It’s a 10-minute drive from the house to the hospital. Liz Getman feels every ache and affliction brought on her languid body as the car strikes potholes, one after another; unavoidable, gaping scoops out of the earth scattered along the dirt road like land mines.

She wrestles with her weakness in the front seat of the car as Victor Agbor, her host in Nigeria, drives into the darkness. He has recently taught himself to use a stick shift and is still stalling out often. But tonight, as the broken-down Toyota Hatchback’s headlight bulbs fade and the nearly empty gas tank offers its last drops, Agbor knows that now is no time to falter.

“I don’t know how we made it,” Getman said.  

Her trip to Nigeria was the most recent of the Ithaca College senior’s experiences in poverty-stricken areas around the world, following travels to Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Each experience motivated her to volunteer at home too, for Project CARE, IC SafeWater, Ten Thousand Villages and IC Intercambios.

The experiences are what Getman could call her résumé — one that got her a two-year contract with Teach For America starting this fall, during a year the organization saw the most applicants since its birth.

“She’s the most remarkable person I’ve ever met,” said senior Aaron King, her husband of three months. “And I met Don King.”

The volunteer trip to Nigeria was through CORAfrica, an organization through which they would document school conditions in the rural village of Obudu that summer.  Neither of them expected a medical emergency.

By 9 p.m., it’s been dark in Nigeria for a while. No one is around; there’s not a person on the road. Locals fell asleep with the fading daylight hours ago.

The hospitals here are not open 24/7 — there is no guarantee she’ll be seen tonight. Growing weak and feverish, Getman feels the wind on her face, blowing her blond hair through the open window.

“Keep your head up,” King tells her from the backseat. He’s a calming force.

“Whenever something bad happens, I want Aaron first,” Getman said. “[To be] there, just saying my name.”

The generally accepted version of how the couple got together, King insists, is that of love at first Snapple cap. King recalls bringing a bottle to class one day and sitting next to the dainty girl with glasses that he had admired from afar until then. She turned and asked him what quote was featured on the twist-off’s underbelly.

King put $1.50 in the vending machine every day from then on before class, hoping for the chance to talk to the girl he now credits for having swooned him into a life of bettering himself and serving others — the girl he now gets to call his wife. And it was all Mango Madness from there.

“It was the best investment I ever made,” he said.

A year later, as they arrive at the medical center halfway through their two-month stay in Obudu, Getman can barely talk at all. Her body lies feeble on the hospital bed.

The next thing she remembers is the doctor’s bite. With his teeth clamped down on one end of the tourniquet, he feels for her heartbeat with his free hand.

 She wakes up again to the doctor stabbing at her skin. An IV is inserted. The couple suspect it’s dripping an epinephrine, but who really knows. She looks up toward the ceiling; mosquitoes hover above her head. She wonders if the needle is sterile.

 Situations like these — moments in time that test a person’s courage and patience — have molded Getman’s desire to equalize living conditions worldwide. Inadequate health care centers like the dirt-floor, open-air, ill-equipped “hospital” in Obudu is just one Getman has experienced.

Her father, the Rev. Bill Getman, recalls their trip to the Dominican Republic after his daughter graduated eighth grade. It was their first day on land, and before suitcases were unloaded, they went to a barrio of more than an estimated 500,000 people, living in concentrated squalor.

 “You can go any place else in the world, and you’ll never see poverty like this,” the Rev. Bill Getman recalls the project director saying to the group.

 Surrounded by “open-sewer ditches and cardboard shacks,” he remembers his daughter “plowing through” within minutes, engaging children living there. It was a scene he says he and her older brother could hardly tolerate.

“Liz was born with a compassionate heart,” he said. “Her life experiences have molded that heart in a way that she could do nothing other than the choices she’s made.”

He laughs to himself. “What else is she going to do?” he said. “If it’s too easy, she’s not going to do it.”

Editor’s note: Students for the series were selected by the deans of their respective schools.