From left,
Nicole Brown ’06, Anne-Lise Maag ’06, and Molly
Fay ’06 atop Kilimanjaro. (courtesy Molly Fay ’06)
PROFILE Molly Fay ’06: Hiking for
health clinics
Molly Fay ’06’s Princeton
banner made quite a trip from her dorm-room wall to the top of the
world’s tallest freestanding mountain. Along with Anne-Lise
Maag ’06 and Nicole Brown ’06, who flew halfway around
the world for the adventure in June, Fay lugged the banner up the
19,340-foot Kilimanjaro to raise money for health clinics in Africa
where she has worked the past year. Despite the headaches, nausea,
and breathing troubles involved in climbing, she didn’t have
to do much convincing to get her classmates to come along.
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a part of the
world I had never been to,” explained Maag, who worked in
a neurosurgery research laboratory at Stanford University and, along
with Brown, began medical school in August. Brown had been a research
assistant at a private medical practice in Pennsylvania.
After the six-day trek, Maag and Brown spent a month volunteering
with one of the mobile HIV/AIDS clinics in northern Kenya, where
Fay worked as part of Princeton-in-Africa through August. Using
a combination of cars, camels, and bicycles, the clinics supply
remote nomadic communities with HIV/AIDS testing and counseling,
immunizations, and reproductive-health services.
A civil engineering major, Fay became interested in health care
when she took an anthropology course. “I started becoming
passionate about health care in impoverished areas,” she said.
“There are no simple solutions. You can’t just throw
your money at [the problem] and get an answer.” But money
can help. Fay, who planned on returning to the United States in
September to take pre-med courses, won a grant for one of the clinics
after it lost its original source of funding.
The Kilimanjaro hike was cold, icy, and spectacular. The trio
woke at midnight and climbed through the dark to reach the summit
at daybreak. Then they waved their banner and headed back down,
having raised more than $2,500 for the clinics — enough money
to buy six months’ worth of medicine.
By Anne Ruderman ’01
Anne Ruderman ’01 is a graduate student at Yale University.
