“Unless we take the first small step, we will never take the next large step,” says alumna Lina Paumgarten.
In January, Lina Paumgarten, MA counseling psychology ’05, embarked upon a three-month, 3,600-mile bicycle trip along the east coast of Australia. Through pledges, she hopes to raise $10,000 to help fund a community orphans home being built in Meru, Kenya, by the nonprofit Peace Initiatives International (PII).
Paumgarten, who originally hails from Austria, chose Australia for the tour “to extend awareness of the AIDS challenge of Africa to another continent.”
“Lina is a great example of a young woman with a big heart for the less fortunate members of our society,” says Karambu Ringera, a human communication studies doctoral candidate who founded PII in 2003. The organization works to seek innovative and alternative means of overcoming devastation of disease, conflict and poverty in Africa.
Paumgarten notes that although the organization she is peddling for is small, “Unless we take the first small step, we will never take the next large step.”