Only days after returning from a six-month stint in Egypt as part of the Lumos Travel program, Belmont alumna Nardien Sadik (’23) visited campus to share about her experiences offering legal humanitarian aid in Cairo.
The Lumos Travel Award allows Belmont students to design their own international working experience. During the application process, each potential awardee selects a location, a cause, an international organization to partner with and outlines the details of their proposal to the Lumos committee in hopes of receiving the award funding to manifest their proposed project.
Lumos Inspiration
Sadik is Coptic, something she identifies as a key facet of her identity. While at Belmont, she founded and served as president of the Orthodox Christian Campus Ministries (OCCM) student organization as a Global Honors student and grew up listening to her parents speak conversational Arabic at home. In addition, Sadik has a passion for legal humanitarian work and plans to attend law school in Fall 2024.
When crafting her project, Sadik explored different ways to fuse these cruxes of her life in a way that would prove fulfilling not only to her, but to others on a global scale. This resulted in a Lumos proposal to Egypt that primarily focused on aid to other Copts in the region, but would expand to humanitarian advocacy for other groups in the area as well. However, finding an international organization that would support her in these endeavors proved tricky.
“It’s very hard to find an organization that will help with humanitarian aid for a specific group of people that essentially requires calling out the Egyptian government every day,” said Sadik. “Many nonprofits will help with that kind of work, but under the guise of helping a generic group of underserved people. In reality, they are actually helping people under an immense amount of pressure to convert or hide their faith, but I wanted a group that was open about what they were doing.”
Providing Aid in Cairo
Fighting through the stress and frustration of searching for an organization that aligned with her aspirations, Sadik found BLESSEgypt, the largest Coptic-specific nonprofit in Egypt that aids in humanitarian activism and resource allocation for anyone in the region who needs it. It was a perfect match and Sadik began her work with BLESS in October 2023. 
While working in Cairo, Sadik fought for migrant aid and education reform for Copts and others in northern Egypt, worked with the church to help women who have suffered genital mutilation flee from their circumstances and aided in writing several funding proposals that were presented to organizations such as the United Nations and European Union. Highlighting her work was the opportunity to write a speech on Egypt’s migrant crisis that was delivered by the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandra, Pope Tawadros II.
Several people that Sadik worked with on a daily basis, including local church members, professors, volunteers and BLESS employees, not only helped assist with her professional work, but also taught Sadik how to spot needs within a population.
“One of the big things I learned is that in human rights work, it generally won’t be a clear path with defined actions you need to take,” she said. “You need to actually listen to the population that you are going to serve and figure out what they need, rather than assuming you know what they need and how to fix it.”
Lumos Takeaways
Adapting to the Egyptian culture proved challenging for Sadik as well, from learning which areas of the city are safe at night to the subjective inflation of prices by street vendors to city-wide rolling power blackouts.
“As a type-A person, it was really hard for me to just go with it,” Sadik explained. “Learning how to adapt to a new environment was often frustrating at the beginning because I wanted to know how things were going to be. It made it scary to leave my apartment sometimes. But I still made the effort to go out and take care of my mental health, even when I found it difficult to understand everything that was going on. I was nervous at first, but I wish I had tried new things sooner.”
While still contemplating her acceptance letters, Sadik now plans to attend law school in the fall with aspirations of becoming a human rights lawyer, something that she is fully confident in her ability to do following her Lumos experience.
Sadik concluded her presentation with words of advice and encouragement to any students interested in the Lumos Travel Award and the enriching experience it provides to Belmont students.
“If you are planning to apply, you need to be prepared and very detailed oriented,” she offered. “How much will it cost? Where will you stay? Do you know the language? Do you know the dollar conversion rate? Do you know how you will get that money once you arrive? Do you know anyone there? My Belmont professors helped me with these questions as well, so use them as a resource.”
Be brave. You can do this. It was truly one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had in my life.