‘My summer with Obama’

Instead of the usual backpacking experience during her gap year, W ithington girl, Sonya Passi, chose to help out on the O bama campaign trail in W ashington DC…

Most ‘gappers’, or university students on long summer holidays, think of visiting places like Thailand or South America as part of their travel plans, making money en route by working in restaurants or bars. But Sonya Passi – a former pupil of Withington Girls’ School and now in her third year at Trinity College, Cambridge, studying history – is no ordinary young woman. Last summer, she ended up doing a four-month stint at Capitol Hill in Washington, and even campaigned for the future President Obama. Why? Because her main aim in life is to become a politician, after training to be a barrister at law school. Judging from her ingenuity so far she is likely to go a long way.

First Eleven first came across Sonya in the February issue (see ‘School’s out’, February 2009), and she so impressed readers that they wanted to hear more about her experience. Here, we recount her full tale.

Sonya, from Mottram St Andrew, near Wilmslow in Cheshire, took an internship with Florida congresswoman Corinne Brown during the US presidential campaign. The congresswoman was an enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Clinton initially and only switched to the Obama camp after the convention in Denver endorsed him as a candidate.

But wily Sonya had been an Obama fan from the start and took to the streets in his support in the swing state of Virginia
– just across the Potomac River from Washington DC – after finishing work. She predicted he would win and finally met him at Boston Airport after working as a volunteer on his plane for the day.

“He is exactly as you’d imagine him to be,” she says. “Very charismatic, very friendly and very funny. I have full faith in him.” She also met Mrs Clinton at an equal pay rally, but remained firmly pro-Obama.

Sonya’s last few weeks were dominated by the subject that has come to overwhelm us all – the financial crisis. “We were inundated with people calling Ms Brown’s office, begging her not to support the bailout of the bankers with taxpayer dollars.”

Now she is back in the UK Sonya has plans to return to the States to study, but not to live. “I love America, but can’t
see myself living there. I have too many attachments here and I feel I’m connected in a one-to-one basis with the problems facing this country. That’s what I am really passionate about and that’s why I want to make a difference.”