By senior year of high school, Sam Grodman ’10 knew what he wanted to do with his life.
“I had this feeling all of a sudden that I wanted to do something with medicine and surgery and so I decided to get my EMT certification,” he said. “I knew I wanted to do this, but it seemed a long way off.”
While many students spend their summers working at paid jobs in their hometowns, Grodman, and others like him, are choosing to volunteer abroad.
After taking medical calls at his local fire department and interning with a surgeon and a nurse at Tufts Medical Center, Grodman said he wanted to volunteer in countries that could benefit from his newly acquired abilities.
“I thought my certification could be really useful [in places] where there are a lack of professional health care services,” he said. “So I got interested in taking my certification abroad and doing something that I couldn’t do here.”
On a visit over winter break to see a nurse for whom he had previously interned, he was put in contact with two physicians who had done international work. When he met with the first doctor over spring break, however, Grodman was bombarded with circumstantial and language barriers.
“He said it was unlikely that I would help a significant amount of people and what they really need is money,” Grodman explained. “If I’m in a rural area for two to three months, I’ll leave with experience, but I’ll bring it back to the U.S.”
When the second doctor neglected to e-mail him back, Grodman decided to give his idea of working abroad in health care one last shot.
“I showed up at his office and he said he had 15 minutes to talk to me about a project in Sarajevo [Bosnia],” he said. “He asks me if I’m in, five more minutes of explaining, and he’s gone.”
While Sarajevo has resources and a medical infrastructure, many educated professionals fled the country following the conflict in Yugoslavia, leaving the country in dire need for volunteers.
The doctor whom Grodman will work under has since been too busy to provide many details about the program, but he did mail Grodman a textbook, from which he will be teaching midwives and other health care professionals relatively simple ways to deliver a baby.
In teaching these techniques, Grodman will compare the effectiveness of traditional teaching methods, such as lecture and textbooks that use interactive CDs, to hands-on training.
“You don’t need that much training, so it’s a good place to devote to volunteering,” he said. “It’s a really big deal to me. It just decided my summer.”
Zachary Rebich ’11 also plans to devote his summer to volunteering abroad—in orphanages in southern China. Rebich’s summer was decided four months ago, when a friend from home, also named Zach, asked if he wanted to accompany him on his trip to work at an orphanage.
In order to obtain a visa, Rebich had to visit the Chinese Consulate in New York City and provide the necessary paperwork.
“I said I was visiting a friend and going to see pandas—that’s what they want to hear, but my friend Zach made the mistake of saying the name of the man he was volunteering for,” Rebich remarked. “Then they required a statement from his university or employer, a statement from his bank saying that he had sufficient funds to travel to and from China, and a letter from the man he was staying with.”
Rebich expects the accommodations to be rough, especially traveling by bus from orphanage to orphanage. He said he’s heard that “bus dives,” in which the bus is moving so fast it flies off a cliff, are a common occurrence.
“I heard bus drivers are out of their minds, speeding through country side roads,” he said. “So that should be exciting.”
Although there will be translators at the orphanages, Rebich hopes to learn basic conversational Chinese beforehand.
“I’m trying to learn key phrases like ’My name is Zach’ and ’Bus driver, slow the fuck down,’” he said.
Ideally, Rebich said he would also like to bring a camera to document the month-long trip through China’s countryside.
“There are so many awful things happening in the world that people can only pay attention to one at a time,” he said. “Orphans in China are generally not one of them.”
Gabe Lezra ’11 will also be involved in international affairs this summer. He will be based in New York City, as an intern for the Latin American division of Human Rights Watch, one of the biggest non-profit organizations in the world.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) pressures governments to improve their human rights standards by publishing papers and holding conferences stating human rights issues and violations. As an intern, however, Lezra will be limited to translating these papers and other office work.
Although the internship is unpaid, Lezra nevertheless leapt at the opportunity to see a non-profit from the inside.
“I thought about working for other non-profits, but I knew of HRW’s great record working in places, such as Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East,” Lezra said. “I won’t be creating policies now, but I would like to work for one in the future.”
Lezra is interning for the Latin American division because of his background in Spanish (he has lived in Spain throughout various periods of his life). Although he has never visited Latin America, he traveled throughout the world in 2003 with his grandfather, visiting Japan, Thailand, India, Uganda, Kenya, and Morocco, among other places.
“My great uncle was a communist from Morocco, and as a result he was the longest incarcerated political prisoner in Africa after Nelson Mandela,” he said. “This was one of the most important factors in my decision to work for a Human Rights NPO.”
It is for this reason that Lezra feels so strongly about HRW’s mission and the impact that HRW, and other non-profits, can have on people throughout the world.
“Organizations like this have to have a base from which to organize, produce papers, and collect information,” he said. “After college I want to join the Peace Corps so I can experience both the inside and outside of major non-profits. The base functioning of an NPO is just as important as the work outside it.”
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