Lomoro “Moses” Santino and Yvonne Ayesiga are a force for service, both in Africa and on the American campus they’ve called home. 

Phuc Phan shares his passion for the cello, born of difficult years of study and practice, with his college and the world.

Macalester College senior Rayanatou Laouali worked with a group of women in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Niger to organize and register a peanut-processing cooperative.

In Kabul, Afghanistan, Colby College senior Sulaiman Nasseri lived under the Taliban regime and saw the nightmarish ways it treated women. “I wanted to do something for the women of Afghanistan — especially for my mom,” he said.

When Ansally Kuria interned at a Nairobi nonprofit that strives to prevent sexual violence and assist survivors, she saw children struggling to recover from serious abuse, and she wanted to do more to help them.

When Shekhar Bhende read about a talk Bill Gates gave, urging business leaders to focus their energies on creating products with a social benefit, Shekhar realized that “business and philanthropy aren’t really separate.”

Maysa Mourad and three fellow Wellesley College students led Camp Rafiqi in Lebanon, which brought together blind and sighted children and helped break down the social stigma associated with disability.

In Srebrenica, Bosnia, where over 8,000 Muslims were murdered by Serbian Army units in 1995, Methodist University students worked with a local expert on the genocide to help 14 families still struggling to recover.

At a home for orphaned children in Lexojme, Albania, Amherst College senior Iris Alia, of Albania, and American student Kathryn Libby brought 500 new books to a library that, when they arrived, had just a few shelves of old books covered thickly in dust.

In their home nation of Nepal, Savant Shrestha and Kumud Ghimire brought sand, concrete, pipes, and steel for a new water system to a western mountain village where women and children had been trudging two hours each day to gather water.

For 11 days last July at a boarding school in Jordan, 16 Iraqi and 16 American teenagers came together to talk about achieving a peaceful, sustainable future. Their Youth Initiative for Progress in Iraq Conference was the brainchild of two UWC students, both now Davis UWC Scholars at Princeton University.

In Tajikistan’s most isolated mountain region, nongovernmental organizations are often reluctant to do projects, considering the area too dangerous. But two Tajiki students from Earlham College did not.

“They hadn’t had any art supplies, and they all wanted to draw. We asked them to draw home. Ninety percent of their drawings were images of helicopters, tanks, buildings with soldiers.”

Watching her home country struggle with rising stresses related to diversity, Dristy Shrestha decided to set an example of collaboration and tolerance by organizing a nationwide camp of Nepalese Scouts in Kathmandu.

In Kabul, Davis UWC Scholar Nafisa Mohammadi set out to clean up a two-acre dump site that was contaminating her home neighborhood. But she ran into so many complications that she changed plans.

“Transforming Tragedy” was the theme of the World Is Moving retreat in Cape Cod. The two keynote presenters were Linda Biehl, whose daughter Amy Biehl, a Fulbright Scholar, was murdered in South Africa in 1983—and Ntobeko Peni, one of the men who killed her. The impact of their talk and the follow-up discussions were profound.

Last August, the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press transmitted a news feature about a 21-year-old Palestinian who had done what, until then, was almost unthinkable — he had led a group of young Palestinians to visit Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.

Kemiyondo Coutinho, of Swaziland, wrote and performed a one-woman play at the National Arts Festival in South Africa for a multiracial, multicultural audience.

Zaheena Rashid spent a two-month internship in the Maldives, working as a communications consultant in the international media division of the President's office. Her work was focused on climate change, and recently, the Maldivian government announced its ambitious plan to reach carbon neutrality by 2020.

Davis UWC Scholar Lukasz Nipardo conceived and developed a magazine that encourages people to think globally but to act locally.

Ansally Kuria, Middlebury College Class of 2012 and native of Kenya, spent the summer before her senior year raising awareness about child abuse and painting cartoons on the walls of a Nairobi hospital. It was all part of a project she called “Let Children Be Children.”

There 18 million street children in India. There are six young women from six different nations on the board of the Ashraya Initiative for Children, a non-profit that three of them started after working with kids at Mahindra UWC in India.

Senia Bachir-Abderahman (Western Sahara, Red Cross Nordic UWC, Mt. Holyoke ‘10) grew up in a tent. Her family’s tent is in a giant refugee camp, home to 159,000 people, in a remote desert region of Algeria. Her family has existed there since the 1970s, when the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara began fleeing their country during a war with Morocco that would last until 1991.

Colby College sophomore Qiamuddin Amiry sums up his life under the Taliban in Kabul, Afghanistan, as a time of emptiness, grinding labor, and periodic horror.

“I always compare it to Orwell’s 1984 — how education was trying to brainwash you,” he says. “There was no freedom of speech  or anything.”

When Chikoti Mibenge’s father died in Kitwe, Zambia, she and her younger brother were told he’d been a victim of witchcraft. When her mother took sick, Chikoti, then 17, cared for her as her condition worsened. Her mother never admitted what was wrong, and the family could afford neither testing nor treatment — but, by then, Chikoti knew this was AIDS.

Arthur Koenig meets with students at Amherst College after the announcement of the Koenig Scholarship Fund, which will provide scholarships for students from Latin America and Africa, support their academic program, and sponsor annual recruitment trips to those regions. With Koenig is Elvis Maradzike ’10 of Harare, Zimbabwe.

The Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) in California is among the most international learning communities in higher education: More than a third of its 750 students comes from outside the United States, and 90 percent of its American students have some experience abroad. Primarily a graduate school, MIIS blends academics with the building of practical skills and experience for internationally oriented careers.

Kathryn W. Davis

Follow the story of a UWC scholar as he travels from his home in Tanzania to Middlebury College in Vermont.