Leaders: Cherine

Life Experience:

Before coming to Challenge Day in 2002, Cherine explored a wide array of random and meaningful gigs. Her nuttiest job involved taking to the streets with her guitar. She has sung on subway trains in Paris and Cairo, and lots of places in between. For a few years, she worked as a journalist in the Middle East and the US. Her journalism has appeared in Whole Earth Magazine, Media File, NPR and The Egyptian Reporter. Last summer she researched and edited the Footprint Guide to Egypt. She's also worked with a handful of nonprofits focused on youth and peace building. Highlights of her nonprofit work include creating and facilitating workshops about domestic violence to high school students in Oakland; creating and implementing an after school empowerment program for adolescent girls in Boston; helping to organize a conference on waging peace in the Middle East with a team from the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco; and most recently, facilitating a series of 5-day workshops about diversity, empathy and peace to elementary students from the Bay Area with The Mosaic Project.

Cherine is currently studying for her Ph.D in Japan on a full-ride scholarship! Awesome, Cherine!

If you really knew me:

If you really knew me, you'd know that I am beyond ecstatic to have found Challenge Day, an organization that fills my heart, engages my mind, and enables me to take action toward cultivating more peace on our planet. If you really knew me, you'd know that I grew up sprawled across the Atlantic Ocean with a foot in two worlds: Egypt, and the States. You'd know that because of that and so many other things, I don't fit in any boxes. If you really knew me, you'd know that my family means more to me than anything and it's hard to be so far from my mom, who lives in Cairo. If you really knew me, you'd know that I speak two and a half languages and can say peace in nine. If you really knew me, you'd know that I love Ethiopian food and sunsets, West African drumming and climbing mountains. If you really knew me, you'd know that I've traveled around the planet more than once in search of adventure, the meaning of life, and myself. If you really knew me, you'd know that I'm still looking.