Adam Herling
Reaching Out to Rwanda

Doing child-protection work in Rwanda, traveling the Congo River for the International Rescue Committee, and helping subsistence farmers more than double their production and income in Kenya — these are the rewarding challenges that three program alumni undertook this year as Princeton in Africa Fellows.

Among 25 Princeton University graduates that PiAF placed in 16 countries, for yearlong fellowships this year, were former Davis UWC Scholars Adam Herling ’07 (USA, UWC Atlantic), Amity Weiss ’07 (USA, UWC Adriatic), and Nahal Zebarjadi ’07 (Australia, UWC-USA). All three are, the program notes, acting “as everyday ambassadors in a time when building bridges between cultures is critical.” (For more, visit www.princeton.edu/~piaf)

In rural western Kenya, Adam Herling worked with the One Acre Fund, which makes microfinance investments in village farmers, often single women, who own a single acre or less. OAF lends the farmers “agricultural inputs” like seed and fertilizer, provides training to greatly increase their harvests, then improves their access to markets and fair crop prices.

“I am currently working on several projects, from developing the curriculum for our health volunteers to streamlining our department of pest and disease control,” Adam wrote for the PiAF newsletter. “Right now I still wish they were offering me a chicken parm sub rather than live insects for lunch — but maybe by the end of my time here, my perspective will have changed on that, too.”

“I work on child protection and grants mobilization for Plan Rwanda,” Amity Weiss emailed from Rwanda. “It’s my job to make sure that all children who come into contact with the Plan, a sponsorship organization focusing on child-centered community development, are safe from psychological, physical, and sexual abuse. So I spend a lot of time training staff and implementing child protection protocols.

“What’s really interesting is the impact being a Davis UWC Scholar has had on my life overall,” she added. “Without UWC and Davis, I would not have gone overseas and likely not have gotten into Princeton ... I would not have had the opportunity to work in Africa every summer from my freshman year on. I also would not have been a PiAF fellow.”

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nahal Zebarjadi worked as an information officer for the International Rescue Committee. “The best part is traveling to IRC’s various field sites to see IRC facilitators in action and collect information,” he wrote for PiAF.

“The ‘community-driven reconstruction’ sector is the most exciting project I have ever been involved with. Its goal is to create structures of local democratic governance where they’ve never existed — in villages, across the entire of the east of the country.”

Previous PiA fellows have included two more Davis UWC Scholars and Princeton alums: Page Dykstra ’06 (USA, UWC Atlantic), who worked in Sudan with the International Republican Institute in 2006-07; and Erin Blake ’06 (USA, UWC Atlantic), who spent the same year in Cape Town, South Africa, helping to prevent mother-child transmission of HIV/AIDS.