“I’m from the state of Paraná in Brazil. When I was a teenager, I went to a Catholic school, and for a field trip, we visited poor communities – favelas – and I started to wonder: ‘I get to study at this good school and these people are struggling to have food on their table – why is that?’ My head started to flip, thinking about this inequality, and eventually I asked myself ‘what could I study that would give me the tools to be useful to society somehow, to change this situation’? That’s when I started volunteering with NGOs and decided to study law in Brazil. I became a lawyer, but after a year, I knew law wasn’t what I wanted.

So, I shifted to NGOs and went to Sao Paulo and started working with favelas and emergency housing projects. That experience gave me several skills and helped me understand that I wanted to have a larger structural impact. After five years, I went to the Brazil-Venezuela border to help with the refugees and migrant operation there. Then I managed a UNICEF-led pandemic emergency response project in a poor northeast area of Brazil. After that, I worked in active conflict zones with former guerilla communities in Colombia, helping the UN monitor implementation of a peace agreement between guerillas and the government.

Applying to Duke, coming here, it’s a natural path to me. I’ve always been thinking about how I can impact a larger amount of people, and working with policy I think will match that. I don’t know what I want to do after – there’s so much to learn and explore – but I feel I have a commitment to all the people I’ve worked with and who gave me the experiences I had. All those different communities I worked with, I learned a lot, so what am I going to do with all this learning and what am I going to give back? More than all those experiences being my background, there’s a human content to it, and I try never to lose sight of that – that’s what I focus on the most.” – Christian Menin, MIDP ‘24 #humansofdukesanford #MIDP