Messenger of mercy

Rosita Najmi’s compassion and leadership spring from her faith, and her mom.

n Thursday, June 12, twelve Wake Forest students—nine participants in the economics department’s annual five-week Benin Summer Study Program and three volunteers—boarded a plane at New York’s Kennedy Airport bound for Benin in West Africa. In the hold were their suitcases, crammed with as many hospital supplies and medications as would fit.

Shortly after arriving in Benin, they traveled to Pobe, a city thirty miles north of the coast near the Nigerian border, where mosquito netting and hospital beds and mattresses, purchased by contacts in the country, awaited them. Soon they departed for the village of Issale, where a new clinic funded by Wake Forest contributions was under construction. Over the next two days their supplies were distributed to nine hospitals and clinics desperate for them.

The couriers had conducted their mission of mercy under the auspices of a program co-founded and coordinated by Wake Forest senior Rosita Najmi. Called Project Bokonon, the program seeks to provide medical assistance and education to a country with one doctor for every 19,000 people—about half of the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum ratio—and where the average life expectancy is fifty-one and nearly two of every ten children die before the age of five.

For this and other service to Third-World causes, Najmi this fall was named one of Glamour magazine’s Top 10 College Women for 2003. She became the second Wake Forest student named to the magazine’s annual list, after Jessica Davey (’94), Najmi’s idol, whose service with Mother Teresa in Calcutta as an undergraduate led to establishment of the University’s annual City of Joy trip, now in its tenth year.

Najmi’s commitment to service is rooted in her faith, and her story has its share of dramatic elements. Her mother was pregnant with her and living in her native Iran when the Islamic revolution erupted in 1980. A Bahá’í, she feared persecution by fundamentalist Muslims, and fled to India, where two of her other children were in boarding school. Eventually, she was brought to the U.S. by the Bahá’í community and finally settled in Knoxville, Tennessee. Najmi, who calls herself Persian, was in kindergarten before she was reunited with all of her siblings.

She was active in high school as a 4-H literacy volunteer and with America’s Promise, Colin Powell’s youth development project. “In our religion, work is worship, and the purest form of service is to humanity,” says the energetic and ever-positive Najmi. “It’s part of my life and my faith. The two reasons I do anything are my Mom and my faith.”

Both would play roles in her college choice. Accepted by several selective schools, including Harvard and Stanford, Najmi was impressed by Wake Forest’s motto of Pro Humanitate. “The application questions really fit me, and I knocked them out over a weekend,” she recalls. “Eventually, it came down to three factors: proximity to home—important because Mom is sick; where I could make the best contribution; and how Wake Forest people were willing to stop their lives to help me when I got into a car accident after my campus visit and needed to get somewhere else on short deadline.”

An economics major with minors in politics and French, Najmi was drawn to Third World development issues, and in spring 2001 she took a course on Africa taught by Sylvain H. Boko of the economics department. Describing the course as “completely influential,” she signed up for Boko’s annual summer institute that year in Benin, his native country.

“It was my first time in the Third World, and for the entire [institute] I was totally disoriented,” Najmi says. “We were taking malaria medication, and I was confused and on an emotional roller coaster, with really intense dreams.” After the institute she stayed on in Benin to conduct research. (Boko included her findings on the positive impact of small loans on poor women’s efforts to launch businesses in his book on West African development issues published this past year.) Suddenly, “everything clarified” for Najmi; all the instances of deplorable medical conditions the students had witnessed—reused syringes; plastic storage bags substituting for sterile surgical gloves; patients packed into hospital rooms on the floor or on beds without mattresses, with chickens and mosquitoes everywhere; pharmacies with bare shelves—came into full focus. She resolved to help.

Together with fellow institute participant Brett Bechtel (’03), now a first-year student at Wake Forest School of Medicine, Najmi organized a fundraising drive on campus and solicited medical suppliers for donations. Dubbing the project “Bokonon,” which is Boko’s original family name as well as the word for “medicine man” in Fon, a Benin language, they raised almost $5,000 from students, faculty, and the University, and obtained donated medical supplies and equipment from Amerisend, a non-profit U.S. aid organization. To both support Benin’s economy and overcome transportation logistics challenges, they lined up contacts in Benin to buy larger items like mattresses and beds. With additional help from some donated shipping of smaller items from the states, the effort stocked the Pobe hospital and its three satellite clinics. This year, the project raised nearly $7,000, which paid for construction of the new clinic (scheduled for completion in December) and supplies for an additional eight sites. Shipping “is expensive, and always a challenge,” Najmi observes; hence, the creative suitcase solution.

Boko, who will return to Benin in December to ensure that the clinic has been satisfactorily completed and staffed, is deeply gratified by the students’ effort. “It shows,” he says, “that you don’t need millions of dollars to make a difference.”

Najmi spent the project’s first summer at a think tank in Paris interning on a World Bank project, but with support from Wake Forest grants she returned to Benin this past summer, solidifying relationships and interviewing doctors and clinic directors to update the project’s needs assessment. She also traveled around the U.S. soliciting support from various non-profit organizations.

Najmi says next year’s trip likely will focus on prevention of malaria, a leading cause of death in Benin. “We’re hoping to have [summer institute] students go into classrooms and do fun presentations on malaria prevention, maybe a skit with students as a mosquito, a sleeping person, and netting,” she says, her smile erupting in delight at the thought.

Najmi is devoting her final year at Wake Forest to putting Project Bokonon firmly on permanent footing. She has recruited a nineteen-member board of students and alumni and completed much of the process of obtaining formal non-profit status. After graduation comes law school and, she hopes, a career working for organizations devoted to justice for Third-World women.

“Physically, this summer was the hardest of my life,” says the petite Najmi, who has also helped construct a schoolhouse in Vietnam and has translated French and Farsi into English for the Tahirih Justice Center in Washington, D.C., which helps women who have fled to the U.S. as political refugees. “But every night after evening devotions, I look at a picture of Benin children and say, ‘This is why I am doing this.’

Pausing, she goes on: “We don’t have to do certain things, but at the same time we have to do them, do you know what I mean? I choose to do things not always because I want to, but because if I don’t, they might not get done.”

Project Bokonon will hold a fundraising event this Saturday, Oct. 4, at Barnes & Noble on Hanes Mall Boulevard. Volunteers will hold a fair from 3 to 5 p.m., featuring face painting, storytelling about Africa, and murals for Beninese schools that children can help color. Also, Barnes & Noble will donate to the project a percentage of sales that day (9 a.m.-11 p.m.) to customers presenting a special voucher which can be obtained only by downloading it from the Project Bokonon Web site (www.projectbokonon.org).
--David Fyten

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