Suzy graduated from UC Santa Barbara with majors in Spanish and Political Science, the latter with an emphasis in International Relations.  She spent the Fall 2005 quarter abroad in Barcelona, Spain.  The two political philosophy courses she took from Prof. Dungey, then a visiting professor at UCSB, helped develop her own personal philosophy.  At UCSB, she volunteered as an intern at Direct Relief International (DRI) in Santa Barbara.  DRI is California's largest nonprofit and provides medical supplies to disaster-stricken regions worldwide.  During her time there, Suzy assembled marketing materials for major donors and, through her daily research, encountered devastating statistics.  For example, a part of Swaziland has an HIV infection rate at birth of over 50%.  This type of information was a call to action for Suzy.

She then organized an awareness rally in Santa Barbara for Invisible Children as well as several screenings of the grassroots documentary, which plead for action against forced conscription of child soldiers in Northern Uganda.  Suzy decided she had to go to Africa to get to know the faces behind the numbers.  She bought tickets and planned for nine weeks alone in East Africa, volunteering as a teacher.

For the first month, Suzy lived in a remote village in southwestern Uganda and taught English to the local schoolchildren through a nonprofit called Teach Inn Uganda.  Her brightest student was Sara, an AIDS orphan living with her grandparents, who couldn't afford high school.  With over 70% of girls in the community having had at least one child by age 17, it was easy to see why so many idealistic volunteers return from Africa as cynics.

Suzy has long believed poverty and preventable disease were better attacked from the mother down than the child up.  She tested this theory by spending her second month in Moshe, Tanzania, teaching English and computer literacy to an adult women's group.  This was arranged through another nonprofit that organizes volunteer placements, called Art in Tanzania.  The women were wholeheartedly dedicated to their studies, but lacked electricity access to do much-needed homework each night; just one light bulb would do the trick.  Suzy blogged and raised money from her network of friends and family for the purchase, security, and installation of a single solar panel on the women's group roof.  The day before she left Tanzania, she celebrated turning on the light bulb for the first time with the women -- with tears all around.  Having seen so many heartfelt monetary donations seep through the cracks of projects in East Africa to which they were bestowed, she made sure she was there to see the whole thing through.  This led Suzy to fall in love with the strategy of global microfinance: empowering the poor with loans instead of donations.

She then returned to her hometown of San Diego where she worked for a large health charity as an event coordinator and married her high school sweetheart, Matt.  While the time in San Diego was beneficial, she felt limited by her job and a constant itch to get back into communities working with the rural poor.  Suzy and Matt decided they wanted to move abroad, but had no idea where to start or what to do -- so they began researching and agreed that whoever got a fellowship first, the other would go along and 'just wing it.'  They saved as much money as they could to fund their next adventure.

Suzy applied to be a Kiva Fellow with Kiva.org, the first peer-to-peer microlending network and an inarguable success story with over $100 million raised in its first few years.  After being accepted, Matt agreed to being the one 'winging it' and so she hopped on a plane for her first three month placement in rural Ayacucho, Peru working with Kiva microfinance institution partner FINCA Peru while her husband volunteered with a local veterinarian.  Next came three months with a new Kiva partner, CIDRE in Cochabamba, Bolivia, where she worked with rural dairy farmers while her husband (a trained veterinary technician) worked with their local livestock veterinarians.  Suzy has made her time in South America a concentrated effort to fall upon as many ears as she can regarding the stories she has heard, and she has blogged for both the Kiva Fellows Blog and Idealist.org's South America blog.  Her time in Peru is also documented in a digital short by PBS Frontline World about Kiva.  She is currently in her final two months as a Kiva Fellow, working with new partner Fondo Esperanza in Santiago, Chile.

Suzy still believes empowering women is one of the most effective ways to tackle poverty -- and passionately believes microfinance is doing an incredible job furthering that very cause.  She thinks it is imperative to have a purpose in life; and whether the purpose be hedonistic or altruistic, it is equally important that you are proud and content with that purpose.  Suzy believes her purpose is to work one-on-one with poor and marginalized women in an effort to empower them, while working each day grounded in the present rather than the past or future.  She aspires to attend law school and pursue a career in human rights law.

Feel free to contact Suzy with any questions, she welcomes it!

suzy.marinkovich@fellows.kiva.org<mailto:suzy.marinkovich@fellows.kiva.org>

To learn more about the organizations mentioned, here are the links:

http://www.directrelief.org<http://www.directrelief.org/>

http://www.invisiblechildren.com<http://www.invisiblechildren.com/>

http://www.teachinnuganda.com<http://www.teachinnuganda.com/>

http://www.artintanzania.org<http://www.artintanzania.org/>

http://www.lavidaidealist.org<http://www.lavidaidealist.org/>

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/blog/2009/10/peru_kivas_webb.html

http://www.kiva.org<http://www.kiva.org/> & http://fellowsblog.kiva.org<http://fellowsblog.kiva.org/>