Fifteen years ago, a Hart Leadership Program public policy course left Sonya Wu-Winter, Trinity '95, wanting to learn more about the challenges facing refugees. That led her to a project on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia, where she spent her junior summer working in a Bosnian refugee camp, absorbing stories of loss and devastation and hope.
"I learned two important lessons that summer: how to drink Bosnian coffee and how to listen," she said on Thursday night as she and two of her classmates, Mark Lorey and Damon Wilson, also Trinity '95, reflected on how experiences at Duke led them to careers in international service at the annual Anthony Joseph Biddle Jr. Lecture on International Studies.
Still, Lorey, Wilson and Wu-Winter were among the first participants in the Refugee Action Project and the Hart Fellows Program, two component programs in Hart Leadership that were just beginning to take flight in the mid-1990's.
With that experience as a foundation, Lorey, Wilson and Wu-Winter have forged exceptional careers in international service.
The skills Wu-Winter acquired during her summer in Bosnia served her well. She's spent the last two decades lobbying for improvements in education and other basic needs for immigration and refugee populations in Canada.
"I was just starting to figure out how to service was integrated into who I was at Duke," Wu-Winter said. "I think that the experiences I had with service learning was a really important part of that."
Today, she's the founder of the Guantanamo Refugee Sponsorship Committee of Trinity-St. Paul's United Church in Toronto and is on the board of directors for the Romero House, which works to resettle refugees in the area.
Growing up in rural Buies Creek, Damon Wilson spent his childhood collecting flags of countries around the world, dreaming of traveling to faraway places and drafting letters to President Reagan on his father's typewriter.
"I arrived at Duke hungry for an international experience," Wilson said.
As an undergraduate, Wilson participated programs in Estonia, the Balkans, Turkey and France. After graduating, he became Duke's first Hart Fellow, working in Rwanda in 1995 with Save the Children less than a year after the country was rocked by genocide.
By gaining exposure to international issues as an undergraduate, Wilson said he discovered his calling. He is now vice president and director of the International Security Program at the Atlantic Council.
"I remember thinking ‘This feels right,'" Wilson said of those first tours working and traveling abroad at Duke. "‘This is what I want to do my life. This is why I came to Duke.'"
Mark Lorey, Wilson's roommate, came to Duke with the same inclination for travel and service. He spent a semester studying abroad in Africa and followed Wilson's footsteps as a Hart Fellow, traveling to Malawi nine months after graduating to work with families and communities ravaged by the emerging AIDS crisis.
"During my time at Duke, I was very fortunate to develop conceptual, analytical and communication skills in the classroom," Lorey said. "But my most valuable experiences were those outside the classroom. They were truly transformative for me."
Lorey now serves as a senior official at World Vision International, a child-focused nonprofit organization that has allowed him to build on the work he did at Duke with populations affected by HIV and AIDS.
Alma Blount, director of the Hart Leadership program, said the alumni's stories helped current students. "It's deeply moving to hear these exemplary young professionals tell such powerful stories about how their undergraduate experiences at Duke helped shape their paths in life."