By: Jeff Lipton
Boland, who wants to be a doctor, traveled to South Africa in February, following her freshman year at Loyola University, to care for babies infected with AIDS. She used about $4,000 of her own money for the trip, leaving on Feb. 21, said her mother, Pat, a nurse at the Number Four School in Inwood. Erin is expecting to return to Cedarhurst sometime in August.
In one e-mail correspondence with her mother on March 18, she wrote, I-m going on home visits with the nurses/doctors to visit people who are too old or too sick to visit the clinic that-s really, really hard. It-s hard to see these babies so sick and dying and that it can all be easily prevented.
Every week I see tons of people getting diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, and these are only the people who have the courage to get tested, she wrote.
Erin has been working with patients in the town of Kayamandi, giving then any assistance she can, and was awaiting word for her transfer to Pietermaritzburg, about an hour outside the city of Durban, where she will work with children in a privately run AIDS orphanage called Little Angels.
Her mother said Erin is taking advantage of a gap year, which allows college students to interrupt their college careers to do volunteer work. She will attend a different college in the fall, her mother said.
She-s working with an agency that caters to college kids, Pat Boland said.
If the Lawrence High School graduate is looking for a challenge, she found one in South Africa, a country that has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the world. Boland has been trying to educate the populace about AIDS prevention as well.
She wants to go into medicine to see if it-s in her, her mother said. She wants to find herself. She wants to be more centered, and she wants this experience to give herself that commitment she will need to be a doctor.
She also wants to see more of the world.
She is also picking up a native language called Xohsa. She-s amazed how much poverty is everywhere over there, but there-s still much happiness amongst the people in how they live and how much they have joy, Pat Boland said. She fell in love with the place.
Erin-s absence has been difficult for the Boland family. Her mother said that she, her husband Michael, who works at WNBC-TV in news, and their other daughter, Kaitlyn, who will start college in the fall, live to hear from Erin in South Africa. We-ve been keeping in constant touch with her, thanks to the phone card, said Pat.
She said she hasn-t worried too much about Erin, even though she is working with victims of AIDS, because she-s certain her daughter has been taking the proper safety precautions.
Boland said her daughter is leaning toward becoming a pediatrician. She said that when Erin entered the 11th grade at Lawrence High, she decided that she really wanted to be a doctor and go to medical school.
I-m so proud of her, but I-m frightened and I-m proud, Boland said. I should say that I-m anxious, not frightened, because she-s so far away from here. But she sounds wonderful.
She-s always been sensitive to other people-s plight.
