SIC Alumni Daniel Low Awarded $36,000 in Scholarships to Continue Public Health Work in Africa

Posted by dana on Thursday, May 27, 2010 at 4:36 pm

Daniel Low in Babati, Tanzania

Pomona College News reports:

Daniel Low (SIC volunteer 2009), who ultimately plans to work in sub-Saharan Africa as a doctor, has been awarded both a $10,000 grant from the Donald A. Strauss Public Service Scholarship Foundation and a $26,000 Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship.

Strauss Scholarships fund public-service projects that the students have proposed and will carry out during their senior year. Low will use the Strauss grant this summer to implement an HIV/AIDS peer education program in Babati, Tanzania. Through music, sports, drama and lecture, Low will train secondary school students in the Manyara region of Tanzania as HIV/AIDS educators. These student leaders will then provide HIV/AIDS education to their local communities.

Low intends to use the Rotary Scholarship to study in Blantyre, Malawi at the University of Malawi College of Medicine, starting a Masters program in Public Health…

…Low first traveled to Africa in summer 2009 as part of a project providing HIV/AIDS education in Babati, Tanzania, with the NGO Support for International Change. On that visit, he helped establish Tumaini La Mbele (Swahili for ‘Hope for the Future’) alternative school for street children in Babati. Later that summer, funded by Pomona’s Summer Undergraduate Research Program, he joined a team researching tuberculosis in Kenya. He followed that work with a semester of study at the School for International Training in Kenya and research on the health and education problems of street children in Mombassa.

At Pomona College, Low is an anthropology major with a chemistry minor. His senior thesis will focus on the street children in Mombassa and the question “Are the survivors really surviving?” …

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