Since I was a high school student, I always dreamed of seeing and experiencing Africa. The real Africa, mind you, not the luxury-tented safari Africa that so many travelers experience. After a year of research, I located a company that sponsors “volunteer vacations” in Africa and signed up for their Tanzania program. The Tanzania program specialized in sending volunteers to a small village and having the volunteers teach classes in English. Other aspects of the work that we were to do involved small construction projects for the local boarding school.
After figuring out where exactly Tanzania was, I applied for my month-long visa, got the endless number of “recommended” inoculations, and packed my bag for my big adventure. After being stranded in Dubai (always buy travel insurance in case the third-world country’s airline goes bankrupt two days before you need to board that plane…I learned that lesson here) I finally made it down to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and met the smiling face of Mohammed, our driver. I think that I actually burst into tears when I saw him holding up the sign looking for me at the airport.
Once all the members of the group arrived in Dar, we spent the night at a hotel on the Indian Ocean getting to know one another over the warm, but delicious, local brew. The next morning, we got into our small bus and embarked on the 12 hour drive to the village that would be hosting us for the next month. In reality, it was probably only about a 300 mile drive, but the road situation (or lack of, I should say) prolonged the drive into an uncomfortable, mind-numbing, dusty 12 hours. I won’t even get into the bathroom-break situations, but driving through the African countryside certainly never disappoints! We exclaimed and shrieked every time we saw an elephant, zebra or giraffe crossing the road. Mohammed was very amused at his carload of “mzungos”. Mzungo, we learned that day, literally means “white”. From this point on, no one in the village ever learned our name, but we were all greeted by smiling faces exclaiming “Jambo, mzungo!”.
The first day in the village, the headmaster of the school comes to meet us and finds out that there is a librarian in the group. He asks me if I would be willing to work separate from the group at their library helping them with a special project. This would be better than I imagined! I jumped at the chance! How incredible to spend my days working in their library!! The headmaster walked me into the village and introduced me to Mama Rachael, the librarian, who unfortunately spoke zero English. My few Swahili phrases that I had learned just barely got us through the motions of introductions. Luckily, the headmaster was fluent and showed me to my task. The job before me was about 12 boxes of papers that were old tests, study guides, etc for all the classes that the students at the school can take. Since the village has no electricity, it therefore has no way to photocopy tests and guides for their students. The Tanzanian government issues the village schools all the tests that it needs for their student body, but no more than once. So recycling is absolutely critical to the school’s student body and teachers. All tests are used over and over as well as any other “handouts” that the students can get. The problem with the way that they were being “filed” is that there was no method to their filing. The papers were literally dumped into boxes. It took me and a student three weeks to separate all the papers out and bind them together for future use.
The best part of the whole project was getting back to the basics mentally and physically. The lack of running water and electricity can really freak out those of us who take that for granted. The town’s one small well that gave the locals their water ran dry the last two weeks we were there, and they take this all in stride, knowing that tomorrow morning, instead of walking the two miles to get their buckets of water, they’ll be walking 8 miles to the next village and back with the water. But the locals did all of this without a second thought. The children of the village all take on massive responsibilities by the age of 4 and 5, taking care of their siblings, herding cattle, working in the fields, and cooking, and don’t think twice about how hard their lives are in comparison to other children in the world. We had a child psychologist in our group who, two weeks into our program, remarked that he hadn’t heard a single child crying. In fact, none of us had, we just saw kids running around in tatters barefooted, laughing and playing with one another.
My favorite Swahili phrase that I learned in Tanzania was “nitakumbuka”, which translates into “I will remember”. What I will remember the most about my trip to Africa was the smiling and laughing faces of the locals and realizing that these people may not have the material wealth that we are used to, but they do have something that we don’t. They truly know and care about each member of their village. They know which children have been orphaned and they take care of them. They know which families may need a little extra food that week and they take care of them. It is a cultural awareness and pride that we should all strive to achieve in our own towns and communities. I came back to the US in a state of shock and embarrassment in remembering what I would complain about almost daily. Every morning I now mutter “nitakumbuka” when I wake up and try to remember what is really important in a happy life.
