At Tufts, junior Diego Villalobos seems to have found his niche. An enthusiast for charity and community service efforts, he has become the director of Building Understanding through International Learning and Development (BUILD), a service program that focuses on promoting sustainable development in Nicaragua.
The program, which he described as an "intercultural exchange," has allowed him to work with the Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service and the Institute for Global Leadership.
But though he has found a fitting role at Tufts, getting there was not easy for Villalobos. A recent immigrant, he has spent years learning - through personal experience - about cultural and community issues in Central America. And though he has been interested in working for sustainable development for years, his road to Tufts was full of twists and turns.
When Villalobos graduated from high school in 1998, he wasn't sure of what he wanted to do with his life. He studied business at a university in Costa Rica, but dropped out after two semesters.
"I wasn't learning enough in the classroom," he said. "I needed to find people to teach me."
Villalobos spent the next few years searching for that better education. He spent a brief stint answering phones for a sports gambling service, which he quit after a woman called and explained that her husband had bet away their life savings.
Soon after, a lucky break changed his life. While rock climbing, Villalobos met the director of a community service program that worked with indigenous communities in Nicaragua. He began working with the program and stayed in Nicaragua for three months.
It was this experience, Villalobos said, that sparked his later interest in community development work.
After working with the service program, Villalobos went backpacking for a year across Central and South America, living as a self-described "hippie" and selling art to get by.
"It was definitely a journey for myself," he said.
He saved enough money to get back to Costa Rica when his trip was finished. Upon his return, Villalobos contacted the leader of the program he had worked for, who had since become the director of Outward Bound Costa Rica, a non-profit educational organization.
Villalobos was once again drawn to community service, and landed a job running the service component of the program and teaching surf lessons on the side. Two years later, he helped start a new branch of Outward Bound in Spain and moved to Europe, where he stayed for several months.
In 2003, Outward Bound offered Villalobos a job in Boston. He enthusiastically accepted in order to be with his girlfriend, Jenna, who lived in Massachusetts. After obtaining a visa, Villalobos moved to the United States and began working for Outward Bound and CHOICES, a group that encourages at-risk students in local middle schools to avoid violence.
After a year, however, Villalobos' visa was about to run out. He and Jenna, who were already planning to get married, decided to do so sooner so he could stay in the United States.
Jenna, a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, encouraged Villalobos to go back to school.
"She's always seen such potential in me," he said.
Villalobos enrolled in a continuing education program at the University of Colorado at Boulder and was accepted as a degree-seeking student within a year.
After his wife graduated and moved back to Boston, Villalobos decided to transfer so the two could be closer.
"Jenna and her father encouraged me to look at Tufts because of the [active citizenship] programs," Villalobos said. He started as a second-semester sophomore here at Tufts in the fall of 2006, and has since found ample opportunity for community service with BUILD.
The program, which sends a group of two leaders and approximately 10 students to Nicaragua for 10 days each winter break, helps with construction projects, harvesting crops and other tasks within small, rural Nicaraguan villages.
But Villalobos said their trip is as much about personal growth as about their charity work there.
"We're not going [to Nicaragua] to get a good feeling of helping people; we're going to learn and understand their culture and problems," he said.
Instead, the group aims to make an impact that lasts longer than the few days the students spend there. They hope to achieve this, he said, by creating continuous partnerships with the local communities.
"Ten days is only a blink of an eye," he said.
On the trip, group members each conduct research on one topic related to sustainable development. Upon returning to Tufts, they each present their findings to the group as a whole. The group then meets weekly throughout the spring, planning a separate research project with the aim of informing students about sustainable development.
According to Villalobos, BUILD will ultimately implement these projects in Nicaraguan communities. Those projects, he said, are the program's core.
Villalobos, an anthropology major, plans to apply to the Fletcher School and other foreign affairs schools upon graduation, hoping to "combine people's perspectives with how foreign affairs are run," he said.
Ultimately, Villalobos hopes that he can use his experience to create better sustainable development programs.
"Bringing modernity to countries so they can industrialize and don't seem as poor by Western standards [causes problems]," he said. "On the other hand, there are no other ways to help global development ... and it's important to do it the right way, like with BUILD."
