Hello, everyone! My name is Nardien Sadik. I am 21 years old and graduated from Belmont in 2023. Some things about me are that I want to be Human Rights Attorney when I grow up, I am engaged to my fiance Michael and am planning to get married in the summer after I return from Egypt, I am a spoken word poet, and I enjoyed playing chess even before the Queen’s Gambit came out on Netflix. In my pursuit of law school, I wanted to get some hands-on experience in what advocating for the expansion of human rights in a foreign country looked like. Embarking on a self-designed project abroad in partnership with an NGO who does just this seemed like a good fit to me, and so here we are. I could not be more thrilled at the chance to live in Egypt for six months, as the country is filled with culture, great food, and a chance to advocate for things I deeply care about. My selfish hope is that the immersion will hopefully greatly improve my Arabic language skills along the way.

Some other important highlights about my life are that while I was born in America and have lived here my whole life, my family lived in Egypt and constantly speaks about the hardships that were faced by the Coptic people. My hope is to aid those like my family while I am there and to walk away with a better understanding of my own identity as a Coptic person. I strive to learn about the historic struggles of the Coptic people and to seek out ways to remedy these complex issues so that the struggles are something in the past and no longer a present reality.

As I am writing this, I am frantically gathering together my application materials for law schools, as I plan to apply right before I leave for Egypt and will be finding out where I go to school while abroad. This thought is quite intimidating but also exciting, and I am eager to share with everyone what that will be like on my later blog posts. I am overwhelmed by this amazing opportunity and am so excited to reflect on how I grow throughout this project. As a writer I can assure you the blogs will be as much an explanation of the trip to you as it is to me as I piece together some of the most important moments and take time to reflect on their significance.