By Sam Carrigan
Beat the Streets Wrestling New York
Beat the Streets alumni are known to fight hard and achieve a great deal, but it’s not every day their ambitions send them all the way to Africa. Sara Andresen is living proof that if you’ve made it here, you can make it anywhere.

Andresen graduated from Hunter College High School and now studies political science and international relations at UMass Amherst. She chose those fields as someone with a love of travel and the diverse cultures of the globe. Being mixed race herself, she felt fortunate to meet so many people of different backgrounds growing up here. “ I simply love seeing the way other people see the world,” Andresen said.

It was this interest that led her to the International Student Volunteers, an organization that places students in community development programs in underdeveloped areas. They connected Andresen with VA 32, a nonprofit that works to create sustainable environmental and community improvement projects in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

Andresen spent five weeks traveling between South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, Zambia and Botswana. Most of this time was in South Africa rebuilding a school in a small village called Cefani, located near the city of East London.

“The children within the community would play with us while we worked,” Andresen said, “so they could also be involved in the improvement of their own community while sharing their interests and culture with us.” The locals taught Andresen and the others about their politics, history and language.

“Although we traveled there to give to their community,” said Andresen, referencing the volunteering in soup kitchens that she and her compatriots also did. “I believe most volunteers found that they gained much more in return by learning about new ideas and lifestyles that are less rooted in such a materialistic focus of living.”

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