Leanna Kelly
IARD 4960
International Experience Reflection
3 December 2015
In the spring of 2105, I spent 5 months living in the Iringa region in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania for my International Experience. I traveled to Tanzania with the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), a nonprofit study abroad organization that promotes international education and exchange; they offer many programs throughout the developed and most recently the developing world. My specific trip was focused on community development, language, and culture, and had three important components: the first was that our group (11 students total) learned about the language, history, and nature of community development in Tanzania, then we each completed our own community development focused research project, and finally we all volunteered at an orphanage in the community that we did our research in. In addition to these three main components, another part of the experience was traveling around different places in Tanzania, such as a safari in Ruaha National Park and Lake Nyasa.
When we arrived in Tanzania we started our trip in the country’s economic capital, Dar Es Salaam. In Dar Es Salaam we had a week long orientation with Tanzanian culture and a crash course in Swahili. This was my first trip to the developing world, I initially thought that I could plan my International Experience by myself and accomplish a community development project in Tanzania without being linking to an organization such as CIEE, but I quickly realized during the on site orientation that this would not have been possible. I became very thankful that I made the decision to travel with an organization to Tanzania for my first taste of the developing world. We then traveled to where we would be spending the next four months of our program, the Iringa region. This initial two and a half months of the program was spent at the University of Iringa taking classes in language, culture and community development, some with other Tanzanian students and some with just our group. We also spent time working on our research projects and perfecting the tools we would use in the field. Not associated with the CIEE program, some of the other students and I decided to start working at a local orphanage the Upendo Center.
After taking an initial few weeks to be comfortable in Tanzania studying at the University, living in Iringa, and working at the Upendo center I began to be more perceptive of the society. The classes were very beneficial and helped me to understand life in Tanzania better, but it was really my time working at the Upendo Center that impacted me. I wouldn’t say that I had any great moment of clarity of understanding while I was there, I had been preparing for this experience for my whole college career, majoring in International Agriculture and Rural Development and Animal Science. I understood on an intellectual level, the complexities of life in the developing world, I could rattle off statistics about agriculture, livestock, gender inequality, education, and family dynamics in the developing world for hours. I have researched and written several term papers for various classes on these topics. It sounds like I went into this trip with some naivety, it being my first trip to the developing world and that I wanted the safety and security of an organization to take me there, but that is in no way the case. I was prepared for this trip, and it was reassuring to know that I understood what I was doing. However this direct experience at the orphanage really revealed to me on a different level, the intricacies and harsh realities of life in Tanzania, specifically of the education system. The children at the orphanage, all street kids over the age of 10, had never attended school in their life. Some of the children, as old as 16 were functionally illiterate and could not perform even simple math problems, the girls had already resigned themselves to a future of no more than selling small goods such as peanuts on the side of the road. This revealed to be how poverty traps work on an individual person by person level, and how it seems to be that only education can break people out of poverty traps.
After our time at the University of Iringa, we traveled further south through the Iringa region to the town of Mufindi, were we all stayed in separate small sub-villages to conduct our research projects. During this time we stayed in a homestay, I stayed with my host mom, Mama Luka, and a long list of host brothers and sisters. We had no electricity or running water, Mama Luka’s only source of income was selling food at the local hospital, and a small restaurant that was in one of the many small mud buildings that made up our house. I was fortunate enough to have my room located in the only concrete building in our house (our house was a combination of many small one room structures). Every night we cooked a dinner from the foods that we grew on our small plot of land which Bibi (grandmother) harvested everyday, and were asleep by 8 because when the sun went down we no longer had any light to use. While I was there I was up on the road everyday conducting my research going door-to-door investigating the relationship between small livestock holdings and gender, specifically “The Types of Livestock Kept by Men and Women in the Mufindi Region of Tanzania.”
The month in my homestay furthered the understanding of the realities of living in the developing world that I had discussed earlier, but here more specifically than education, I learned about the crucial relationship of people and agriculture. Mama Luka’s sole source of income was cooking bagia, these were made of corn that she harvest from our plot of land, the entirety of our diet came from that plot of land. Climate change is quickly impacting the world and most harshly in the tropics, before we know it this area will be completely devoid of crops and the people will have no way to eat. Everyone in my villages full diet was supplied of their plots of land, there was no where to buy food in an hours walking distance besides maybe tomatoes or meat, and no one pays for food, or anything in the village. The relationship between fragility of people’s lives in my village, agriculture, and climate change was concrete.
Finally we spent time volunteering with Mufindi Orphans at the Igoda Children’s Village. Here we each worked on a project and I worked in the Montessori Pre-School and on the Education Outreach Team. I reorganized the school’s office in a way that would make it easy in the future for the instructors to plan lessons so they could spend more time with the children.
The Igoda Children’s Village was an area for not only orphans but for any children in the surrounding villages that were in vulnerable situations. The village we were in was very isolated from the rest of the country, this resulted in the people there’s knowledge of basic health, and specifically HIV/AIDS to be very low, as a direct result of this, the HIV/AIDS rate in the village was estimated to be about if not more than 50%, leaving about that same percentage of children to be orphaned or to be in vulnerable enough situations to need to live at the Igoda Children’s Village. The people simply do not know how HIV/AIDS is spread so the rates keep to continually increase, the experience in the village showed me how much the isolation of a village, both geographically and technologically can have such devastating consequences.
Despite my experience showing me how harsh the developing world can be once it is experienced outside of books and the classroom, it also gave me hope for the future of development and restored my faith in humanity. I saw just how real the potential is in these areas that can, with the help of the local people’s knowledge, truly be actualized. I saw first hand how people who have so little, and who’s health and well being could be devastated by just a season of drought, can still be so giving to others. I have never experienced such real welcoming and giving by people who I barely knew.