2011 Loewenstern Fellows
Individual and Group Presentations
- Unconventional Summer - Thursday, September 8 - 4:30-6:00pm - RMC Ray Courtyard
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Melanie Calzada
 Melanie Calzada (Duncan ’12) served with Amigos de las Americas who partners with CARE in the Department of Matagalpa, Nicaragua. She collaborated with local youth to conduct educational activities and workshops related to safe water and the environment. For these activities, Melanie, her partners and youth counterparts planned two-hour long classes five days a week. The five themes included: Hygiene and Nutrition, Sustainable Water and Soil Management, Reforestation, Safe Water and Healthy Watersheds, Risk Management and Preparing for Disasters. Along with these weekly educational activities, Melanie cooperated with her host community, Maria Jesus de las Olivas, to implement a small-scale community project. Community members voted for the construction of a preschool and Melanie assisted community leaders in the application for the Bevil grant, which they were awarded. After receiving the grant, she and community members organized workdays and began the collection of materials and initiated the construction of the school.
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Ramya Chockalingam
 Ramya Chockalingam (Will Rice '12) worked with GlobeAware in Jaipur, India. Ramya worked on a number of educational outreach projects during the six weeks that she spent at her service site. In the mornings, Ramya worked in an underserved area, where she taught basic math and elementary English to married women (ages 18-50). She also educated these women about healthcare issues, including hygiene and nutrition. Ramya also had the opportunity to work with younger children through the FXB India Suraksha Organization. Specifically, she worked with abused and drug-addicted children, who had left their homes and were living in the local railway station. Ramya engaged these children in a variety of educational activities and encouraged them to substitute drugs with enriching activities. In the afternoons, Ramya worked in conjunction with a non-profit organization, Saarthak: Initiatives of Relevance. Through Saarthak, Ramya taught English to a group of girls (ages 15-19) in another underserved area. She inspired these girls to pursue a college education so that they would be able to realize the benefits of economic freedom and independence in the future.
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Mohini Dasari
 Mohini Dasari (McMurtry ’12) served with Cross-Cultural Solutions in Dharamshala, India. She taught at the Harmony Through Education School for children (ages 6-20) with special needs, where she organized and led group activities, crafts and games, as well as worked individually with students to develop their motor skills and cognitive abilities. She also taught a group of older students how to make newspaper bags as part of their vocational training. Additionally, she worked with Badlav Ki Aur, a local women’s empowerment group, where she taught English in order to help the women develop their professional skills and marketability for jobs. She also taught English to schoolchildren as part of the women’s center’s afterschool enrichment program. Through these experiences, Mohini gained a clearer perspective on the realities of social development in rural India, especially with respect to special needs education and women’s empowerment.
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Amanda Gutierrez
 Amanda Gutierrez (Hanszen '13) served with Orphanage Outreach in Jinotega, Nicaragua for six weeks. Each week, her and a few other long-term volunteers went to a different school in a different part of the city to teach. Each morning, she went to a local preschool center and taught kids from ages 1-5 the basic numbers, colors, shapes, letters and other skills. In the afternoons, she went to a primary school and taught English to kids ages 7-15. Some weeks Amanda helped put together an English camp, with various stations and activities for the primary school kids. At recess, she would give a short health lesson on nutrition, hygiene and anatomy. After a long day of teaching, she spent the evening making more teaching materials, activities, games and worksheets for the next day’s classes. On a few weekends, she and the other volunteers put together a field day for kids in a local community and played soccer, jump-roped and talked with the local community leaders about the educational issues in their community and all over the country. Nicaragua is the poorest country in Central America and Amanda got to see firsthand how greatly under-resourced the country’s educational programs are. What she will remember most from this experience are the kids, their happiness with life despite the fact that they seem to lack so much and their unbelievable gratitude to the volunteers for doing something as simple as teaching them the numbers or playing jump rope. She has learned so much from the Nicaraguan people and their way of life, work ethic, and ability to stay positive throughout adversity and she will carry those lessons with her in all of her future endeavors.
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Megan Johnson
 Megan Johnson (Hanszen '12) served in northwest Costa Rica teaching English in an elementary school. Projects Abroad, a worldwide service organization, provided the placement in a small local school as well as arranging a homestay placement for her with a Costa Rican family. While working in the school, she served in seven 5th and 6th grade classrooms working on English and later worked with the school's science curriculum coordinator to prepare programs to educate the children about issues like recycling and dental hygiene. Following her time in the school, she participated in a conservation project in a national park doing both investigation and maintenance work for the park. This work included things like capturing and collecting data on the park's bat population, trapping and counting butterfly species, and tracking the movement of larger mammal populations within the park.
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Chethan Ramprasad
 Chethan Ramprasad (Hanszen '12) served for six weeks as an intern in the Dominican Republic with Orphanage Outreach, an organization supporting the Centro para la Ninez boys orphanage and its surrounding communities. In addition to mentoring and caring for the twenty boys of the orphanage, he taught Spanish literacy in the classroom, led the construction of a new campfire ring, and collaborated with other interns to initiate and teach a leadership class for the four oldest boys. Through his experiences comforting the boys on emotional days, playing jump rope or wall ball, and simply just reading a book to the most eager of students, he learned the greatest value of service: human relationships. In the communities of Jaibon and Montecristi, Chethan also led groups of short term volunteers in organizing public health education summer camps for over seven communities including Batey Libertad, an impoverished Haitian migrant farm worker community. By lesson planning and teaching nutrition, dental hygiene, sanitation, and body systems, he had firsthand experience fighting the health disparities that challenge such communities. He strengthened his leadership skills in a multi-lingual environment while growing to understand his role in community leadership as a young man. This experience leading, teaching, mentoring through service has ignited a passion within him to serve others as a future physician.
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Christina Rojas
 Christina Rojas (Brown '12) spent two months in the Dominican Republic working with Orphanage Outreach, an organization which aims to "release the hero within" the orphaned, abandoned, and disadvantaged children of various Latin American countries. While there, she worked on several different projects, including teaching conversational English to children in local schools, and hosting educational summer camps for the local orphanage & surrounding community. Halfway through the summer she was asked to serve as a "Program Director," and thus assumed a key leadership role, in which she ensured that Public Health, English, and Spanish Literacy were integral parts of all camp curriculums, taught by knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate volunteers. Moreover, she spent a significant amount of one-on-one time with various boys & girls at the local orphanage; whether she was teaching them English, practicing reading & writing, or playing games, she cherishes the time she had to build these treasured friendships with such incredible children.
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Lena Silva
 Lena Silva (McMurtry ’13) worked with ProWorld Peru in a number of varied realms for six weeks. She contributed to their cleaner burning stove initiative in rural Cuzco; read with children in Cuzco’s only children’s library; and taught dance classes, including a riveting Lady Gaga routine, to adolescent orphans. Her main service activity was with Cuzco Penitentiary’s counseling office.. As the only bilingual member of the counseling staff, she was responsible for taking the psychological histories of the foreign, non-Spanish speaking inmates. In addition, she was able to lead group therapy sessions including a discussion of domestic violence and healthy relationships. All of the foreign women in the penitentiary were convicted of drug trafficking and while they were all much older than Lena, the respect with which they regarded her was remarkable. She will miss the relationships she formed with the women, as well as with her fellow volunteers and host family.
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Melody Tan
 Melody Tan (Brown '14) spent 8 weeks in Ecuador through a joint placement by the Loewenstern Fellowship and Rice University's Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB) program. She lived in a clinic in rural Planchaloma, and worked with the local organization Fundación Futuro to demonstrate and solicit feedback for student-designed global health technologies and collect data for BTB Lab-in-a-Backpacks left in Ecuador the previous year. She also taught children in guarderías about hand washing and the proper disposal of trash and created posters about the detection and prevention of Tuberculosis. Melody is grateful to have had this experience, which was a lesson in the realities, challenges, and frustrations of working with global health in a very rural community. She hopes to spend her life helping to bring appropriate health technologies to the developing world, as she truly believes that "In arguing that health care is a human right, one signs on to a lifetime of work dedicated to erasing double standards for rich and poor" (Paul Farmer).
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