13.

I don’t want to live in the kind of world where we don’t look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I can’t change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit. | Charles de Lint

Scholarship

As some of you may already know, I was the gracious recipient of the 2017 Spring CUAbroad Diversity Scholarship. This scholarship is available to CUA students who are traditionally underrepresented in education abroad. I actually am a representative student of two groups that are under-represented in education abroad – first generation students and students in diverse fields of study. As we all know, CUA students pride themselves on the importance of service. Therefore, recipients of this scholarship are required to fulfill multiple service obligations, write a blog and participate in recruiting activities as a condition of the award.

This past weekend I participated in my first of two service events in Rome. I will later have to complete two at CUA in order to aid in promoting CUA Study Abroad. For this service event, a group of CUA students and alumni went to the Community of Sant’Egidio in Trastevere. The Community of Sant’Egidio began in Rome in 1968 with a dedication to evangelization and charity. While being founded in Rome, the movement has spread to over 60,000 memebers in 73 countries. Claudio, a familiar face working on the administrative side of the Rome campus, was a founding father of the movement. He was able to aid us in getting involved!

Here at the community headquarters in Rome, we organized and sorted through donated medicines that are later distributed to refugees. This required looking at expiration dates and organizing boxed medicines. Unfortunately, lots of medicines had to be disposed of due to passed expiration dates. However, many were salvageable and I’m glad that I was able to be a part of the process where we properly disposed of the medicine and made it much easier for those who spend their time at the Community of Sant’Egidio helping the refugees.