asked questions about the family history and recorded the conditions of the homestead.  These surveys will be used by the local and regional government to determine the most pressing problems and where to most effectively allot government funds. 

We then filled out a slip listing the members or the family who were ill and describing their malady and invited them to bring the paper to a clinic we were holding.  The clinic had two doctors (there were only three in the 300,000 person sub-county), a dentist, and discounted medication and was financed by our program fees.  It cost each family slightly less than one dollar to receive a check-up and whatever medication that they needed.  We visited homesteads six days a week for six weeks and held two three-day clinics.  Overall, it was estimated that we treated about 1300 people. 

But it was heartbreaking knowing that, when the medicines ran out, the womens’ arthritis would return, when the children’s bandages fell off the cuts would only become infected again, and when the glasses broke the wearer would no longer see – even that little bit.  And then there were the bigger problems of HIV and measles that will never be fixed – that, even if diagnosed, are a death sentence because no one can afford a car ride to get tested in the city, much less the medications to successfully treat whatever it is that is eating away at their body.  

Considering all of these things, it is unbearable for me to be so self-righteous to say that I made a real difference.  And coming home to a soft bed, running water, telephones, working lights, and even the smaller comforts like a clean toothbrush or a piece of candy, after spending eight weeks with people who literally struggled through every day sent me into a sort of depression for about a month.  But in the end I was forced to acknowledge that there may never be a tangible result from this summer, but that it was still perhaps the most worthwhile two months that I had ever spent.  The way that I live my life and the goals that I have, coupled with the tremendous sense of obligation that I feel to use the privilege and opportunities that my life has been graced with will ensure that I will endlessly work to improve the lives of others for the rest of my years. 

As before my trip, I aim to become a journalist.  And I will travel the world and let everyone know what exists beyond their jobs and their homes and their lives.  I will do this because it is now my responsibility to give what I have received.  I have developed self-awareness, a humility that drives me to improve myself, an overtaking sense of appreciation, and also a cynicism that is not negative – as is often the case – but incredibly motivating.  Because my experience in Africa has given me these gifts, I am determined to spend my life using these things to return the favor.

Kate Thirolf

I am currently a PhD student at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education (CSHPE) at the University of Michigan School of Education. This summer, thanks to the Raoul Wallenberg International Travel Fellowship and the Can Tho Youth Empowerment Project (CTYEP) in Vietnam, I am directing a youth leadership camp that I am calling the Raoul Wallenberg Summer Youth Empowerment Program.

CTYEP currently provides tutoring to children at orphanages in Can Tho (a city 90 miles southwest of Ho Chi Minh City).

The Raoul Wallenberg Summer Youth Empowerment Program I have developed will enable the CTYEP to build upon its strengths and serve these children in new and special ways. Following a summer camp format, the program will focus on three main themes: learning, leading, and having fun!

Each day and all day, the children (aged 8 to 15) will participate in a variety of program activities. For example, they will take English and computer lessons; engage in community service, team building, and leadership development activities; and take part in creative arts and crafts and athletics, such as playing basketball, badminton, or da cau (the national sport in Vietnam).

To help me with the design and delivery of this program, I am working with a few fantastic Vietnamese college students. One of my research interests is developing civic engagement in society through higher education, and I am excited and hopeful that the students with whom I work will grow their own appreciation for serving others and will develop into strong and compassionate community leaders.

Another research interest of mine is international higher education. I am excited to be learning more about the higher education system in Vietnam by talking with faculty, students, and administrators at colleges in the area where I am working and living. One of my goals this summer is to identify future research opportunities so that I might have the chance to return to this amazing area of the world and conduct formal research on higher education institutions here.

As a result of this summer fellowship experience, I hope to build strong connections with friends and colleagues in Vietnam, make a difference in the lives of the children served by the Raoul Wallenberg Summer Youth Empowerment Program, and make strides in my professional career as an education researcher. I can't thank the Wallenberg Endowment enough for this amazing opportunity!

Ivy Tran

The Temple Orphanage program through ELI in Vietnam is designed to help shelter children from these harsh realities, even though they have already experienced a little of it. As a volunteer, I will be staying in a dorm that is situated close to the orphanage in Vietnam. Travel may require bus, but the site is feasibly within walking distance. Currently, I am in contact with the program specialist located here in the United States, Malissa Spero. She has provided me with much information about the typical on goings of a volunteer placed in Vietnam.