Weeks after Destenie Nock returned from Malawi, discussing her experiences there still makes her tear up.

“I feel like a better person,” she said.

Nock, a senior, electrical engineering and applied mathematics major, spent four weeks in Malawi working with school-aged children with the Malawi Leadership Team.

“Before I started my projects, we were getting to know the kids,” she said. “They were so amazed to get a pen, pencil and a notebook.”

“We would sing an American song to the kids and the kids would sing a song in Chichewa to them. After school was over, we would spend time playing with them.”

Nock traveled to Malawi with associate professor of leadership studies, Dr. Elizabeth Barber. Barber’s husband is one of Nock’s former teachers. He mentioned his wife coordinates a trip to Malawi and that she would be perfect for it.

“He told me to think about it and gave me a packet. I didn’t think anything else about it until I was cleaning my room one day and found it,” Nock said.

“I read the information and I thought, ‘This sounds great’.”

Another thing that convinced her to go was a conversation she’d had with her mother in years prior saying she regretted never visiting Africa.

“I didn’t want to regret this,” Nock said.

The first year, a lack of funds kept the 4.0-student from making the journey to Malawi. Once she decided she wanted to go, she started saving money.

“Every semester I’ve had two jobs – one semester she had three,” she said.

“Once I started saving for it, I had to do it. Once I say I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it.”

While in Malawi, Nock worked on two projects. She worked with fellow travelers to put on a workshop with local teachers on how to use a pathematics and showed the girls how to make reusable feminine pads.

Pathematics is an innovative method for engaging children and youth in concrete problem-solving using a runway to study factoring, multiplication, addition, and other math concepts. In the workshop, Nock and her counterparts explained to the teachers how they can use the runway and teach their students. They shared table top runways and she wrote a manual on how to look for prime numbers and how to play games.

The Destiny Pads project, though, was Nock’s brainchild. Each year, the team takes feminine supplies to Domasi Demonstration Primary School for the girls. In Malawi, a lot of families do not have the money necessary to buy disposable sanitary items monthly and that meant some girls could miss three to five days of school per month.

To help combat the problem, the team would travel with those items but there never seemed to be enough to get them through the year. In Nock’s forward thinking, she thought it would make more of an impact to show the girls how to make reusable pads.

“Instead of raising money to buy pads, we raised money for supplies,” she said.

Nock researched the customs to find out if this would be acceptable and then she researched designs.

“We taught all the girls how to hand sew them,” she said. “Now they can make more or do their own repairs if the stitching comes loose or something like that.”

This trip for Nock has been an eye-opening experience.

“Life is like a journey until you find yourself and you can’t find yourself until you get lost,” she said.

“When I was in Malawi, I never felt so lost in my life.”

Nock says as an engineer, the first thought to make an impact is something technical. This experience for her showed her there’s not always a complicated solution to the world’s problems.

“Sometimes the needs are so basic, you don’t need to do anything overly technical to make an impact,” she said.