From wanderlust to purpose
From wanderlust to purpose
SU senior Sacha Norton’s initial desire to travel the world led her to volunteer in Africa, where she found fulfillment and a path for her future.
Sacha Norton has a bedroom that looks like that of any Syracuse University student: a white bedspread, riddled with a dark-colored array of throw blankets and various animal plushies.
On the wall adjacent to her bed is a framed gallery of sketches drawn by Sophie Porigow, Norton’s best friend since they were three. The sketches are a short graphic novel that tells the story of the friends’ lazy summer nights in Connecticut, where they’d sneak out of Norton’s house, jump her back fence and end up in a field staring up at the stars all night. They were searching for adventure. Norton has always been eager for adventure.
Those childhood adventures bonded the pair for life. Porigow, the more shy of the two, sensed Norton was special the moment they met and they have been attached at the hip since.
“I got some crazy intuition or something,” Porigow said. “I don’t know how I knew, like how can you tell a three-year-old is going to be an amazing person? But I just knew.”
What Norton discovered in these quests for the stars was a passion not only for adventure but to make an impact. By the time she started her senior year at SU, Norton’s adventures had taken her twice to Africa on volunteer missions where she forged new bonds she never imagined.
From a young age, Norton couldn’t sit still. Norton’s parents remember her as a toddler running into their bedroom early every morning demanding to know what was on the agenda for the day. By age five, she was wildly independent. Even in her independence, she loved to be surrounded by close connections.
Norton and her mother, Stephanie, share their passion for travel and volunteering. In 2011, Norton watched her mother and her friends start the Mother’s Day Movement, a charity that partners with organizations worldwide to improve the lives of women and their families. This was her introduction to the world of volunteering.
“I think seeing my mom have her organization and seeing her picking out places for the Mother’s Day Movement was so inspiring,” Norton said. “I started at first searching for charities for her, and then I was like ‘what if I do this hands-on?’”
In the summer of 2023, Norton went to rural Kenya for a trip through Kenya Connect, a nongovernmental organization that provides support for education.
She lived in the town of Wamunyu, a two-hour drive from the closest airport in Nairobi. It was her first time volunteering outside of the country on a major trip. There, Norton did observational learning in classrooms and bonded with the children.
Kenya was the first time Norton was ever truly alone. She was terrified. But, as a person who desires human connection, she formed relationships with the Kenyan staff at the school, danced with the children she grew to love and immersed herself in a culture that was entirely different from her upbringing.
“I think she found herself when she went to Africa the first time,” Porigow said. “She always wanted to do something like that but hadn’t tapped into that interest. After, she was changed; that was it, that was the path.”
In Kenya, Norton wore her natural curly hair and did not wear makeup. She brought only four T-shirts for the entire trip – a pink shirt, a white one, a beige one and one with chickens on it. The children loved the chicken shirt the most.
It was the little things that made Norton fall in love with the work she was doing. For the first time in her life, she felt no anxiety, especially when she sat down with a book in her favorite chair outside her tent.
Freshman year, before her trip to Kenya, Norton decided she wanted to join the Peace Corps post-graduation. At the time, she was a political philosophy major destined for law school, but she changed her major to education, shifting her entire trajectory towards her goal of joining the Peace Corps.
But her exploring wasn’t done after Kenya. After her semester studying abroad in Madrid, she went straight to Ghana on another volunteer trip in May 2024 and lived in the city of Kumasi.
This past January, Stephanie Norton and Norton’s step-grandfather, Bob, founded another charity called Tablets For Kids, with the mission of providing digital technology to children in sub-Saharan Africa.
Norton became a director of the mission, leading to her third trip to Africa in October. This trip was to Kenya to see the first wave of the pilot program for Tablets for Kids.
Norton saw the children in the program using the tablets for their lessons, proving the mission to be a success. She is excited to see how the charity develops going forward, reaching more schools in sub-Saharan Africa.
Norton can’t coin exactly when her mindset switched from enjoying volunteering to wanting to pursue it as a career. All she knew was that she wanted to do something fulfilling. She also knew that travel was something she couldn’t give up.
“I think travel came before volunteering,” Norton said. “I’ve always wanted to go to places that are off the beaten track, so that’s why I love going to rural places because no one else gets to go there and I get to see this totally different environment.”
“She’s obsessed with travel and planning,” Stephanie Norton said. “Constantly it was, ‘How about here? How about here?’ Like, the more random, the more remote, she’s good with that.”
The Peace Corps invited Norton to serve in Rwanda after graduation, but Norton’s dreams have pulled her towards Teach For America’s program at a Denver elementary school. There, she will continue to bridge the gap between inequalities of the world.
After her two-year contract with Teach for America ends, Norton intends to return to Africa to finish what she started. The little girl who loved to explore and valued kindness over all else is now a woman with a deep sense of responsibility and a connection to the world.
“I’m just so happy that she chose this adventure and her passion and she’s just doing it,” Porigow said. “She’s not letting obstacles get in her way. She’s literally taking action to make her dreams come true.”
Her father, Jeffrey Norton, called it “wanderlust.” It was wanderlust that brought Norton to Africa three times in a year and a half. It was wanderlust that made Norton a planner and caused her to drag Porigow to abandoned houses hours away during the pandemic. And it’s wanderlust that pushes Norton towards making the world a better place after college.