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Josefine Garcia believes that most people are good and, if shown the way, they would give back.  Without a doubt, Josefine is the woman for the job of modeling to others how to give.  Since she arrived at UNH, after enduring her own struggles, all she has done is give back.  “I’m a little over the top,” she admits. “I feel so strongly, I don’t know what to do first.” Josefine’s desire to give is what makes her story so inspiring and humbling.

Josefine, the youngest of nine children, grew up in the Dominican Republic and arrived in the United States when she nine years old.  The rest of her family had already been living in Nashua, NH since the 1960s, so Josefine and her family decided to move to be closer. 

“I didn’t know English,” she remembers. “I knew ‘chicken’, ‘pencil’, ‘ceiling’, and ‘floor’ from a song I knew.”  She was one of two Hispanic students at her school.  The English as a Second Language program was still a work in progress at that time.  She was in the classroom a lot and slowly began piecing things together.  Josefine would go to the library and get books on tape and listen to them over and over. By the second month of school, she was having conversations with other students.

This struggle is what lead Josefine to her communications disorders major here at UNH.  “I know what it’s like to have a speech issue,” she says.  She describes it like listening to the radio: when the volume is turned down low, you can barely understand the words, but when you turn up the volume, suddenly you can understand what is being sung. When she first read the job description of a speech pathologist, she knew it was what she wanted to do. There were so many options, ranging from accent modification for actors to working with children suffering from brain injuries; Josefine felt that there had to be something in there for her.

In addition to her major classes, Josefine has found ways to get involved in the community.  She joined the National Student Speech Hearing and Language Association (NSSHLA) and has participated in the Brain Injury Association of New Hampshire (BIANH) Brain Injury Walk. Josefine remembers a significant moment during one of the walks. The walk was set up so that participants walked a distance and then turned around at a certain point to return to the starting line.  When turning, they would face other people walking behind. People were so empowered to see the long line of participants.  Josefine remembers: “There was this one woman in a wheelchair and she couldn’t speak. She gave me this really thankful look – I felt connected to people with brain injuries from that moment on.”

Josefine’s community giving doesn’t stop there.  Through Golden Key National Honor Society, she helped with a project that turned donated books into new books for schools in Africa.  In a women studies class, she started a letter writing campaign, “Wear White For Darfur.”  Through this campaign, she spread the word of wearing white to raise awareness and distributed templates to students so they could write to Congress themselves.  Most recently, Josefine helped sponsor “Winter Women’s Gala” with the help from her classmates in the women studies class.  She made a flyer encouraging people to “come stuff your face and benefit local women at the same time.”  The women gathered for a potluck dinner and brought donations for A Safe Place, a shelter for victims of domestic abuse located in Portsmouth.

As if all of this isn’t enough, Josefine does one more thing that shines the light on how truly golden her heart is.  Like many people, she saw a photo of a little boy who desperately needed a sponsor through ChildReach-PLAN USA. But unlike many people who move on from that picture, Josefine chose to sponsor him.  She thinks that maybe the reason people don’t sponsor children is that they don’t know where their money is going. But, she is consistently sent a report about where her contributions are going and the progress of her little boy.  “For the first two years, he was so shy and skinny.  He was not healthy.  When I got a picture of him and he was beaming and looked so healthy.  I just started bawling.”

There are other children whose lives will be impacted by Josefine – after she graduates in May, she plans to attend graduate school for communication disorders, and then hopes to work with children in either an educational or a medical setting.  “There are kids with a huge range of disorders and disabilities,” she says.  Those kids, and anyone who crosses paths with Josefine, will surely be lucky to have her in their lives.

“Students are the focus of everything we do.”