Whitworth grad takes passion for community service from Zimbabwe to Washington, D.C.

Growing up in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, Nadia Sarfraz spent much of her time volunteering at schools, orphanages and retirement homes.

In particular, she remembers leading a group of students who collected donations and wrapped Christmas gifts for children who had little to look forward to on the holiday.

“I come from a very collectivist culture where we all get through things together, we work together, I serve my community,” Sarfraz said. “My entire life, I was raised around the idea of service.”

Sarfraz took that passion for community service to Spokane four years ago when she started her undergraduate career at Whitworth University. The 22-year-old recently graduated from Whitworth after a semester disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Her accomplishments are many and varied.

Sarfraz majored in biochemistry, and yet she found time to work extensively at Whitworth’s Dornsife Center for Community Engagement. She managed a mentorship program called RISE that connects Whitworth students with kids at local K-12 schools.

Working with local nonprofits and attending city council meetings, Sarfraz has advocated for a wide range of causes, including mental health outreach, affordable housing, food security, cultural heritage preservation and animal rescue.

Sarfraz enjoys getting others involved, too. In the United States, she said she’s noticed many people “being really compassionate, but then not knowing how to funnel their compassion into service.”

Last year, through Whitworth’s honors program, Sarfraz spent the fall semester in Washington, D.C., as an intern at two Smithsonian Institution museums.

At the National Museum of American History, she helped create teaching tools for people with vision and hearing disabilities – objects they could touch and hold to get a tactile experience as they toured exhibits. Those included objects made with a 3D printer and strips of fabric that mimicked the feel of dresses worn by the nation’s first ladies.

At the National Museum of Air and Space, Sarfraz researched the ethics of spaceflight and, in particular, a condition known as spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome. Basically, she explained, astronauts lose eyesight as they travel farther into space – a problem with great implications for any future attempt at a Mars landing.

Among many other awards, Sarfraz recently won a Governor’s Student Civic Leader Award from Washington Campus Compact, a coalition of colleges and universities in the state. She was one of three students in Washington to win the award, which comes with a $1,000 stipend.

Sarfraz already has moved back to D.C., where she plans to pursue a doctorate in biochemistry followed by a law degree at Georgetown University, starting this fall. In her spare time, she hopes to get involved in yet another area of volunteer work: advocating for prisoners on death row.

A lot has changed in Zimbabwe since Sarfraz moved away, including a military coup that ousted strongman president Robert Mugabe, who led the country for nearly four decades.

Sarfraz has visited home a few times and considered moving back to Harare, where her parents are doctors, but now says she will let her career and passion lead her to her next destination.

“For the longest time, I thought I wanted to be a doctor like my parents, and go back and work with the nonprofit clinics that we have there,” Sarfraz said. But then, she said, she began noticing laws and policies that have “inhibited a lot of the people that I care about – doctors and patients – from actually accessing the help that they need in so many different ways.”

She looks forward to knocking down some of those barriers.