I am living proof that the dreams of each of our Samaritan Scholars are valid. I was raised in a village in Kenya, the eleventh born in a family of twelve siblings. For us, struggle was the order of the day.  My elderly parents were not educated. They were staunch...

Here in Ethiopia, we celebrated the New Year this past September with singing and dancing in the lively streets of Addis Ababa. One of the remarkable groups that performed named themselves the Samaritan Family. Clad in vibrant, traditional attire, adorned with...

Why did Barry Sanders retire so abruptly from the Detroit Lions in 1999? Amazon Prime recently released Bye Bye Barry, a 90-minute documentary to relive the glory days and reminisce about what could have been. By the end of the film, Barry concedes that it was...

Can anything good come from Nazareth? This is how Nathaniel, who became one of Jesus’s apostles, responded when he learned where Jesus was from. It’s a question our scholars often face themselves—either as they interview for jobs or enter schools outside of their...

I was introduced to International Samaritan in 2022, through an invitation from my church to go to Honduras and learn about “garbage dump” communities and to help people there break out of poverty. I thought, “Wow! There are 15 million people worldwide in this...

Toledo, Ohio, is well known for producing Jeeps, manufacturing glass, and for sparking a mostly bloodless war between Michigan and Ohio. What you may not know is that International Samaritan was started by a group of students and faculty from Toledo’s St. John’s...

Something is going on at International Samaritan that reminds me a lot of a guy I saw at our local pool last week. That guy is me. I started swimming laps for the first time in my life a few weeks ago. It’s pretty embarrassing. Older people fly by me, and they keep...

Energy and excitement filled the air as Samaritan Scholars, families, and friends gathered to participate in the IntSam Global 5K last weekend. It was a joy-filled experience here in Ethiopia where stories were shared, prayers were offered, and laughter echoed...

One of our Samaritan Scholars in Ethiopia, Baye, grew up with an abusive father. His father's harsh and unbearable presence inflicted deep wounds on Baye and his mother. Despite summoning the courage to leave and forge their own path, the pain would resurface,...

Elizabeth, age 14, hopes to become a journalist. That looked like an impossible dream just a few months ago as she didn’t have the money to continue with school past the sixth grade.  Money is tight because Elizabeth’s mother is the family breadwinner, and she’s a...

As the program director in Jamaica, I spend a lot of time praying for the scholars in my program. As I’ve been praying, the word resilience has been echoing in my head for months. Looking at the definition, resilience means “the capacity to recover quickly from...

This past spring, I went on a service trip to Guatemala with 11 other parishioners from the St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor. I had no idea the impact this trip would have on me.  We started off traveling in our minibus to the Francisco Coll elementary school. We...