When
thinking about the perfect summer, a lot of teenagers might think that a sunny
day at the beach or a night out with friends would be their cup of tea. And
yet, a unique group of youngsters made part of their summer into the adventure
of a lifetime, more than two thousand miles from home, in a foreign country;
learning, helping, and understanding a culture so fundamentally intriguing. I
had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with one of the adventurers, Kira
Levin, a junior at Miami Palmetto Senior High, who described the summer 2011
trip into the Tanzanian landscape as a lifetime experience.
From the get-go, there
were several questions I had in mind – where’d you go, how’d you get there,
what did you do, and most importantly, what did you find? But I made the
conscious choice to start from the very beginning: what inspired you to go on
this African adventure? It turned out that a genuine fascination with world
history was the cause; more specifically, a fundamental misgiving about the
idea of imperialism upon the African continent. How can people just take other peoples’ lands?
Thousands of miles
later, you found yourself in the middle of a Tanzanian village, having gone
through so much to get this far, in the company of like-minded American teens
who wanted more than just a safari tour through one of the most troubled
regions of the world – they wanted to help. The idea of giving back to the
community was not foreign to you – you’d already had experience mentoring
little kids in the ways of tennis, here in sunny Pinecrest, Florida – but the
surroundings made you feel out of your comfort zone. Through bus rides that
lasted hours on end, through hikes that went on way too long, and through
living conditions befit solely for the rampant globe trotter, somehow this
spirit of benevolence towards a society well removed from your own persevered.
You told me about your
experience teaching African youth, at Himo Primary School, about an hour away
from the compound you and your fellow Global Leadership Adventures mates were
staying at. It began as a frustrating venture: the kids didn’t understand you
too well, and they essentially copied whatever you guys were saying. But as you
and your mates learned more Swahili and were able to communicate better, naturally
your students began to respect you more.
Another part of the
trip was meeting your host family: a kind bunch, with a grandmother, a 22 year
old named Carles, and a few other children. Here came a vital lesson – perhaps
completely unintelligible by Western notions – in humility. This family – and
by extension, much of Tanzania’s people – lack many basic things we take for
granted. Food, a shower, a bathroom. And yet, their capacity for kindness and
amicability is unsurpassed. Having yawned once, you were immediately offered to
sleep in one of the family home rooms; having fallen by your own misstep, you
were immediately offered aid as if someone else had to have made sure you
weren’t hurt. Happiness, it seems, transcends even basic living accommodations,
perhaps even to the point of folly – Carles has malaria four times a year, so
pilgrimages to the hospital are mundane excursions for him and other
Tanzanians.
Back home, well before
your departure date, concern regarding your welfare on the trip was widespread: from your parents, to your
friends, to your teachers. Many lampooned your expressed desire to go on this
trip, others thought it fundamentally risky. It took a lot on your part, but
also some on theirs, for them to be at peace with this very unique field trip.
And upon being put on a
hike by the Masai tribesmen – rural folk well away from the townsite you and
your friends were staying at – some of their concerns possibly rang true. These
African tribesmen are used to walking through the desert at high temperatures
for hours on end – but your “kind”, the white people, were reaching a dangerous
point of exhaustion that Saturday afternoon as you kept walking through the
sandy dunes and cliffs iconic of this part of Tanzania.
Surely, the way of life
in a place like Tanzania is too removed from our Western way to even bear
comparison. While some similar rituals exist – such as your experience
strolling through the town market and being pleaded, almost, for your money in
exchange for some salesman’s jewelry – the whole of it is color black to our
white. Take the Chagga women, for example, and their experiences with female genital mutilation.
You ask yourself, how can they talk about this so nonchalantly, almost
cynically or sarcastically, when the subject matter is so genuinely appalling,
disgusting? Why does it happen?
Yet other confusions
are more cultural, more aesthetic in nature. You said people are happy there. I
asked, is it simply because they don’t know there’s something better out there?
Well, education is key to that, you said. Carles, for example, goes to school
and is getting an education. He is aware of the problems that plague Tanzania,
and that they are circumstantial in nature, not impossible to change. He agrees
that education is almost solely the way to societal progress, particularly in
Tanzania. If people knew that something better is out there, they would become
cognizant of the relative condition of their lives.
So is ignorance what
keeps these people happy? Perhaps it is. But you told me that there’s something
beyond that. There’s another factor that may be what keeps these people in such
good spirit. It’s something intrinsic, something intangible. When you had a
Swahili lesson with Mama Simba, a local Tanzanian leader, she brought you all
together when she said “we are all one family” and “you are all my children”.
When you hung out with your host family, you were treated as another one of
their children. It is such demonstrations of unrestrained love and
companionship that both characterize these peoples and set them so fundamentally
apart from our own Western notions of individualism and self-sufficiency,
which, while economically sound, have visible social shortcomings. There’s
something beyond the "ignorance" clause – something from the heart, something from
the culture …if only we really knew what it was.
And as the last word, you
told me, Kira, that this experience showed you what you want to do with your
life. You named joining the Peace Corps and continuing to travel as some of
your future aspirations. Less remotely, you plan to travel to India this coming
summer. I can’t help but give my own positive evaluation of this. While you may
not yet stand alongside the great humanitarians of our time, you’re definitely headed in
the right direction. The realizations and experiences you’ve had as a result of
this trip – before, during and after – are bound to serve you well in many ways
beyond choosing a suitable career.
Yet the questions posed
here remain unanswered. How can these people be so blind? Are they blind? Are
they simply so strong-willed as to smile in the face of plight? Your
experience, both for yourself and I, is but the beginning of a long road of
understanding the world, of understanding its people. It’s sure to be a road
worth traveling.
Tomas Monzon
June – October 2011
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