by Tom Parisi
Camped in Serengeti National Park, the eight NIU students settled into their sleeping bags, only to hear the not-so-distant laughter of hyenas, grunts of warthogs and roars of lions.
During daytime safaris, the cover of darkness gone, they spotted animals they had seen before only in zoos, now in their natural habitat: galloping impalas, grazing giraffes and elephants, a leopard perched in a tree, a pack of cheetahs strategically stalking a herd of zebras.
At one point, the students’ Land Rovers snaked through a traffic jam of sorts, as tens of thousands of wildebeests made their annual migration through the Great Rift Valley, crossing man-made roads along the way.
This was NIU’s first study abroad trip to Tanzania, and it provided a learning experience that for many of the students was beyond description.
“It was a sensory overload,” says 22-year-old Tristan Pence, a senior economics major from Downers Grove who had never before traveled overseas. “Everything was so surreal and incredibly different that I don’t think I could accurately describe it.”
The students also witnessed the abject poverty of a country left behind by globalization: barefoot children wearing torn hand-me-downs, playing with toys made of garbage; families living in huts made of sticks and mud, with pit toilets and no electricity; concrete workers laboring for a dollar a day, without benefit of shoes and gloves; HIV-infected orphans struggling to survive on a Lake Victoria island overrun by prostitution and disease.
Amidst these contrasts of natural abundance and scarcity of human resources, the NIU students say they encountered uncommon generosity, humility, hospitality and gratitude.
In the tiny village of Nyegina – where the study abroad group helped build a high school girls dormitory – the students’ bus was met by hundreds of welcomers. The villagers lined a dirt road, waving palm fronds, beating drums, singing songs and dancing to celebrate the visitors’ arrival.
“It was almost like Palm Sunday,” says Kurt Thurmaier, a professor of public administration who led the trip. “We were all overwhelmed.”
A year earlier, Thurmaier and his wife Jeanine had visited Tanzania and reunited with their friend, the Rev. Leo Kazeri. The Nyegina parish priest serves as development director for the diocese, director of a secular economic development organization and business manager for the Nyegina boarding school with an enrollment of 500 students.
Kazeri and Thurmaier had first met many years earlier, when they both were working toward public administration degrees at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Seeing the substantial work that his friend was accomplishing and the region’s great need, Thurmaier recognized an educational opportunity for students that would combine service and experiential learning.
This past June, it became a reality.
From their base in Musoma, a city of about 100,000 on Lake Victoria, the students studied how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – or what Americans typically call non-profit groups – play a strategic role in developing countries. The students participated in seminars with different NGO officials in the Musoma area, and several conducted individual interviews with officials for independent study projects.
The NIU students then spent a good portion of the trip joining forces with a volunteer service group organized through Tanzania Development Support. The NGO was created by Thurmaier, his wife and their friends to raise funds for construction of the girls dormitory in Nyegina and for other needs of the school.
Working alongside laborers, school board members and others in the Nyegina community, the students poured the dormitory’s cement foundation. They carried more than 10,000 bricks to build its walls. They also made a difference in the lives of people they had just met.
“The single most effective way to fight poverty is to provide secondary education to young women,” Thurmaier says. “That’s true in the United States as well as in developing nations.”
He says the service-learning component of the study abroad program was critical. It taps a strong desire of students today to contribute to society through volunteerism and to engage those who need assistance.
“It’s not just study abroad, where students go and look, but where they go and look and do,” Thurmaier says. “Students can experience a different culture and leave knowing they’ve made a lasting contribution.”
On his first trip overseas, Pence saw cultural differences, to be sure, but he also recognized similarities.
“Being able to contribute to the community was fantastic,” he says. “We connected with the people there on a much more personal level, to the point where we could smile and joke and laugh together. There was a bond there that I think really exemplified how people don’t intrinsically change from country to country and continent to continent.”
Stephanie Reilly, 22, a senior from Rockford majoring in corporate communications, is continuing to work with a Tanzanian NGO, developing its Web site.
“One of the things that struck me the most was how the people were so open to meeting us,” she says. “They were excited to see new faces come and just show interest in their community. The children had never really seen Caucasians before. The highlight of their day was just being able to hold our hands and walk alongside us.”
Professor Thurmaier wanted to establish a study abroad program that would challenge the students’ views of the world they live in. He believes it succeeded.
“The students had such a rich experience,” he says. “Hopefully their worldview is profoundly different than when they set out.”
For more photos and information on the NIU work in Tanzania, visit the “project blog” section of the Tanzanian Development Support Web site at www.tdsnfp.org.