Office of the Vice Provost for International Relations
Columbia and the World

I grew up in Cleveland, OH, and came to New York City in 1998 to start as a freshman in the Columbia College class of 2002.  As a women's and gender studies major, I quickly became involved in local activist projects and focused on studying social and public policies affecting low-income women in terms of race, gender, and class.  I felt like being in New York City was studying abroad and never seriously considered the option.  In the fall of my junior year, I decided that a break from NYC and exposure to a non-Western culture would be a good experience.  I signed up for the School for International Training's "Kenya - Culture and Development" program and left two months later.  My six months in Kenya changed my life.

 Being exposed to a different culture, life in a developing country, and the intense experiential education that SIT provides provided me not only with a global perspective on what I had previously studied, but also with the desire and the skills to return to Kenya and contribute in a productive way.

While working in a family planning clinic in a small town north of Nairobi during my research period, I realized that while reproductive health services and education were increasing, there was almost nothing targeting adolescent girls.  In my senior year, I was awarded the Henry Evans Traveling Fellowship from Columbia College to return to Kenya with a colleague and do a three-month project working with a group of teenage girls in Kibera, the largest slum in East Africa.  We used photography as a way to discuss reproductive health and other issues that the girls were facing in their day-to-day lives.  The girls made it clear however that what they needed was not a three-month project, but a program - so we returned to NYC for a year, did fundraising for the program, and then returned to Kenya to develop and establish the Binti Pamoja (Daughters

United) Center.  During that year we expanded the programming, increased the membership, and hired Kenyan staff.  By the end, the program was running on its own and had grown from a temporary photography project to a comprehensive, safe, and sustainable program for adolescent girls in Kibera.

As I was preparing to return to NYC, it became clear that I wanted to pursue a Masters in Public Health and the Reproductive, Adolescent, and Child Health program at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health had what I was looking for in terms of skills training and subject focus.  I was awarded the Sharp Scholarship to attend the Mailman school and started in the Fall of 2005.  During this time, I have remained an active advisor of the Binti Pamoja Center, helping with fund-raising, reporting writing and new program development.  I have been working part-time as a research assistant in the Department of Population and Family Health and part-time as a consultant for the Population Council in their Gender, Family, and Development Division.  Specifically I have been working with Binti Pamoja on the development of the Safe Spaces Program, which supports the alumni of the Center to start their own girls groups in the community and has also included the development of a financial literacy curriculum geared toward adolescent girls in Kibera.

I plan on finishing my MPH in May 2007 and using the skills I gained during my training at Mailman to further my work in the field of adolescent reproductive health programming.