Once, when Mwansa Njelesani was a growing up she wanted to be a doctor.

"My dad was part of the first group of Zambian doctors to graduate out of the university after independence," the HIV/AIDS program co-ordinator for Taking It Global says, adding her mother was also a midwife.

No, she's not a doctor today — entirely by choice. Instead, she wants to work to help doctors do their jobs. And her tenacity is impressive.

Now the recent graduate of Carleton University's master's program in international affairs — a degree she completed in only one year — is spearheading a youth website for Taking It Global's efforts at this year's World AIDS Conference to be held in Toronto this August.

What brought her to Taking It Global and the efforts to stop AIDS was her African upbringing.

"It's always at the back of your head, but you don't realize how much of an impact it's had on you," she says of her experience with the disease.

She calmly tells of returning to Africa from school in England each year.

"Every summer you were guaranteed a few people would die, which was very macabre. But it was a weird reality you have to face," she says, her eyes bright with emotion.

"The (funerals) were a blur to me, and I didn't fully understand what it was about."

Her encounters with HIV started early. In Zambia, roughly 20 per cent of the population has the infection.

"You go through cycles where you're upset ... it's a hard thing to do and I think for me that's been kind of my motivation (to spread information)," she says. "You happen to have been born in Canada. I happened to have been born in Zambia.

"Life circumstances have meant I'm facing these challenges.

"But at the end of the day we're all seeking similar things."

Njelesani spent her first nine years in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, a country with the world's lowest life expectancy rate, around 35 years.

Yet if you ask her about Africa, her eyes light up and her smile grows.

"It's so diverse and so rich and so amazing: the lifestyle and just the heat," the 24-year-old says laughing. "It's an amazing place."

Her father later moved her family to Sierra Leone when he was approached by the World Health Organization to work as a doctor for the UN in the early '90s.

Then her schooling took her thousands of miles away from the home she had known.

Her parents decided to send Njelesani and her brother to boarding school in East Sussex, England to have a more stable education while they moved to different countries in Africa.

She spent nearly 10 years in England.

And it was on those trips home to Africa that she first began to realize being a doctor wasn't for her.

"I would see the frustrations that doctors had, like working at the main hospital in Lusaka — there were three medicines for the official pharmacy," she says.

"You'd diagnose the patient but what's the point of even diagnosing them if the major pharmacy doesn't have the medicine for these people?"

Njelesani was struck by how important it was to understand ways to help meet the doctors' needs.

"I was more interested in facilitating doctors to do their work than becoming that doctor," she explains, though she adds they were always an inspiration to her.

"These doctors would switch from language to language to try and find out, `Do you speak this or do you speak this?' and then diagnose in that particular language," she says, adding there are 72 distinct languages in Zambia, of which she speaks two and her mother speaks nine.

In 2000, Njelesani came to Canada. As an 18-year-old who had just finished her A-Levels — the equivalent to the old Grade 13 — she had a desire to see more of the world.

"I ended up in Nova Scotia by chance really," she explains of her decision to go to Dalhousie University — it was just the first Canadian university to accept her.

She did a combined honours degree in political science and French while continuing a love of music — developed over years of studying piano and singing in England — by joining a band.

Nonetheless, AIDS factored into her work again as she organized campaigns to educate students about the realities of the disease.

"I remember this one person said, `Oh well, you know it's a curse from God and they didn't pray enough and that's why it happened to them.'

"Or people were like like, `Are Africans just more sexually promiscuous?'" she says, with a laugh. "So in some ways you have to respect the fact that someone's coming to you because they want to be more engaged.

"But on the other level you realize there's a lot of misinformation out there."

Njelesani sees how the Western perspective has trouble understanding the extent of the disease.

"There's an association with, `It won't happen to me,'" she says of people's opinions of the disease here in Canada.

"My biggest lesson was, as empathetic as I was, it took someone close to me getting HIV to really hit it home."

She doesn't feel comfortable disclosing the person's name.

"I was in England and it was around the time when I was writing my final exams," she says.

"I remember simply going into a nearby church and basically crying, trying to figure out why, particularly why this person. It took awhile for me to calm down."

The person is still alive today, which gives her hope. "You have to keep living and the person is living with HIV, and unlike many other people, not dying from it.

"That is what you have to focus on, on the fact that they are living, trying to live their best life, like anyone else."

Njelesani hopes people who haven't been around the disease as much as she has will realize there is life behind those numbers that are so hard to understand.

"These are young people like you and me.

"They are excited about life and they want all of these things to happen for them. But (they were also) born in Zambia.

"Therefore, on top of just being young they have to deal with the fact they've lost a parent or something," she says sadly. "It's a hard thing to try and transmit."

But there is hope, she says, for the youth growing up in Africa right now. Her dissertation, which she completed in October 2005, was on youth NGOs in Lusaka. And she feels there are more people speaking out about the disease.

"There's been this explosion of Zambian music and young people are using music as a mechanism to express their frustrations with the system. It's amazing," she says.

This past November, she began working with Taking It Global — a job that fate dropped in her lap when she was least expecting it, but when she needed it most. As an international student on her post-grad work visa, she was running out of time to find a job.

Now, five months later, Njelesani says Taking It Global really draws her in because of its ability to use growing technology to connect youth around the world for one cause.

Her future plans lie in travelling the world. But she recognizes she also needs to find balance first.

"Now that I'm growing a little older I know the importance of having a base, my own home, a place that's my little sanctuary," she says.

"(But) through travelling and through working in other cultures you learn about yourself and it's amazing, you grow so much."

No matter where she goes, she says she will always be connected with her childhood home.

"That connection for me is always important," she says softly, putting her hands to her chest.

"It's engrained in me, it's part of me.

"Home is Africa."

ID@thestar.ca