Each bear then went off to South Africa and was given to clinically sick children. Little girls with tuberculosis tied the bears to their backs, just as the women do with their babies in South Africa. “It was so interesting to see that,” says Presser.

Presser then went on to create her award winning foundation Lêbonê Solutions which is a Northern Sutu word for “light stick.” What is Lêbonê Solutions exactly, and how did she get involved in it?

Before coming to SMC, Presser wanted to go to medical school and become a doctor. After taking a physics class with professor Jeffrey Bresloff, whom she says taught her two-thirds of what she knows about physics, she made a shift in emphasis to the technical side of medicine and studied engineering.

“My classmates who went to UCLA weren’t as accomplished as my classmates who first went to SMC,” she says. SMC has its very own Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine, which is run by professor Jamie Anderson.

It is a critical tool in organic chemistry, and Presser had the opportunity to learn how to run and operate the machine. “UCLA students don’t see or touch the machine,” she says.
She also found herself taking a glass blowing class, along with her intense workload of chemistry and physics classes.

“I certainly could not have learned to blow glass at Harvard,” she says with a laugh. “If you look for advantages, there is great stuff everywhere and SMC is definitely no exception.”

Presser then went off to UCLA and got her undergrad in chemical engineering. Lêbonê Solutions came to fruition when she was at Harvard. Presser was a teaching fellow for an idea translation course, which was designed to teach students to surpass a realized dream and change the world in passing disciplinary boundaries.

Presser had three African students, one of whom is David Sengeh from Sierra Leone who grew up doing homework by candlelight. Another of her students, Steven Lwendo, told her about kids in villages who walk to the nearest highway with lighting to do their homework.

“About 75% of Africans live off of electrical grids,” says Presser.

“So we took the idea of lighting to develop feasible off grid lighting for Africa.” As the idea developed, they found a competition sponsored by the World Bank and submitted an application, and soon received the news that they were finalists.

She went along with a South African student Hugo Van Vureen to Ghana in the first week of May and won a $200,000 grant to pursue their work. As a result of this grant, they received a private company offer to match. “That made it a doubly exciting experience,” she said.

This is currently the most successful course, with other companies branching out, and still in the growing process. They money went to production distribution and devices are being built and taken to create communities in rural areas.

“It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling,” she said. “This project spoke to me a great deal and I joined the group after the semester when I was no longer a teaching fellow.”

Presser has spent time in South Africa visiting urban areas, hospitals and clinics. In Nohana, she stayed by the one doctor who works for the “Partners in Health” clinic. “Over there, they only have one doctor, it’s not like here if you go into the clinic and your doctor is unavailable, you just see another one. Over there, if the doctor sleeps in no one is helping them.”

She witnesses one woman walk three and a half hours with a bunch of children to the clinic and then walk back home again, she went with the doctor to the house of a woman with tuberculosis and HIV because the woman could not walk herself to the clinic.

She prepared dinner by candlelight because even the doctor’s home had no electricity.
“I studied a lot about it but being there made such a huge difference in terms of impact,” she said. “I highly recommend to visit.”

As for now, Presser hopes to return to South Africa sometime in the near future. She is working with Lêbonê Solutions to build infrastructure of organization, working on her graduate studies, “because I have to graduate someday,” she says, keeping busy with Bears Without Borders and continuing to teach the idea translation lab. All in all, Presser calls her experience, “heartbreaking, yet so inspiring.”