"I live in a place called Raheny," says Sinead Walsh ’00, a tall fair-skinned woman with pale blue eyes. "Raheny is five miles away from town" – Dublin, Ireland – "and it’s also five miles away from Howth."

With the same joyousness that made her known in Ireland as the No. 2-seeded junior tennis champ who ³loved to play,² Walsh plunged into extracurricular life at Harvard. Staff photo by Kris Snibbe

Howth is an affluent suburb, with heathery hills, an excellent private school, and a tennis club. Dublin proper is industrial. Raheny, situated between the two, is working-class – the laundry-lined, peeling-paint neighborhoods described in Roddy Doyle’s novels.

"I live right on the sea front," Walsh says, "so on a good day, when the weather is really windy, the sea’s just gorgeous, and it’s sort of a ‘Howth day.’ But when it’s horrible and winter, it’s more industrial Dublin that you see."

Walsh, a self-described "chameleon figure," has moved between contrasting worlds all her life: working-class and upper-class neighborhoods, Ireland and America, the tenuousness of transfer students and the relative security of four-year students at Harvard. After graduation, she’ll pursue her lifelong interest in third-world development, as a Rockefeller Fellow traveling and working in India.

Now an English concentrator in Winthrop House, Walsh transferred to Harvard from Texas Christian University her sophomore year.

"Best thing," she says. "Best thing I ever did."

With the same joyousness that made her known in Ireland as the number-two seeded junior tennis champ who "loved to play," Walsh plunged into extracurricular life at Harvard.

She transformed Harvard’s Transfer Links program into a substantial orientation program and support network for incoming transfer students. She played on the varsity tennis team until a hand injury ended her run junior year. She sang with the Noteables. And she founded IMPACT, a student group devoted to fundraising – and consciousness-raising – for third-world development needs.

IMPACT may be closest to her heart. Her mother – "a helper, a lay-saint kind of person" – visited people in hospitals, ran raffles to raise money for Ethiopia, and turned down the socially prestigious vice-captaincy of the tennis club to, instead, help the woman in Clontarf who "was bringing the kids from Chernobyl to summer in Ireland, to breathe the fresh air."
Walsh grew up fasting for Somalia, walking for Ethiopia, and putting money in her trocaire box at Lent for African famines. (Trocaire is a development agency based in Ireland.)

"I’ve never really seriously considered anything other than third-world development work as a career," she says. "I want to eradicate hunger and stop AIDS, or at least stem the flow of AIDS.

"I don’t really see the harm in having that as my goal," Walsh adds with a deceptive lightness.

As head of IMPACT, Walsh has raised funds for Kosovar refugees and increased campus awareness of Honduran survivors of Hurricane Mitch. The group has purchased sewing machines and cows for villagers in Tamil Nadu, India.

Last summer, she worked for Human Rights Watch in New York, answering letters from death-row inmates and researching the role of race in drug-related arrests. She connected with Physicans for Human Rights, for whom she’ll do research next year in Mumbai, India, while also working for an Indian organization that brings class-action suits on behalf of plaintiffs in child-labor and child-prostitution cases. After spending the fall in Mumbai, Walsh hopes to travel south, to participate in AIDS education in rural areas. And in addition to her malaria and diarrhea tablets, she’s gotten 14 inoculations, enough to cover her time in Africa, where she hopes to do more AIDS work after India.

"My favorite quote is written by George Eliot," she says. "‘What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for one another?’"

Harvard has helped her in that effort.

"Harvard has given me the language to not just be a do-gooder, bleeding-heart liberal – but the bleeding-heart who can quote Rawls and quote economic figures from Sachs [Professor Jeffrey Sachs]," Walsh says. "It’s been terrific for me to come here and find there’s institutional support and language to do what I want to do.

"Gandhi was asked to write a preface to a book on human rights," Walsh says, "and he said, before we write the book on human rights, we should write the book on human responsibilities.

"As Harvard students, we’re in the position to have a lot of influence. And I think it would be great if we took more seriously the responsibility that we have."

George Eliot’s description of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch could apply, in some way, to Sinead Walsh.

"[T]he effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life."