In The News

A trip to India last summer sparked a passion in Isabella Nuñez that she shared with her whole school. "We stayed in a small village in India, and they re-use apricot pits there that are being thrown away to make them into soap and body lotion," she said. "The idea of using something that is wasted, I thought that was really cool."

The opportunity of a life-time: a chance for students to study abroad and bring those experiences back to their Chicago neighborhoods.

As a black kid growing up in Chicago, some opportunities tend to be more open to me than others. I find aspects of my life experience limited due to my identity, whether or not I recognize it at the time.

While looking through a photo album of my Indian host mother’s wedding day, I learned that she was 17-years-old the day she was arranged to marry a 30-year-old man from another village whom she did not know. As a 17-year-old American girl, the fears that keep me awake at night are things like a robber coming into my house or an unknown person assaulting me on the street — events that could possibly happen in my future, but are fortunately not realities for me.

As we traveled through a slum in Delhi, India, a few of my American colleagues broke down in tears. I too was moved, but their shocked reaction took me by surprise because I see deprivation like this every day. Parts of Chicago and the slums of India are similar. As you walk through each community, you see despair in both. Violence and oppression is so regular within these communities that the citizens begin to believe it is the norm. Most people only have the will to survive rather than thrive. But in India I saw something I would have never thought was possible — I saw unity in poverty.