If you’re like me, you get a kick out of how Wake Foresters can pop up anywhere in the world and find easy-going, common ground.

A few weeks ago I heard from Blythe Riggan, who had just finished her first year at Wake Forest and was writing from Kigali, Rwanda. Participating in the Institute for Public Engagement’s summer nonprofit immersion program, Riggan was traveling with Mary Martin Niepold (’65), a senior lecturer in journalism and founder of The Nyanya Project, which helps African grandmothers support their AIDS-orphaned grandchildren.

Mary Martin Niepold (’65) with Kenyan grandmothers on an earlier trip

As you’ll see from Riggan’s blog post, Wake Forest was not her first choice of universities. Reynolda campus was all-too familiar terrain for this Lexington, N.C., young woman who dressed as a Wake Forest cheerleader for Halloween when she was little. Black and gold seemed old hat. But her first year was more than she could have hoped for, and, as she wrote from Rwanda, “Somehow everything fell into place and I am now in Africa having the experience of a lifetime.”

She and Niepold visited nyanyas (Swahili for “grandmothers”) in the slums of Kenya and the hillsides of Rwanda, assuring grandmothers they would not be forgotten and surveying them on their economic progress to track the nonprofit’s impact. One day, in Kigali, she wound up at a dinner table with Niepold and Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham (’06). I visited Craigwell-Graham last year in New York, where she was an associate at Shearman and Sterling LLP, a blue-chip law firm. I wrote about how her two-month stint doing pro bono work in Africa ignited a passion to figure out a way to return. In a few weeks, she had found the way. She left New York for Kigali, for a job in the Strategic Investment Unit of the Rwanda Development Board.

Observing the immediate rapport between Niepold and Craigwell-Graham, Blythe wrote, “As we sat under the cool shade of the tin roof of a local restaurant, Zaffran’s, I listened to these two highly intelligent women discuss the government situation of various African countries. My surroundings flooded over me and I thought, ‘Wow. How did you end up eating at an Indian restaurant with these two women in Rwanda? Can you believe that you are eating lunch in Rwanda with two Wake Forest alumni?’ … I continued to listen in awe as the two swapped stories and discussed the development of African countries. My next thought? ‘Wow. Did you ever think this was possible? Now, can you even imagine the future possibilities?’”

When I saw Blythe in Winston-Salem last week, she said she had no words for how deeply the trip had affected her. She planned to continue working with Niepold this summer and found herself drawn to elders now that she was home.

Blythe Riggan (’16) at Mary Martin Niepold’s (’65) home last week

I zipped off a note to Craigwell-Graham to ask about her impressions. Not only had she welcomed Blythe and Niepold, she’d also hosted other Wake Forest community members in May: Ajay Patel, a business professor who heads the Center for Enterprise Research and Education, and, separately, a group of Wake students traveling with Mary Gerardy, associate vice president and dean of campus life, and with Marianne Magjuka, director of campus life.

“Tracing back to the conversation I had with Maria Henson one year ago in a midtown restaurant, we were talking about the mission inherited by all Wake Forest students: Pro Humanitate,” she wrote. That’s why she was “hardly surprised” and “neglected to remark ‘what a coincidence’” to see all of these Wake Forest visitors.

Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham (’06) in her old life in Manhattan

“It’s no coincidence that a certain type of person would be attracted to Wake Forest,” Craigwell-Graham wrote. “Therefore (if I may be forgiven to make this logical leap just once), it’s no coincidence that some of those same people might end up in Rwanda. To meet, analyze, assist, learn — all different forms of action but aligned with the idea of service to mankind.”

Craigwell-Graham was pleased to see all the visitors and catch up on campus news, including whether Shag on the Mag still exists. (It does.) Most important, she wrote, the visits provided “clear and unequivocal reassurance” that she had attended the right college.

“Just one year ago I was stuck in a concrete jungle,” she wrote. “Now today I am in a place, Africa, Rwanda to be more specific, that is known for them and I couldn’t be more free.”

She was on the right track all along, she said. It was one more way she and Blythe share common ground on a planet that feels smaller every day as connections widen and strengthen. As Blythe would say: Imagine the possibilities.

Words Awake! maestro and professor Tom Phillips (’74, MA ’78) shared the news this week that Shane Harris (’98) has left his senior writer position at Washingtonian magazine to move to Foreign Policy magazine as a senior writer.

Shane Harris (’98), author, senior writer, analyst

In a note to Phillips and friends, Harris wrote, “I wanted to let you know about an exciting new chapter in my career. … I’ll be a senior writer at Foreign Policy magazine, where I will cover intelligence and cyber security. And of course, in light of recent events, surveillance!”

Harris no doubt will be blogging and writing nonstop about Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked news of classified intelligence about domestic surveillance to The Guardian and The Washington Post. “Forget PRISM, the National Security Agency’s system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like,” Harris wrote on Monday in a blog post. “The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone-location information of U.S. citizens.”

Harris is the author of “The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State,” which The Economist named as one of the best books of 2010. He was a star panelist at the Words Awake! conference at Wake Forest in March 2012. Congratulations to Shane on his new job, a timely posting for commenting on the latest in ‘watching.’

Wake Forester Will D. Campbell died Monday at age 88 in Nashville. I first met him in the funny pages but didn’t know then he was a Demon Deacon. He was the inspiration behind the Rev. Will B. Dunn in “Kudzu,” the syndicated comic strip created by my late friend and fellow Charlotte Observer editorial board veteran Doug Marlette.

Rev. Will B. Dunn of “Kudzu”

Marlette had the eccentric cartoon version of Campbell tell it like it was. In one strip, Rev. Dunn said, “Lord, I know we’re called to be fishers of men. But I want to throw ‘em all back.”

In a 1992 article, journalist David L. Langford described Campbell this way: “Here’s a whiskey-swilling, tobacco-spitting, guitar-picking Baptist preacher and truck farmer who is a widely respected writer, thinker, humorist and ex-officio chaplain to the Grand Ole Opry crowd. He doesn’t have a church — a steeple as he puts it — and doesn’t want one.”

Last year, during Words Awake!, Wake Forest honored an inaugural class of inductees to the Wake Forest Writers Hall of Fame. Campbell (’48, L.H.D. ’84) naturally was among the honorees. His “Brother to a Dragonfly” was a finalist for the 1978 National Book Award and named one of the 10 best religious books of the 1970s by Time. But our Wake Forest notable author was unable to attend the ceremony. His son, Webb (’81), returned to campus on his behalf. We didn’t know Campbell was struggling to recover from a stroke in 2011. What we did know and laud was his national, historic reputation as a voice of conscience in the South’s struggles against racism.

Campbell was born to Mississippi cotton farmers in 1924 and became an ordained Baptist minister at 17. He served in the Army during World War II and arrived at Wake Forest afterward, majoring in English. You can find no activities listed under his name in The Howler of 1948, but Campbell more than made up for that omission in his unparalleled life of social activism and advocacy for the marginalized.

Campbell’s senior photo in The Howler

He attended Tulane University, earned his theology degree from Yale Divinity School, pastored a church in Louisiana, became an integrationist chaplain at Ole Miss and served as a field officer for the National Council of Churches. He was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Wherever there were momentous events in the civil rights movement, Campbell typically had a role: counseling Freedom Riders; participating in boycotts and sit-ins; challenging the clergy to step up on behalf of society’s forgotten ones; helping escort the nine black students through angry mobs at Central High School in Little Rock.

In 1984, along with Eudora Welty, he came to Wake Forest to receive an honorary degree at Commencement. Wake Forest Magazine welcomed him “home to his college,” adding in an article that year: “In a pickup truck, carrying a Gibson guitar and whittling a cedar stick, and wearing a black plowman’s hat, Campbell preaches and sings and saves.” As The New York Times noted in Campbell’s obituary yesterday, his friends and followers called him “hilarious, profound, inspiring and apocalyptic” as he stomped around “uttering streams of sacred and profane commentary that found their way into books, articles, lectures and sermons.” In 2000 Bill Clinton awarded him the National Endowment for the Humanities medal. A PBS documentary, “God’s Will,” profiles his life.

This week Bill Leonard, the Divinity School’s founding dean, who holds the James and Marilyn Dunn Chair of Baptist Studies, offers a must-read remembrance of Campbell called “The Freedom of Will” at ABPnews.com. Leonard examines the paradox of a man who witnessed unspeakable “meanness” all around him in the turbulent South but who never gave up on grace.

He also recounts a fine Wake Forest anecdote: “Will once told me that he fully understood the name “Demon Deacons” for the Wake Forest University mascot. ‘Hell,’ he commented, ‘anybody who’s ever been in a Baptist church knows at least one demon deacon!’ Will could sanctify profanity like no one else.”

Kyle Webster’s portrait of Campbell for Words Awake!

Campbell was truly a distinguished alumnus, ahead of his time, and, through it all, as brave in the cities as in the backwoods.

Hauling school supplies, soccer balls and jump ropes, Phillips Bragg (’93) of Huntersville, N.C., made his first trip to Africa last month to see the school he, his wife, Leslie McLean Bragg (’91), and their friend James Lubo Mijak dreamed about for years.

Students head to the school last November

Not quite finished but already welcoming students — and on Sundays, church-goers — the school is among the first built in Unity State in the new nation of South Sudan. Not only that, Phillips was told by a local near Nyarweng: “It is the first permanent building in this area since the beginning of man.”

That is a fact nigh impossible to verify but not outlandish when one hears Phillips describe “the ridiculously rural” area that in some ways remains “a desperate place.” It is where students used to have school under a tree, where huts need to be rebuilt every two years after the rains and where the South Sudanese rely almost exclusively on their traditional nomadic livelihood of herding cattle. “The people were beautiful. Where they can, they wear beautiful colors. And in Dinka (the local language), they said were grateful for the school,” Phillips said.

The dream emerged as the Bragg family grew close to Lubo, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan who fled for their lives during the last civil war, dodging militia from Khartoum and lions in the scrubland. Lubo became one of the 3,800 Lost Boys the U.S. government invited to resettle in the United States. In June 2001, Lubo made his way to Charlotte and, eventually, to the Braggs and their St. John’s Baptist Church filled with caring parishioners. Phillips and Leslie answered the church’s call to be mentors. They became more like family.

Phillips and Leslie Bragg and their sons, from left, Claude, 9, John, 5, and Kirby, 11, and dog “Ernie” gather for a photo with James “Lubo” Mijak at their home in 2011

“I have been a witness to their care and love since I came,” Lubo told me in 2011.

Lubo worked two jobs, including one at Bragg Financial Advisors Inc., and studied, earning a bachelor’s degree at UNC Charlotte. He yearned to see a permanent school built in his home village of Nyarweng in Unity State. Phillips and Leslie loved Lubo, and wanted to help. He was like a brother. They enlisted the Charlotte nonprofit Mothering Across Continents to guide them. The nonprofit shepherds dream projects that can serve as sustainable global models for change. Raising Sudan — now Raising South Sudan — was born. Phillips committed to help raise the money for a school in Nyarweng and another one an hour away in Aliap championed by Lost Boy Ngor Kur Mayol.

Today Lubo lives in South Sudan and works for the government as a community development officer assigned to a Chinese oil company about three hours from the new school. He showed Phillips around his country, and everywhere the two went they ran into someone who knew Lubo from the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. Lubo arrived there in 1992.

Phillips said he was amazed and heartened by the work that has been done in Nyarweng. But he knows the school will be an ongoing commitment. “It’s discouraging how helpless the people are in this place. It’s so war torn. They’re not in a position yet to do for themselves with the illiteracy rate of 90 percent, and a lot of the younger people have grown up in displaced persons camps so they’ve never done anything for themselves. Our uphill battle of introducing microfinance — (it) has to follow literacy. They can go hand in hand a little bit. These people who say, ‘You need to teach the man to fish,’ I totally agree but they can’t even read the instructions.”

Phillips believes an educated population will be important “not only for the governance of their country and preservation of their new democracy but to do business. We feel like we’ve done the right thing.”

“It’s been really hard, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “It’s hard asking your friends for money when you have no good evidence that you can pull it off, and it’s hard after one school to say, ‘Hey, we want to do it again.’”

Phillips with South Sudanese children last month

But one thing Phillips, Leslie and Lubo have shown: One can have faith in the unseen and deliver on the promise.