Ariane’s name mirrors her roots, planted firmly on three continents: Kirtley, the American born; Ariane, the daughter of a French mother; and Alzhara, “desert flower” in Arabic, signalling that she blossomed in Africa, the continent she loves above all others. Ariane crossed the Sahara Desert for the first time when she was six months old — in a basket tied to the back seat of her family’s Land-Cruiser. From those earliest months until she turned ten, her home was in North and West Africa, including the country of Niger.

A 2001 graduate of Yale University, in 2004 she also earned her Masters in Public Health from Yale. In summer of 2003, she returned to Niger to intern for CARE International on a public health initiative which culminated in her Master’s thesis on the subject for Yale. In May of 2004 Ariane was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to return to Niger in order to research the special health needs of women and minority indigenous populations in the Sahel.

As a Fulbright Scholar, Ariane travelled to the pastoral region of the Azawak, Niger’s most remote and unknown region. In the Azawak, Ariane discovered the human face of climate change: people literally dying of thirst because of their inability to adapt to a rapidly changing climate. These were the most generous and dignified, as well as the most vulnerable populations of her travels throughout West Africa. She had never before witnessed an area with so few resources and infrastructure, where individuals live on the brink of disaster on a daily basis due to circumstances beyond their control. Most importantly, she had never seen half a million people in such distress receiving so little assistance from the rest of the world.

She rapidly grew to love and consider her new found Touareg and Fulani friends of the Azawak as family. Thanks to the tremendous encouragement of her family and friends, Ariane founded Amman Imman:Water is Life for the children of the Azawak.