My name is Lindsay Depow, and I am a senior Business Administration major. There are many ways that I hope to contribute to Elon’s legacy in South Africa. First and foremost, I am unbelievably excited to meet and work with the children in South Africa. Children truly do determine the future of the world that we live in. Because of this, it is extremely important to develop a strong foundation in order for them to build on and change the world. During our first meeting, Professor Layne expressed to us that while in South Africa, we will fall in love with the kids and they will fall in love with us. I’m sure we’ve all seen the pictures taken by previous students where this love is apparent. I hope to make as large of an impact on those children’s lives as they will make on each one of ours.
A second service objective that I would like to achieve is to hopefully form a working understanding of South Africa’s business world. In the business school, we are taught everything that we need to know about how to be successful in business. Since high school, I have dreamed of joining the Peace Corps after graduation. I hope that this program will provide me with the insight in South African business that I can use to help developing businesses in the country in later years.
The last idea that I have for what I plan to do as my service component in South Africa has to do with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. My freshman year, I coordinated a reception for World AIDS Day in conjunction with Alamance Cares on Elon’s campus that raised over 800 dollars for the organization. This event was a service component of a research paper that I completed in my global class. During the writing of my group’s sixty page research paper on HIV/AIDS education, I learned more than I could have imagined about the disease and its implications to society. I think that education and prevention are the most important ways to slow down or even end this epidemic all over the world. Since Africa has particularly high rates of HIV/AIDS, I would love to learn about what organizations are doing in order to provide education about the disease and help in any way that I can.