 Be More: Dream
Centre
South Africa
This summer Yaa will be working at the Dream Centre in South Africa, a
clinical haven for patients afflicted with HIV/AIDS. The clinic is designed to
be a place where patients can relax and de-stress "from the social and health
issues that arise from being HIV-positive." While at the Centre, Yaa's
day-to-day duties will include helping nurses administer drugs, spending
one-on-one time with patients, and helping patients organize activities and
sharing hobbies. Yaa, who immigrated to the United States from Ghana when she
was eleven, is anxious to get back to do service work on the African
continent.
While researching service organizations, Yaa saw that "there was uniformity
in one aspect…the faces of the volunteers were for the most part white and the
people being helped were African." She sees this service as an opportunity to
challenge that image, to "represent the million Black faces that are never
shown in brochures." With dreams of one day becoming a doctor and working in a
lab focused on HIV/AIDS, Yaa hopes that her fellowship will help inform her
career choices and enable her to explore some of the socioeconomic factors
surrounding AIDS that cannot be answered with a textbook alone.
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