by Laura Fichte, Alum
Dear family, friends, and donors,
After nine flights, five weeks, and three flat tires, I am home from Africa. Traveling to Tanzania this summer was an incredible experience. I can't say that I remember the reason I originally decided to go on this trip, but I definitely came back with a desire to do more good. Early on in the trip, I was pumped, I met the 2 leaders and the 17 other students that were traveling with me, and I was so excited. I loved all the people that I had met and they all shared similar hopes and goals for the adventure we were embarking on together.
After three exhausting days traveling to Africa, one of the main cities in Tanzania, we arrived at the house of our cultural contact. We spent one night there so that we could get acclimated with the 11 hour time difference in Tanzania . The following day, four Safari Jeeps picked us up so that we could begin traveling through the Serengeti, Ngotogoto Crater, Lake Manyara, and the Tarangire National Park. Traveling in Africa is a very different experience compared to in America-there is no sense of time in Africa; nobody worries about how long anything is going to take or when you are going to arrive! On safari (safari is the Swahili word for Journey,) we saw tons of animals which included; elephants, giraffes, zebras, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, leopards, cheetahs, panthers, wildebeests, monkeys, buffalo and flamingo. It was a good time for our group to bond before we had to head off to the village in which we would be working. We arrived back at our house in Arusha on July 9th, very grimy from not having showered for many days while at campsites.
The next day, we left Arusha to go to Ndombo Mfulony, the village in which we were staying. We were warmly, or homely as they say in Africa, welcomed by most of the community members, school officials from the area and the 200 students at the school. Our original project was to build a school, but it turned out that the school really needed a veranda built onto the school in front of all the classrooms. When I heard about this, I honestly thought that it was the stupidest thing in the world-Why had I raised all this money to build a “porch?” Then I saw it. The school was built on a hill, and directly in front of each classroom was a two-foot drop before you encountered uneven, receding dirt. The school consisted of six classrooms and an office, all in a year-old cinder-block then plastered, unpainted building. We all realized how lucky we were and how we really needed to give this school whatever we could.
We spent three weeks working in the village and staying with our host families. My host family consisted of a mother, who was a teacher, a father, who managed a company that sold tourist stuff, and a 10-month-old little girl named Mercy. They lived in a cement/cinder block home that was about a 15 minute walk from the secondary school. I stayed there with another girl on the program named Ariana, and we slept in a little room in the home together. We were allowed to stay out in the village until 6:30, so that we would have time for socializing, but at the same time we weren't past dark. There was no electricity in the house-we were staying at the only host family without electricity!!! It was winter, so it would get dark right before seven, and then Ari and I would get out our headlights and they would all look at us in amazement. They cooked us dinner in either a small gas stove in their kitchen or on a fire outside. We always had some sort of starch-rice, pasta, chapati's (Swahili pancakes,) and then a pot of some sort of cooked vegetables, and one orange and one banana for dinner. We always ate dinner at around 7, which was great compared to some families which fed their students at 10:30. Since it was so dark in the house, Ari and I would get tired right after dinner and we usually ended up going to bed by eight or nine and getting 12 hours of sleep! We had to be at the worksite at nine and so our baba, Swahili for father, would wake us up at 7:30 and make us breakfast so that we could leave at 8:30, so we were on time. Outside of the house, was a little building which contained a pit toilet-that was also the room that we bathed in. To get clean, we first had to boil two pots of water and then add that to some cold water so it was warm. We would take a small cup and pour the water over ourselves. I am definitely thankful for showers with hot water and the water pressure now!
We worked pretty much everyday for three weeks, but when we were done, it had definitely paid off. When we were “working,” we were usually carrying rocks, laying cement, plastering walls, digging in the dirt or passing buckets. We were required to wear the hilarious hard hats because some girl on another program got a cinder block dropped on her head and so that really sucked. On the last day, when we were finished working, it was so rewarding seeing what we had done to the school and how much our hard work really paid off. We hadn't finished all the work but they only needed one or two more days before everything was complete. Leaving the village was difficult. We had all created such strong bonds with the people there and really gotten used to the pace of life and each other. Many people cried and it was really moving to see how much they appreciated what we had done for them.
Once we left the village, we spent a night in Arusha before we flew to Zanzibar. This was when the trip became bittersweet. We were all having so much fun being together again, but we knew that we only had five days left. We flew to Zanzibar and we spent the first day visiting tourist sites around Stonetown (the main city in Zanzibar,) and shopping for gifts. The next day we took a small boat out to Prison Island and saw the Giant Turtles and spent the day snorkeling. We were all so happy that it hadn't really started settling in that we were leaving. The next day, we took a bus on a spice tour and visited spice farms. We drove about an hour to this hotel on the beach where we spent the next two nights. We spent all of the next two days together on the beach before we had to come home.
I really didn't want to come home; it was almost like I had established a life there, and I knew how much I would be missing out on it. Being in Tanzania was one of the best times of my life, I learned a lot about who I am and who I really want to be, and I was around people that shared similar life goals. I realized when I was there that there are not actually a lot of things I really need. I have become much more aware-I have learned to think before I say certain things, and I learned that I am never starving. Some of the things that I experienced-the abuse, the famine, the distress, just to name a few, have really changed my life. Seeing and experiencing what really goes on in a third-world nation really helped me appreciate everything I have here that I take for granted.
This was just a little bit about my trip, if you have any further questions, feel free to give me a call.
Thank you
Laura Fichte (Class of 2007) |
