Alumna Pursues Passion for Girls’ Education, Healthcare in Africa

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. –Illinois Wesleyan University alumna Shannon O’Rourke, an international studies and political science double major while at Illinois Wesleyan, took an off-beat route to her interest in Africa.

“I actually realized I wanted to go to Africa when I was studying abroad in Switzerland during my junior year,” said O’Rourke, a 2007 Illinois Wesleyan graduate who recently returned from spending six months in Senegal on a Rotary Cultural Ambassador Scholarship. While in Switzerland, her study abroad research project involved working with a World Trade Organization representative from Tanzania. “Something simply clicked in my head and I thought, ‘I am going to go to Africa.’”

O’Rourke discovered the Rotary scholarship, which would allow her to study Arabic in Tanzania or French in Senegal. “I’d already studied French in college and high school for a few years, so I decided on Senegal,” she said.

The scholarship required her to study 225 hours of French with a professor at a small language school in Senegal’s capitol city of Dakar. Driving from the Dakar airport with her host family, O’Rourke realized she had stepped into a new world. “I spent the entire 20-minute drive staring out the window because everything looked so different. I had never seen anything like it.”

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