Woman Without Borders

This is the stuff of a bad dream turned surreal: Imagine you are a college student traveling in Ghana with a friend. You decide to take a road trip mapped out using an outdated guide book. You’re traveling by bus—a bus designed for about a dozen people but on this day packed with 30 or more, as well as a goat or two. Because it’s dry season, you’re covered in dust, and the ride is so rough that people are vomiting out the windows. After nearly a day’s worth of travel you and your friend reach your destination—only to find that the village you were searching for no longer exists. You’re stranded there, in an apparent wasteland.

Here is where the surreal part comes in: Off in the distance you see two identical men approaching, or you think that’s what you see, but you might just be hallucinating from the heat. But as they come closer, you realize they’re real, a pair of brothers. They ask you where you’re from and where you study. It turns out these Ghanaian men, living in the middle of nowhere, know a professor from your school and having made this connection, invite you into their home and treat you like royalty.

For Mindy Lipsitz, a 24-year-old Mountain Brook native and medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, this is a true story, a small example of one of her many brave endeavors and bizarre experiences during a three-year (and counting) crusade to travel the world and, in the simplest of terms, make it a better place. Aside from Ghana, Lipsitz has traveled to Argentina, South Korea, Borneo, Japan, Greece, Nepal, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, China, India, Spain and Malasia. She has forged close ties with people in some of the poorest communities in the world, witnessed unimaginable hardship and done community-development work ranging from health education to teaching English and leading AA meetings in a prison. Along the way, she also expanded her mission exponentially by recruiting other volunteers to help with these efforts, eventually launching a bona fide nonprofit group, Global Endeavors—all before the age of 22.

Ron Carroll, professor of ecology at the University of Georgia (UGA) and director for science of the university’s River Basin Center, became acquainted with Lipsitz while she was a UGA undergraduate and accompanied a group he was leading to Ecuador.
“Mindy is a wonderful example that just because you’re young,” Carroll notes, “it doesn’t mean you can’t take on these really important tasks.”

A Life-Changing Opportunity
It began when Lipsitz earned a spot in the coveted UGA Foundation Fellows program, which is reserved for honors students who maintain the highest academic records, show strong leadership skills and, according to the school website, possess “intense intellectual curiosity about the world around them”—a description which fits Lipsitz perfectly.

For her, the greatest benefit of becoming a Foundation Fellow was that its scholarship component includes a travel stipend, giving her an opportunity she seized. “I’ve always been interested in different cultures, but I’d never been out of the country,” explains Lipsitz, whose effervescent personality belies an exceptional, lifelong work ethic. “I’d wanted to travel forever.” She eschewed what she calls the “typical travel-study” programs because they seemed too fabricated and instead embarked on a much more ambitious plan: to organize a large group of students to make a trip to Argentina for community-aid projects. Eleven students ultimately made the trip which took place the summer after Lipsitz’ sophomore year.

In Argentina, they spread out to volunteer in a variety of clinical settings. Lipsitz chose a government-run clinic located in an extremely poor, rural area. “I pretty much had free reign as to what projects to do, and I started giving public-health instruction to women and children in the community. I was teaching them about things like prenatal care, hygiene, and even basic things like the importance of brushing your teeth.” Her Spanish was rapidly improving—she was already fairly fluent from years of Spanish classes—but she says there were still occasional slip-ups. “Once I was talking to them about preservatives in the food, and I called them ‘preservativo,’ she remembers. “And that turns out to be slang for ‘condom’ there. So there were funny translational things like that.” But the classes caught on, and soon crowds of 40 to 50 people would cram into small rooms to hear what she had to say.

She also made home visits, weighing babies and otherwise checking in on the local families. “It literally is a slum,” she explains. “There are homes with cardboard or mud or whatever is there, and you kind of stand out because you’re this tall white girl…but it was so lively, with kids all running around the village together, and I really fell in love with that.”

But she also witnessed great need—people who’d never seen a doctor in their lives, children suffering from preventable diseases, and students who hiked so far to school that they would simply sleep there during the week, away from their families, before hiking back to their homes on the weekend. “It was really an eye opener, being in those villages,” Lipsitz recalls. “You see all of these problems that are preventable, but there’s no counseling at all. For example, talking about sexual health is taboo, so you’re seeing 12-year-olds who are pregnant. There is a lot of domestic and sexual abuse, all this stuff that goes on, and they really don’t know any better because they’re so isolated. This is the only life they know.”

Lipsitz adds that in most cases, she and her friends were the only foreigners the villagers had ever met. “That was strange and humbling,” she says. “It makes you realize that how you act really matters, because it’s like their whole image of the outside world is based on you.”

The summer trip to Argentina lasted for two months and sealed Lipsitz’ dedication to the cause of rural international health, an area where she felt she could have long-term impact. “Everything is tied to health,” she says. “It starts there and branches out, until ultimately it’s about community development and finding ways to help these communities sustain themselves in order to improve their healthcare and well-being.”

A Movement Gains Momentum
Up until then the group had been hosting benefit concerts and raising money through whatever means they could, but eventually Lipsitz saw that becoming an official nonprofit was an important next step. So after a trip she made to Ghana that winter, Lipsitz coordinated with a university professor to begin the process of applying for 501(c)(3) status, which they eventually received. And Lipsitz was still recruiting, with the idea that Global Endeavors would establish a sustained presence in the areas they served. “I was looking for people who were interested in working on these projects long-term,” she says. “I couldn’t ask them to commit their entire lives, but I would ask, ‘Can you see yourself in 10 years still wanting to go to these communities?’ And I found an incredible group of people who wanted to do this.”

There are enough remarkable stories resulting from their ventures to make one’s head spin, made even more remarkable because they have all occurred in such a short time span. Many of them involve witnessing great tragedy. Teaching English in an orphanage on the outskirts of Cambodia, she came face to face with a large sex-trade industry in the area. “I was living with these girls who had all been subject to this sex trade—girls eight to 15 years old,” she says. “This is stuff you’ve heard and read about, maybe talked about it a little bit, but when you encounter it directly, that’s a whole different thing.”
In Thailand, she volunteered in an overcrowded refugee camp that housed a number of Burmese political prisoners who cross the border illegally and are frequently subject to government raids. (Just to get into the camp herself, Lipsitz had to learn the ins and outs of local bribery rituals, which included bringing the guards their favorite type of whisky.) There, she taught English courses, and she remembers giving the refugees what seemed like a casual writing assignment. “It was basically, ‘Tell me a little about yourself,’” she says. “And the stories I got back would be like, ‘Two weeks ago I was in prison being tortured for passing out a flyer about HIV awareness.’ And that’s just one little example of so many of these stories.”

Unlikely Friendships
That’s not to say there haven’t been wonderful experiences in Lipsitz’ work abroad, as well. One occurred while she was in Salta, when she had an opportunity to join with another psychology major and visit a local prison twice a week to lead Alchololics Anonymous meetings as well as separate therapy sessions. She says initially there was a language barrier, because the prisoners spoke a different dialect of Spanish than what she’d learned in school—not to mention a gender and cultural barrier, since Lipsitz was a Caucasion female in an all-male prison—but eventually she bonded with the inmates, and they with her. “For the group therapy session, I focused a lot on teambuilding, the ‘trust fall,’ things like that—just really trying to brighten up the inmates’ day and get them moving a bit.

“I found these men were some of the most kind and genuinely caring people of this world. I got really close to a few of them, some of whom I truly believe were innocent.” She adds that her frustration over seeing innocent men imprisoned has fueled an interest in working for prison reform. She would also welcome the opportunity to work in a prison system again, doing health education or anything else that might help improve their lives.

“It’s What Makes Me Happy”
Because she frequently experienced the frustration of encountering people suffering from severe illness and trauma without the ability to medically intervene, Lipsitz decided in her junior year of college that the natural extension of her work would be to attend medical school. “There are certain instances when you’re seeing people who are dying,” she says, “and I don’t know how to actively help them. Just seeing one person like that made me think, ‘I need to do this.’”

After she was admitted at UAB, Lipsitz took a year’s deferment to make a long trip to Nepal, and now has begun her studies in earnest to earn both an MD as well as a PhD in public health. Meanwhile, she and the other five active members of Global Endeavors continue to plan trips and apply for grants.

For herself, Lipsitz doesn’t see herself working in a hospital setting after graduation but rather continuing her work abroad, as well as in rural areas in the U.S. She is continuing to focus on Eastern medicine, mind-body health, and preventative medicine. Down the road, she hopes to run her own free clinic. She doesn’t yet know where the funding would come from—but that’s never stopped her before, notes Ron Carroll, the professor from UGA who befriended her while she was an undergraduate and also serves on the advisory board for Global Endeavors.

“Mindy is one of these rare people who, when she sees a need that’s important, she doesn’t worry about where the funds are going to come from or anything else—she just goes for it,” Carroll says. “She’s bright and has boundless energy and total commitment. I think she’s going to be an absolutely superb physician.”

Nor does it bother her that she’s looking ahead to years of arduous study, which, in the end, may never reap much in the way of financial reward. “It is kind of scary, going into so much student debt, and you have to pay it off somehow,” she concedes. “But if you’re passionate about something, I believe it will fall into place.

“And doing this kind of work is the only way I’m going to be happy,” she continues. “That’s what makes it worth it.”