WCS: Student Shows Passion for Global Mission - June 2010

“I hope to take the skills and experiences I’m learning now and use them to do global work in the future,” says World Communion Sunday Scholar Alison Kimura.

As a child, Alison went to Kenya on a tour through her home church in Eureka, Calif. The experience changed her life. Since then she has developed a passion for global service. “I’m encouraging other people to do their part,” she said.

A junior at Trinity University in San Antonio, Alison stays busy balancing her education and her extracurricular activities, but a common passion for global service lies beneath almost everything she does. She is a double major in Spanish and International Relations as well as a pre-med student hoping to become an anesthesiologist someday. The future doctor says her interest in the miracle of medicine began “when I underwent surgery after a gymnastics accident as a child and developed a rare condition called Compartment Syndrome that required me to have more surgeries and skin grafts put in. Even though it was a traumatic experience, it really helped shape my character and led me toward the medical field.”

All of her areas of study relate to her plans of “practicing medicine on a global scale, possibly working for doctors without borders or forming my own coalition of Christian doctors to work in troubled parts of the world. I also would like to teach English as a second language to children before I go to medical school. As a child of two educators, I have always been interested in teaching, but never really pursued it until one of my professors at Trinity placed me in a classroom with bilingual children. It was such a rewarding experience working with them.”

Alison’s activities outside of her studies include participation in ATO, the school’s volunteer organization, where she assists with blood-drives and adopt a highway programs. She volunteered with the local girl scouts troop in her school’s area and spent a semester teaching a second grade class. Other commitments include cheerleading and assisting with student recruitment through the Trinity Distinguished Representative program. Alison maintains that she “still finds time for friends. I have made some wonderful friends who share in the same faith as me. We support each other as we direct our passions toward the Lord,” says the young scholar.

Like all World Communion Sunday scholars, Alison depends on your generous donations and continued support on World Communion Sunday in October in order to continue her ongoing commitment to world service. A life-long Methodist Alison says she is “very blessed to have grown up in a local United Methodist Church in Eureka and cherish the relationships I have formed in that community. I am grateful to the United Methodist Church for supporting my education. It is great to know there is an organization that helps us go to great schools.”

---by Philip Brooks, Marketing Intern at United Methodist Communications

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