2008-2009 Loewenstern Fellows Announced
Fiona Adams is a sophomore Anthropology major who will be traveling to Cochabamba, Bolivia and Cuzco, Peru this summer. Her time in Cochabamba will be spent studying the indigenous language Quechua that is spoken across the Andes with the Cornell University Latin American Studies Program. She will then travel to Cuzco as a Loewenstern fellow to apply her new Quechua skills while working for the Peruvian NGO Arariwa through the volunteer organization ProWorld Service Corps. Arariwa's three sectors of work include microbusiness consulting, adult education, and leadership development. Fiona hopes to work in the leadership development team as a way of enabling communities to develop sustainable incomes and business practices. As an anthropologist, while in Peru she would like to explore the notion of commerce being a "pathway" to better health. Fiona hopes to work for the Peace Corps following graduation, dreams big to become a professional anthropologist, a development expert, or an international doctor.
Alfredo Gutierrez is a junior at Wiess College, majoring in Psychology. This summer he will be spending a month in Ecuador with Child Family Health International. In Ecuador he will be working alongside doctors, learning how the Amazon Indigenous people incorporate modern medicine with their own traditional medicines. He is most excited about being able to interact with, as well as learn from, the indigenous communities. He looks forward to practicing his Spanish and becoming fluent in medical Spanish, so as to better serve the minority communities in the United States. As a premed student, Alfredo knows that this will be an invaluable experience, allowing his knowledge of other cultures to expand will make him a better informed doctor in the years to come.
Bhavika Kaul is currently a Brown College junior majoring in Biochemistry & Cell Biology. This summer she will work on grassroots public health campaigns in Argentina through the Loewenstern Fellowship and will focus on how the access to essential medicine campaign can serve as a powerful tool in preventing mother to child transmission of diseases, especially HIV/AIDS. Bhavika has been passionate about global health ever since her work in SOS Villages in India but became interested in the access to essential medicine campaign while interning in Washington DC last summer where she conducted research on how providing more affordable antiretroviral treatments to HIV/AIDS can significantly improve the lives of many people, especially children, in developing countries. Bhavika plans to get a joint MD/MPH with a focus on international health after graduating from Rice. She strongly believes that doctors must do more than treat patients within the walls of a hospital; they must also serve as advocates for the less fortunate and help bridge the gap between the clinic and the realm of public policy. She hopes to continue working on humanitarian campaigns in the future through programs such as Doctors without Boarders and would one day love to work for an international health organization such as UNICEF or WHO.
Julia Lukomnik is a sophomore sociology major and global health minor at Baker College. This summer she will travel to Cuzco, Peru to help teach battered women how to become financially independent of their abusers. Julia has always been passionate about women’s rights – she works at Rice’s Women’s Resource Center and helped implement a mental health program at a women’s clinic in her home of New York City – but she feels that her organizational roles in both of these experiences have removed her slightly from the groups she wants to help. She hopes through the Loewenstern to gain a true understanding of the people she is helping. Julia hopes to one day save the world. She truly believes that one person can make a difference and is excited to begin the hands-on dirty work of producing change from the ground up.
Michael Puente is a sophomore at Hanszen College majoring in Biological Sciences. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, but will be spending two months this summer volunteering in a pediatric clinic run by a Catholic priest in Cuzco, Peru. Michael will be assisting the medical staff of the facility with patient care and will spend much of his time interacting with the patients and taking care of the basic needs of the students at an associated special needs school. He recently returned from an Alternative Spring Break trip in the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation of South Dakota where he volunteered mentoring the local youth at an after-school program. This experience inspired him to dedicate his summer to giving of himself for the sake of children in another culture. Michael plans to become a pediatrician and looks forward to the opportunity to improve his Spanish, experience another culture, and bring smiles to the faces of some of the children of Peru.
Steven Ricondo, a junior at Baker College majoring in Health Science, will be spending one month this summer volunteering in a Reproductive Health program held in Quito, Ecuador. The program, offered through Child Family Health International, focuses on promoting women’s health and wellness by providing participants with opportunities to see differences in health care, paying particular attention to cultural and gender influence. With interests lying predominantly in women’s reproductive health and aspirations of one day becoming an OB/GYN, the prospect of interacting with women of a foreign culture from the viewpoint of their own health care system immediately caught his eye. Any chance to better the lives of women worldwide, whether in rural or urban settings, he feels, is worth taking. Through the experiences he seeks to engage in while there, he hopes his work will further the advancements of global reproductive health, especially in the country of Ecuador.
Anna Roberts is a sophomore History and Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality major. She is very excited and honored to be chosen as a Loewenstern Fellow for 2008-2009 to volunteer in Salvador, Brazil. Anna first started her passion for social justice in Rice’s Pilot Program for Poverty, Social Justice, and Human Capabilities. Through these sets of classes and others, she felt a call to do more than just learn about how other agitate social change, but to work herself to fight poverty. In her history and sociology classes, she learned about the extreme poverty in the favelas, or urban slums. Seeing the conditions of illiteracy, drug addiction, and violence doom generations of Brazilians to extreme poverty. In Salvador, I plan on volunteering with various local organizations to help, in my small way, to stop this cycle. To Anna, her fellowship with CIC’s Loewenstern Fellowship is an amazing way to connect her knowledge academically to real-life experiences. A life-long service worker and feminist, she looks forward to opportunity to interact with Brazilian women and understand what they truly need to improve their lives. She hopes to continue fighting for social justice and the end of poverty before and after graduation.
Tiffany Yeh is a junior from Martel College studying cognitive sciences. She has always loved traveling, photography, and collecting stories, but her curiosity in science stopped her from becoming a journalist. She found that global health combines it all and stretches her perspective beyond the world she could imagine. She was abroad in Ecuador last semester studying medical anthropology and is now a part of Rice's new program in global health technologies, Beyond Traditional Borders. With the introductory course, she learned about health disparities and innovations to remedy them, in addition to developing a health-science curriculum for a school. This summer, she will be implementing that project, teaching primary school children in Haiti about basic hygiene and science (via much motion and little speech), then heading down to Guatemala to take on projects and assess the needs at a medical outreach center.
Mark Yurewicz is currently a junior at Baker College, majoring in Religious Studies and applying to medical school this summer. He will be traveling to the Ecuadorian Andes and Amazonian Jungle with Child Family Health International this July. After studying Tibetan Medicine in the Indian Himalayas during his month-long independent study in India in Fall 2007, he’s excited to learn more about traditional indigenous Amazonian medicine and its overlaps with modern allopathic medicine. He’s an avid traveler and outdoorsman, and can’t wait to journey through the jungles by backpack for hours on end to reach these remote indigenous villagers. And learning some medical Spanish along the way can’t hurt either. Mark sees this great journey as part of his path to becoming a physician that can serve people around the world with many different perspectives on the nature of life, health, and healing.
Jennifer Zhan, a sophomore at Lovett College, will be traveling to Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica this summer to work with the Association for Women, Families, and the Community of Quepos (ASOMUFACQ). The organization’s mission is to foster the development of women, families, and the community of Quepos, through the realization of social, cultural, environmental, and economic projects and programs, focused on women, teenagers, children, and families in their relation to the community. She has proposed a project to advance health, prevention, and women’s rights among the prostitute population. The project was inspired by the work of St. Luke’s Episcopal Health Charities, an organization that Jen interned with during the summer of her freshman year. Jen is majoring in biochemistry and hopes to pursue a career in medicine and public health. As a native of Chicago, IL, Jen enjoys being outdoors and on the waters and is looking forward to surfing along the Pacific coast this summer.
