Editor's note: Amanda Ricci's adventures are featured in GPC's new online feature, Where Our Students Spent Their Summer. Did you spend your summer in another country or state? Tell us! Visit the site to pin your summer location on our world map and share your story and photos. If we publish your entry, you will receive an OTP t-shirt.

Summertime may mean work or family vacations for some students, but for 29-year-old Amanda Ricci, this summer presented the unique opportunity to work as a medical volunteer in Africa. The Georgia Perimeter College student volunteered for a month in Livingstone, Zambia, with African Impact, a group she found via a Google search.

As a medical volunteer, Ricci went to various clinics where she took vitals, weighed babies and filled prescriptions. She went into schools and taught HIV education courses to college students. She also traveled to different villages where she dressed wounds and gave medical advice and medications to those unable to make it to the clinic.

The volunteers also worked in various non-medical projects. Most of these were after-school clubs for the children. “I discovered that I really loved teaching the seventh grade boys’ math club,” Ricci says. “It was so rewarding to watch the kids get excited when they finally grasped the concepts. They are so hungry for knowledge and eager to learn.”

On the weekends, Ricci enjoyed  a variety of activities, including white-water rafting on the Zambezi River, hiking down to the Batoka Gorge and a photo safari through Chobe National Park in neighboring Botswana. She also did bungee jumping, zip lining, and the bridge swing 111 meters above the raging waters of the river off the Zambia/Zimbabwe bridge.

“The bridge swing was the single most terrifying thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “It was a true adrenaline rush.”

Ricci didn’t have any medical experience prior to volunteering in Zambia; she has a bachelor’s degree is in interior design. She is currently taking science courses at GPC’s Newton Campus and plans to apply to medical school and study anesthesiology.

Her change in career path was the result of a poor job market and a rare disease, Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome that debilitated her mother. “CRPS left my mother bedridden and in excruciating pain, unable to walk, drive or even be touched,” she says. 

Ricci explains that her interest in medicine and pain management was the result of seeing a dramatic change in her mother’s condition after she received an experimental treatment in Monterrey, Mexico. In the study, patients were induced into a coma for five days using a drug called ketamine. “This procedure put my mom in remission and gave her back her life,” Ricci says.

“I want to help people like my mother and push for this study to be reopened and eventually made available in the States,” Ricci says.

Africa wasn’t Ricci’s first adventure in another country. She also has spent two months traveling all over Peru, including hiking the Inca Trail for four days to Machu Picchu.

“I don’t know where my travels will take me next. Maybe Thailand, Australia, Italy or Spain,” she says.