The Power of One

Andy Cunningham wanted to be a meteorologist. After a high-school trip to China, however, he quickly relinquished the dreams of weather, temperature and air pressure to pursue a newly discovered passion in international education. He became the golden child that every parent longs for, and the guy that everyone wants to be. As a Robertson Scholar, Truman Scholar, founder of the first centralized facility for the treatment of sexually abused children in Vermont, co-founder of WISER and a devout Catholic, Cunningham's resume is a dream and he doesn't seem to have a bad bone in his body. He is a person who quotes Mother Teresa and Winston Churchill, says his favorite spot at Duke is a sixth-row Chapel seat and speaks with sincerity and enthusiasm that can convince anyone to join his cause. Even people who work with him say Cunningham's biggest flaw is only that he stays up too late to do his homework, a red-haired apparition haunting Perkins Library at all hours of the night.

But from aspiring meteorologist to enterprising leader-what makes this senior tick?

"There is nothing more than walking into a classroom or even down the halls of a school that gets me more pumped about life," Cunningham says. "To think about the potential that each student has every day to make a difference in their world, almost makes me explode."

Cunningham is a conspicuous figure on campus-at 6-foot-5 with fiery hair, he is best known for his involvement with WISER, the first all-girls secondary boarding school in Muhuru Bay, Kenya, which will promote gender equality and intellectual enthusiasm. Long before his interest in Kenya developed, however, he had already discovered that he wanted to do something with international relations. At his public high school in Rutland, Vt., he was an active athlete on the track team and an avid saxophone player. His sophomore year, he left the country for the first time in his life to spend a month and a half in China, where he and other students worked in rural and urban schools.

"I came back and said, 'I want to do something called International Blank. I don't know what that is-something beyond Rutland but that includes our home needs as well.'"

After devoting the rest of his high school experience to service, Cunningham received a full ride to Duke as part of the service-oriented Robertson Scholars Program, enrolled in the "Humanitarian Challenges at Home and Abroad" Focus Program, and eventually took Sherryl Broverman's AIDS and Emerging Diseases seminar. The summer after his sophomore year, he traveled to Muhuru Bay for the first time, which he says taught him more about gender and education than any classes could have done.

"I just realized, 'This is where I need to be. This is what I need to be doing. This is what I mean by international education,'" he says. "That's what I wanted out of Duke-to fill in the blank and to work with others."

As a Robertson Scholar, Cunningham is no stranger to the opportunities afforded to merit scholars. As part of the program, students spend their summers engaged in service work around the country, and after his freshman year, Cunningham spent the summer in New Orleans, an experience that ultimately led him to help students get back into schools and houses after Hurricane Katrina. Though his second summer was spent in Kenya working with WISER, the Robertson Scholars Program didn't limit its assistance to providing the initial opportunity for Cunningham to travel to Muhuru Bay.

"I surround myself with powerful people, and I surround myself with people with powerful ideas," he says. Cunningham cites Broverman, Rose Odhiambo-faculty member at Egerton University and WISER's crucial link to Kenya-and an assortment of fellow Duke students as integral in getting WISER off the ground. These "powerful people" who constitute WISER's foundation have only the best memories of Cunningham's passion and compassion in a world where first impressions matter.

"I first met Andy in the lobby of a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya," says junior Katie Mikush, who works with Cunningham. "A tall, skinny, red-haired, well over six-foot-tall kid with a huge smile on his face walked into the hotel lobby, spotted me, and immediately wrapped me into a giant hug."

Mikush adds that Cunningham's tireless enthusiasm and optimism are evident in everything he does. "I don't think I've ever seen him get discouraged."

So how does a person like Cunningham come out of a small town in Vermont, discover a passion and spread his contagious enthusiasm while working toward a definitive life goal? McKinstry describes him as "driven, thoughtful, authentic and energetic." Mikush says his enthusiasm is his worst quality: "He'll stay up till 4 a.m. working on something for WISER and then get up at 7 a.m. to continue working," she says.

Where does Cunningham hide his Achilles' heel? Or better yet: does he even have one?

"When I was volunteering at a men's shelter at Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, a short, small five-foot nun read me a quote from Mother Teresa that was written on the inside of their wall that said, 'Our greatest challenge is to love without getting tired,'" he says. "And I will never forget that."

Cunningham came to Duke because of the academic opportunities. He says he was deciding between Duke and Georgetown University's Foreign Service program, but apart from receiving a scholarship, he was drawn here by the potential.

"I really like what President [Richard] Brodhead said last year about translational learning," he says. "I wanted to translate what I learned in the classroom into a real-world situation [now], and not wait 10 years. I really believed that they wanted us to be daring and really push the envelope." The turning point for Cunningham was Broverman's AIDS seminar-his favorite class at Duke and the impetus for creating WISER.

"It took me three e-mails to get into that class-thank God I did," he says. " [Otherwise] I would not be doing what I'm doing now."

Together with the professor, Cunningham says the students in the class created a 64-page manual full of recommendations regarding issues of education and gender in Kenya. However, at a college level the recommendations were reaching the wrong audience-it was Kenya itself that needed to be reached. And what stemmed from a theoretical manual became a 12-person DukeEngage project, which turned into a school in Muhuru Bay and, this year, an official non-governmental organization.

As soon as WISER got off the ground in its initial form, Cunningham says Broverman was inundated with interest but had to limit participation to students conducting independent studies while the initiative was still being established. Soon enough, however, the original group of students began to consider what other kinds of help would benefit the quickly growing project. Cunningham says students with an array of different interests in addition to gender equality and education began showing interest, and WISER grew to accommodate those whose knowledge of things like microfinance or computer skills fit with the mission.

Last fall during WISER Week, fundraising, tabling on the Plaza and distributing T-shirts made the group a visible and popular organization on campus, but Cunningham says interest was always high to begin with.

"The big explosion happened at the first meeting," he says. "We had 170 students show up. and we only had one other meeting. We're not about meetings." But WISER nonetheless continues to grow. The student group plans to make WISER Week an even more prominent and more educational event this semester, with a visit by Dr. Paul Farmer, Trinity '82, who has done groundbreaking work with infectious diseases in Haiti and was the subject of the senior class' summer reading selection, Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Cunningham says his only goal before he graduates is to ensure the future of WISER on campus. He hopes a head for the student group-which supports the NGO and academic research-will be chosen this month.

"I really want WISER to remain the way it is right now, that it's a student group that really engages students in global issues," he says. He adds that the student group at Duke is one of several components of the entire WISER family, which also includes the WISER NGO, the Muhuru Bay board of advisors and the Duke board of advisors. The student group supports the NGO and academic research; Cunningham hopes that the student group stays strongly connected to Muhuru Bay while maintaining a presence on campus.

Cunningham came to Duke with direction, and through a series of classes and collaborations with a strong spurt of determination, he has certainly found his calling. His success story has made him a public campus figure lauded by professors, administrators, fellow students and girls going to school in Muhuru Bay.

Mikush points out Cunningham's optimism, and he follows through: "[International education] is exhausting, draining and often times the least glamorous job out there-but that's what gets me excited about tomorrow, the day after that and so on.. Do I feel lucky? I think I feel more responsible than anything else to take the opportunities that have been afforded to me in and out of the classroom and to put them into practice on the ground."

Let's be glad Cunningham gave up on meteorology.