Like so many young women, April Edwards thinks of herself as a future doctor. She has a plan: work hard, focus on her Duke education, get into medical school and along the way acquire all the trimmings deemed necessary for a successful American life.

She never considered these unusual goals for a girl. At least not until she spent a summer working in Africa.

"There's a saying in Kenya," April says. "' Why educate another man's wife?' Women get married off sometimes as someone's second or third wife and so they don't see the point in investing in women's education."

Working with biology professor Sherryl Broverman and about a dozen students, April wants to change that cultural norm. They are building the first boarding school for girls in Muhuru Bay, Kenya, an impoverished rural area next to Lake Victoria. When it's complete, the Women's Institute for Secondary Education and Research will be the first modern academic institution for girls in a region where only one girl has ever gone to college.

Developing a school has been a slow process, guided by research at every step. In summer 2005, Prof. Broverman took several students from her class on "AIDS and Other Emerging Diseases: Focus on Kenya" to begin studying the gender gap in academic performance for students in Muhuru Bay. In summer 2006, seven students, including April, lived at the local co-ed secondary school to research obstacles to girls' success.

"Some of the issues getting in the way of girls' success were chore kinds of things that we would consider givens or essentials, like, the girls fetch the water for the entire school, and they do the laundry," April explains.

Such seemingly straightforward tasks actually involve hauling water nearly a mile and boiling it for purification because Lake Victoria resembles "toxic sludge," she says. In an area without electricity, girls also are given inferior lanterns that prevent them from doing work after dark. To eliminate these issues, the new school will have plumbing and electricity.

April, a junior biological anthropology and religion double major, notes that the most surprising part of her work in Kenya is how receptive people have been to improving education for women. She and her fellow organizers held open town meetings in three different languages so that everyone in the town could communicate their ideas and opinions. "It's really important for us not to go in and present our solution for how things should be," she notes.

That wasn't exactly the lesson April had expected to come away with when she first enrolled in biology classes. "It's one thing to sit in the classroom and learn about AIDS," she says. "But to go to Kenya and talk to a girl who says, 'I'm in the 10th grade and I have AIDS, and I don't have enough money for my medicine'; that's totally different."

April understands the complexities of service, which she admits is really about a mutual exchange of knowledge. "I just felt this sense of responsibility," she says. "I have all these wonderful things, so how dare I not use what I have and make the most of them."